Working in Greece and Turkey: A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation-States, 1840–1940 9781789206975

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction and Historiographical Essay: Greek and Turkish Economic and Social History, and Labour History
Part I Agrarian Property and Labour Relations, Rural and Urban Organization of Work
Chapter 1 Were Peasants Bound to the Soil in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans? A Reappraisal of the Question of the New/Second Serfdom in Ottoman Historiography
Chapter 2 The ‘Invisible’ Army of Gree k Labourers
Chapter 3 ‘No Work for Anyone in Thi s Country of Misery’ Famine and Labour Relations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anatolia
Chapter 4 Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Ninetee nth-Century Ottoman Countryside: Textile Workers in Three Plovdiv Villages
Chapter 5 Ethno-religious Division of Labour in Urban Economie s of the Ottoman Empire in the Ninetee nth Century
Part II Political Change, Migration and Nationalisms
Chapter 6 Class Formation on the Modern Waterfront: Port Workers and Their Struggles in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Chapter 7 Labourers, Refugees, Revolutionaries: Ottoman Perceptions of Armenian Emigration
Chapter 8 The Greek Labour Movement and National Preference Demands, 1890–1922
Chapter 9 Refugees, Foreigners, Non-Muslims: Nationalism and Workers in the Silahtarağa Power Plant, 1914–1924
Part III Labour Market and Emotions in the Twentieth Century
Chapter 10 ‘Fatherly Interest…’ Industrial Paternalism, Labour Management and Gender in the Textile Mills of a Greek Island (Hermoupolis, Syros), 1900–1940
Chapter 11 The Changing Organization of Production and Modes of Control, and the Workers’ Response: The Turkish Textile Industry in the 1940s and 1950s
Chapter 12 ‘It Is Fair to Ask for the Imp rovement of Their Fate’ The Demands, Mobilization and Political Orientation of the Press Workers and Printers of Patras, 1900–1940
Chapter 13 Children’s Domestic Labour: Intimate Relations, Family Politics and the Construction of Identity of Domestic Workers in Interwar Greece
Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

Working in Greece and Turkey

International Studies in Social History

General Editor: Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam Published under the auspices of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, this series offers transnational perspectives on labour and workingclass history. For a long time, labour historians have been working within national interpretive frameworks. But interest in studies contrasting different national and regional experiences and studying cross-border interactions has been increasing in recent years. This series is designed to act as a forum for these new approaches. Recent volumes: Volume 33 Working in Greece and Turkey: A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation-States, 1840–1940 Edited by Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı

Volume 28 Labour, Unions and Politics under the North Star: The Nordic Countries, 1700–2000 Edited by Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger and Iben Vyff

Volume 32 Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania Alina-Sandra Cucu

Volume 27 Rescuing the Vulnerable: Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Modern Europe Edited by Beate Althammer, Lutz Raphael and Tamara Stazic-Wendt

Volume 31 Categories in Context: Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present Edited by Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Olivier Giraud, Léa Renard and Theresa Wobbe

Volume 26 The History of Labour Intermediation: Institutions and Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Edited by Sigrid Wadauer, Thomas Buchner and Alexander Mejstrik

Volume 30 What Is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present Edited by Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis and Manuela Martini Volume 29 Laborers and Enslaved Workers: Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro’s Working Class, 1850–1920 Marcelo Badaró Mattos

Volume 25 Bread from the Lion’s Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi Volume 24 Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries Alessandro Stanziani

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/international-studies-in-social-history

Working in Greece and Turkey A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation-States, 1840–1940

Edited by Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Papastephanakē, Lēda, author. | Kabadayi, M. Erdem, author. Title: Working in Greece and Turkey : a comparative labour history from empires to nation-states, 1840-1940 / Leda Papastefanaki, M. Erdem Kabadayı. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series: International studies in social history; vol 33 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020015868 (print) | LCCN 2020015869 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789206968 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789206975 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Labor--Greece--History. | Labor--Turkey--History. Classification: LCC HD8650.5 .P37 2020 (print) | LCC HD8650.5 (ebook) | DDC 331.09495/09034--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015868 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015869 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-696-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-697-5 ebook

Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction and Historiographical Essay. Greek and Turkish Economic and Social History, and Labour History Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı

1

Part I. Agrarian Property and Labour Relations, Rural and Urban Organization of Work  1 Were Peasants Bound to the Soil in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans? A Reappraisal of the Question of the New/Second Serfdom in Ottoman Historiography Alp Yücel Kaya  2 The ‘Invisible’ Army of Greek Labourers Christos Hadziiossif  3 ‘No Work for Anyone in This Country of Misery’: Famine and Labour Relations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anatolia Semih Çelik  4 Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside: Textile Workers in Three Plovdiv Villages Fatma Öncel  5 Ethno-religious Division of Labour in Urban Economies of the Ottoman Empire in the Nineteenth Century M. Erdem Kabadayı and Murat Güvenç

61 113

148

174

204

vi

Contents

Part II. Political Change, Migration and Nationalisms  6 Class Formation on the Modern Waterfront: Port Workers and Their Struggles in Late Ottoman Istanbul Akın Sefer

233

 7 Labourers, Refugees, Revolutionaries: Ottoman Perceptions of Armenian Emigration Sinan Dinçer

255

 8 The Greek Labour Movement and National Preference Demands, 1890–1922 Nikos Potamianos

286

 9 Refugees, Foreigners, Non-Muslims: Nationalism and Workers in the Silahtarağa Power Plant, 1914–1924 Erol Ülker

308

Part III. Labour Market and Emotions in the Twentieth Century  10 ‘Fatherly Interest…’: Industrial Paternalism, Labour Management and Gender in the Textile Mills of a Greek Island (Hermoupolis, Syros), 1900–1940 Leda Papastefanaki  11 The Changing Organization of Production and Modes of Control, and the Workers’ Response: The Turkish Textile Industry in the 1940s and 1950s Barı¸s Alp Özden  12 ‘It Is Fair to Ask for the Improvement of Their Fate’: The Demands, Mobilization and Political Orientation of the Press Workers and Printers of Patras, 1900–1940 Asimakis Palaiologos  13 Children’s Domestic Labour: Intimate Relations, Family Politics and the Construction of Identity of Domestic Workers in Interwar Greece Pothiti Hantzaroula

337

364

390

425

Epilogue 452 Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı Index 459

Illustrations

Figures 1.1 Historiographical exchanges between studies on serfdom, new/second serfdom and free peasantry 4.1 Breakdown of incomes (guru¸s) in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845 9.1 The List of the Russian Nationals Working at the Silahtarağa Central Factory

65 179 310

Maps 4.1 Source and amount of income 5.1 Locations in the 1845 temettuat dataset

180 209

Tables 3.1 Changes in agricultural input in the towns and villages of Kengiri (1845–46) 3.2 Changes in agricultural input in the villages of Nallu/Kengiri (1845–46) 4.1 Textile producer households in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845 4.2 Total annual incomes of textile producers in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845 4.3 Members of textile professions in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845 4.4 Number of journeymen and apprentices among textile producers in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845

159 159 181 182 183 188

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Illustrations

4.5 Average income of journeyman and apprentice households in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845 189 5.1 The distribution of total observations in sixteen locations according to ethno-religious affiliations 212 5.2 Examples of bottom-up four-level coding with the PST system 214 5.3 Examples of top-down two-level coding with the PST system 214 5.4 Distribution of observations with unspecified groups into PST sectors 215 5.5 Shannon’s entropy for locations and clusters 216 5.6 Ethno-religious composition of three clusters in real numbers and in percentages 218 9.1 Employment status of tram, electric and funicular personnel 314 9.2 Religious status and nationality of Electric Company employees, May 1923 314 9.3 Religious status and nationality of Silahtarağa workers 315 9.4 Religious status and nationality of Electric Company employees, 1923/1924 325 10.1 Evolution of the Karellas textile mill, 1895–1937 344 10.2 Composition of the workforce in the Karellas textile mill by age and sex, 1920 346 10.3 Age of entry into the textile mill for women weavers 347 10.4 Cash gifts to male workers in the Karellas textile mill, 1938 351 12.1 Workers in the paper and printing industry of Patras, 1930. Classification by gender and age 396 12.2 Comparative average daily wage of male workers in basic printing specializations in the Peloponnese and on a nationwide scale in 1930 (in drachmas) 402

Acknowledgements This volume has been planned as an accompanying volume to Suraiya Faroqhi’s edited collection Bread from the Lion’s Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities (Berghahn Books, 2015), also published in this series. The studies in the first volume concentrated on the working lives of artisans in Ottoman cities including Bursa, Cairo and Istanbul from the late fifteenth to the mid nineteenth century. The studies in the present volume, which cover both urban and rural locations, pertain to a shorter period, yet one that was decisive for the shared histories of Greece and Turkey. We are grateful to Marcel van der Linden, the general editor of the International Studies in Social History series, and one of the most influential advocates of global labour history, for his unwavering support. Without him, our modest contribution to the comparative international labour history of Greece and Turkey would not have come to fruition. We would also like to Chris Chappell, senior editor, Berghahn Books, for his boundless assistance in the very long process of completion of this work. For useful comments, as well as the provision of valuable material, we would like to thank the following people: in Greece, Christina Agriantoni, Antonis Anastasopoulos, Maria Christina Chatziioannou, Andreas Dimitriadis, Evanghelos Hekimoglou, Elias Kolovos, Sophia Laiou, Anna Mahera, Vassilis Nitsiakos, Kostas Paloukis, Socrates D. Petmezas and Marinos Sariyannis; in Turkey, Erden Akbulut and Y. Doğan Çetinkaya; and Touraj Atabaki at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. We would very much like to express our deep gratitude to Nikola Rakovski, a PhD candidate in History at Koç University, who mastered the daunting tasks of transliterating all non-English alphabet words into English, organizing individual chapters, abstracts and biographies, and conducting final editorial and administrative correspondence with all our contributors in a very short time. Thanks to his highly effective and fast work, this volume reached its final stage. Lastly we would like to thank Ben Young, Babel Academic Editing Services, for his meticulous preliminary copy-editing, which we needed before submitting the

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Acknowledgements

manuscript to the Berghahn Books. We are also thankful for the financial support provided by the UrbanOccupationsOETR, Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850–2000, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679097) for the copy-editing. We must also express sincere thanks to the contributors of this volume for their patience. On a non-academic note, yet still crucially important, both of the editors sincerely thank Spiros Drivas for providing an excellent working atmosphere, with constant encouragement and patience as well as food for thought and body, during our long sessions in Athens. Finally, we express our sincere sorrow for the loss of two dear colleagues, Donald Quataert (1941–2011) and Vangelis Kechriotis (1969–2015), whose scholarly contributions and personal engagements were invaluable in creating the academic community from which the present work has issued; this is a community that truly transcends national borders. This volume is dedicated to their memory.

Introduction and Historiographical Essay

Greek and Turkish Economic and Social History, and Labour History

Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı

With this edited volume we are pursuing the challenging task of connecting the labour histories and historiographies of Greece and Turkey. Our methodological point of departure is largely furnished by the conceptual framework of global labour history, which stresses the need for transnational/transcontinental and diachronic comparisons. Until the 1970s, labour historians typically locked themselves into the frameworks of individual nation-states.1 In contrast, we seek to connect labour history studies on both shores of the Aegean within the field of global labour history. In attempting to write a comparative labour history not only of the history of contact between two polities but also of their shared history, we follow the recent twofold critique and suggestion of Marcel van der Linden, which targets Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism.2 The seed of this volume was planted in Istanbul in November 2011, at the close of a conference entitled ‘Working in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Ottoman and Turkish Labour History within a Global Perspective’.3 We built upon the ideas and concepts presented there with the double aim, from the one side, to compare, contrast and position the findings and applied methodologies of Ottoman labour history with and within global labour historiography; and from the other side, to bring the labour histories conducted within some of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire into contact. We hope that we can thus contribute to the internationalization of Greek, Ottoman and Turkish labour history.

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On this basis we have prepared a historiographical essay based upon a detailed critical review of the current literature to start with.

Greek Economic and Social Historiography Regarding the Ottoman Past Under the influence chiefly of French historiography, Greek economic historiography developed in two independent directions: on the one hand, towards the study of the agricultural economy, and on the other, towards that of the urban sector of the economy (commerce and manufacture).4 The initial questions posed by studies of economic history stemmed from the widespread thinking of the 1970s on the country’s economic and social development, and the conditions under which modern Greek society was shaped. The historian Nikos Svoronos (1911–89) had studied and worked in France since 1945. There he published his magnum opus on the commerce of Thessaloniki in the eighteenth century,5 a study in the Marxist ‘labrousienne’ tradition that had great influence on Greek economic historiography. In Paris in the mid 1960s, at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (IV Section), Svoronos accepted as students the young historians Spyros Asdrachas, Vassilis Panayotopoulos, Phillipe Iliou and Vassilis Kremmydas, who left Greece in order to study modern history in France. In the same period, the Byzantinist Hélène Antoniadis was teaching the course ‘Histoire économique et sociale de la Grèce medieval et modern’ at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.6 In 1979, writing the introduction to a collective volume which he had edited, Spyros Asdrachas took the opportunity to frame a series of questions regarding the structure of the Greek economy and the hegemony of commercial capital in the Greek lands under Ottoman rule.7 The following year, the publication of a volume in Greek with translated articles from a conference organized in Hamburg by the Association Internationale d’Etudes du Sud-Est Européen (AIESEE), on modernization and the Industrial Revolution in the Balkans in the nineteenth century, established the image of ‘retarded’ industrialization in the Balkans as common ground regarding the Ottoman past.8 In the early 1980s an economic history conference organized by the Hellenic National Research Foundation on Mediterranean Economies, spanning the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, brought historians of the vieille garde braudelienne (such as Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, José Gentil da Silva and Maurice Aymard) together with historians of the Mediterranean from Italy, Spain and France (such as Carlo

Introduction 3

Ginsburg and Robert Mantran) and the Balkans (Traian Stoianovich, Maria Todorova, Cornelia Papacostea-Danielopoulou, Alexandru Dutu, Olga Cicanci, Bariša Krekic and others).9 In general, with the participants coming mainly from Greece and the Balkans, the hegemony of French Braudelian historiography was obvious, while there was only one historian of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (Elena Frangakis), two Turkish intellectuals (I˙skender Gökalp and Cengiz-Osman Aktar) and no historian or Ottomanist from Turkey.10 Another international conference organized in 1984 by the Association on the Study of Modern Hellenism, focusing on the urban history of modern Greece and more specifically on the Ottoman heritage and the Greek state, brought together historians and urbanists from Greece, France (André Raymond, Guy Burgel) and the United States (Elena Frangakis),11 but again no scholar from Turkey or the Balkans. These events could be considered as the first premature attempts at international collaboration by Greek historians, before the professionalization of international history. Concerning rural history, mainly under the influence of Spyros Asdrachas (1933–2017), Greek historiography has focused on the study of the forms and functions of agricultural structures in Greek lands under Ottoman rule, the emergence of capitalist relations through the large land estates (çiftliks), and the forms of cultivation by share-croppers.12 Rural historiography has also dealt with land ownership problems, the distribution of the national estates, and the land/agrarian reform organized by the Greek state after the second half of the nineteenth century and during the interwar period.13 As for the history of industry, the problématique concerned the conditions of and the limits on the development of Greek industry, and the reasons why industrialization in Greece was ‘retarded’. The process of industrialization in the Greek state during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century has been explored since the 1980s and 1990s,14 while studies on proto-industries in the agricultural sector under Ottoman rule, and on craft industries and occupations in pre-industrial societies under Venetian and Ottoman rule, have provided researchers with important data on the life and labour of people in the world of agriculture and craft industries in the countryside and urban areas.15 This has stimulated questions about the social and cultural origins of the urban workers’ strata and the process of transition to the free-wage labour market.16 At the same time, some approaches have drawn attention to the economic importance of the family in the cottage industry in the countryside, also dealing with the gender division of labour – where data were available.17

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Leda Papastefanaki and M. Erdem Kabadayı

In Greek Economic History, 15th to 19th Centuries, his magnum opus published in 2003, Spyros Asdrachas and his collaborators explored the ‘history of the conquered people’ or the ‘subjected peoples’ and the ‘economy of the subjected’ under Venetian and Ottoman rule.18 Ottoman Studies in Greece, which had been an exclusively historical discipline concerned with the period of Ottoman rule in the Greek regions, acquired substance after the mid 1960s when Vassilis Dimitriadis and Elizabeth Zachariadou became the first historians to study Ottoman history in European and US universities. Vassilis Dimitriadis, born in Komotini in 1931, graduated from the School of Philology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1954. In the following year he was appointed director of the newly created Historical Archive of Macedonia, a post he held until 1984. In the meantime, he attended postgraduate courses in Turkish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, where he studied under V.L. Ménage. Dimitriadis earned his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with a thesis on Central and Western Macedonia according to Evliya Çelebi.19 He took the initiative of publishing the Bulletin of Turkish Bibliography (Deltion Tourkikis Vivliografias) in 1967–71 in Thessaloniki. The Bulletin contained bibliographies and extended abstracts of articles on Turkish Studies published in Turkey or elsewhere.20 Although the Bulletin was published during the dictatorship in Greece (1967–74), it is noteworthy that it included translations of articles by Ömer Lütfi Barkan about historical demography in Ottoman history, and Halil İnalcık on the administration of rules of justice.21 The research by Dimitriadis on the topography and population of Ottoman Thessaloniki was very influential.22 Elisabeth Zachariadou (1931–2018) studied history at Athens University and Ottoman history at SOAS in London (1956–60), then followed the courses on Byzantine history given by Paul Lemerle in section IV of the Ecole Pratique in Paris in the 1960s, specializing in early Ottoman history. She worked at the National Hellenic Research Foundation until the 1980s,23 when she became professor of Ottoman History at the University of Crete, in the same period as Vassilis Dimitriadis. The historian John C. Alexander (=Alexandropoulos), born in 1940, studied Ottoman history at Columbia University in the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1974. Alexander later worked at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, and in the 1990s he became professor of Ottoman History at the University of Thessaloniki.24 In general, since the 1980s Ottoman Studies in Greece has seen fruitful results, publishing Ottoman sources which have illuminated questions of the economy, population, topography and urban history, taxation and

Introduction 5

fiscal issues, the history of monasteries and convents, and Christian communities.25 And in the same period Ottoman Studies has been reinforced by the establishment of new university courses, notably at the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Crete, a new university where Nikos Svoronos was a member of the governing committee. Dimitriadis and Zachariadou were elected professors in Turkish Studies in the latter department, and a programme for Ottoman and Turkish Studies was established in 1987 at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS/FORTH) by these two Ottomanists.26 Since the 1990s Ottoman history has been taught at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki by Alexander and his students, while research has also been conducted at the National Hellenic Research Foundation by Evangelia Balta, and by researchers at IMS/FORTH. The publication of original sources and translations, as well as the expansion of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Turkish and Ottoman Studies, has broadened the Greek historiography in terms of both subjects and sources. Since the end of the 1980s, and especially since the turn of the millennium, many of the classical studies on the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey have been translated into Greek: works by Paul Wittek, Halil İnalcık, Donald Quataert, Suraiya Faroqhi, S¸evket Pamuk, Erik Jan Zürcher and Cemal Kafadar have been published in Greece,27 thanks to the careful editing of historians like Kostas Kostis and Socrates D. Petmezas (these two published many translated works in their edited series for Alexandreia publications). Edited volumes with translated articles in Greek thus brought Greek, Turkish, European and American historians of the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire together.28

A Review of Ottoman and Turkish Economic and Social History and Its Internationalization Politically instrumentalized nationalist history writing in Turkey had obstructed the internationalization of the craft in general, and in particular as regards the inclusion of non-Muslim, non-Turkish communities into the historiography of the Ottoman Empire. The limited and politically oriented understanding of the Ottoman past expressed through the Turkish nationalist historiography left no room for a shared history of different communities. Greek and Armenian histories especially were confined to the histories of minorities, seen from the perspective of the Turkish state, and in general held responsible for the failure of the Ottoman Empire.29 Only with the internationalization of Ottoman

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history writing could this closed and ahistorical historiography be undermined. In the following we trace the process of this internationalization, which eventually led to the development of connections between the Greek and Turkish historiographies. Economic and social history as a discipline in Turkey is relatively young. Although it is difficult to set a date for when studies in economic history began to be the object of a joint and orchestrated effort, the year 1955, when Ömer Lütfi Barkan (1902–79) established the Institute for Turkish Economic History in Istanbul, marks a point of culmination.30 Barkan’s personal and academic connection to the Annales school31 has been influential in the discipline from the early days of its emergence. In fact, in the 1950s Barkan made one of the earliest pleas – albeit with no adequate response – to Greek historians to use Ottoman archival sources, and so indirectly connect the historiographies in Athens.32 Halil İnalcık, who passed away in July 2016 aged 100, took the study of the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire to a decisively higher level of institutionalization and internationalization.33 İnalcık was a professor in the Department of History at Chicago University from 1972 up to his retirement in 1986. In 1993, after having held appointments at other prominent universities in the United States, he returned to Turkey as the founding chair of the Department of History at Bilkent University, of which he remained a member until his death. İnalcık’s legacy for the internationalization of Ottoman economic and social history is his leadership in the establishment of the International Association of Ottoman Social and Economic History, which organized the first International Congress of the Social and Economic History of Turkey in 1977. In 2008 the name of the congress was changed to the International Congress of Ottoman Social and Economic History (ICOSEH). ICOSEH convened thirteen times, eight of which were outside Turkey. It still serves as one of the most important venues for the further internationalization of the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire. Although the prominent Byzantinist Nikolas Oikonomides participated in the 3rd meeting, held in Princeton in 1983, the involvement of Greek scholars and scholars working on the Greek lands of the Ottoman Empire in the ICOSEH meetings were limited for quite a while. Only with the 12th meeting in Retz in 2011 and the 13th in Alcala in 2013 can we observe the emergence of a critical mass of contributions from Greek and Turkish academics working on the Greek lands of the Ottoman Empire, another sign of enhanced academic cooperation between economic and social historiography on both shores of the Aegean, and a timely consequence of the further internationalization of Ottoman history writing.

Introduction 7

We can argue, though, that the real spearhead for the internationalization of Ottoman economic and social history is our dear colleague Suraiya Faroqhi. Faroqhi had been one of Barkan’s students, and is one of the most prolific authors in the field.34 Her publications have contributed to the visibility of the Ottoman Empire in international academia in general and in economic and social history in particular. Volumes edited by Faroqhi and her collaborators have served as platforms of academic exchange. Like İnalcık, she has made her mark on the literature, especially as regards the internationalization of the field. In the 1980s, partially also thanks to the popularity of world-systems theory, Ottoman economic history gained visibility internationally. Among others, a volume edited by Huri İslamoğlu with a most eloquent introduction was particularly influential in this regard. It contained contributions from several other economic and social historians who would define the field in the years to come, as well as Immanuel Wallerstein.35 Donald Quataert, to whom this volume is dedicated and whose contribution to the field of Ottoman labour history will be elaborated in detail below, was one of these historians.36 In 1993 Quataert published his influential and widely read book on nineteenth-century Ottoman manufacturing,37 and in the following year edited a book on manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.38 Building upon the aforementioned historiographical developments,39 the 1990s marked a culmination point for the internationalization of Ottoman social and economic history writing, and this then served as a basis for the rapprochement between the Greek and Turkish historiographies on the Turkish side.

Bridging the Aegean Since the turn of the millennium, social scientists from Greece and Turkey have begun to explore new aspects of society and history in both countries, examining the formation of nation-states, the transition to modernity and the emergence of citizenship, in a series of three collective interdisciplinary volumes published in Greek and English.40 Since the early 1990s a new generation of historians both from Greece and Turkey have been learning Turkish and Greek as research languages, engaging with the sources and themes of a shared Greek, Ottoman and Turkish history, and thus contributing to a shared historiography that bridges the Aegean. We will name some of these scholars and their work in what follows, though without claiming to be exhaustive. The late Vangelis Kechriotis, to whom this volume is dedicated, was one of these Greek scholars, having a keen interest in the interconnections

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and shifting boundaries of the societies of the late Ottoman period.41 Evangelia Balta,42 Sia Anagnostopoulou, Paraskevas Konortas, Eleni Gara, Antonis Anastasopoulos, Elias Kolovos, Phokion Kotzageorgis, Sophia Laiou, Marinos Sariyannis, Demetrios Papastamatiou and Irini Renieri have all contributed to the emergence of a connected history writing.43 Particularly important in this effort was the joint research group for the project ‘Christian Communities in Cappadocia’, initiated by Christos Hadziiossif in the 1990s–2000s and hosted at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH. This project boosted awareness of the need for a more holistic approach, and issued trend-setting publications.44 Hadziiossif has been influential in the development of this inclusive historiography not by ignoring the distinct characteristics of the Orthodox Christian communities in the Ottoman society, but rather by acknowledging the multi-ethnic, multi-religious political and social order of the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, he does not conceptualize the Orthodox Christian communities as minorities, living as culturally isolated or politically non-represented social groups, but instead adopts a perspective that accommodates the multifaceted, intrinsic social and economic activities, tensions and connections that characterize their interactions. This positioning also enables the historian to better understand the political upheavals connected to nation-making processes. On this complicated issue, the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens pursues a valuable and purpose-oriented agenda by conserving the Greek Orthodox Christian identity both of and from the lost homelands in Anatolia.45 To mention just some of the research topics where the use of Ottoman sources has enriched Greek historiography, we could cite: the interrelations among Greek-Christians and other ethno-religious communities of the late Ottoman Empire in the period of transition to nation-states; the conceptualization of Rum as a constitutive element of Ottoman history;46 the status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate under Ottoman rule;47 the establishment of pious endowments (vakıf); the economic and political importance of Christian monasteries under Ottoman rule;48 economic and social history in the Ottoman Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Aegean islands;49 the economic, social and cultural history of the Turkish-speaking Christian Orthodox communities of Asia Minor;50 development of the Ottoman cities and capital formation;51 political mobilization and forms of collective action;52 the history of Ottoman political thought;53 and the economic history of the Black Sea.54 Yannis Papadopoulos use Ottoman and Turkish sources in order to examine the experiences of the first migrants to travel between the Ottoman Empire and the United States,55 while Efi Kanner also studies the formation of

Introduction 9

the discourses on women’s rights and feminist interventions that appear among the various ethno-religious groups in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and later Turkey from the mid nineteenth century to the interwar period, or the meanings of poverty in the late Ottoman Empire as they were elaborated in various ethno-religious contexts.56 On the Turkish side of the Aegean, Onur Yıldırım produced one of the most authoritative accounts on the population exchange by making use of sources both in Greek and Turkish.57 Elçin Macar published on the Greek Patriarchate and Greek community in Istanbul.58 The latest members of this expanding group of scholars are Ays¸e Ozil, whose work is representative of the advanced level of scholarship on the non-dominant communities within the Ottoman Empire,59 and Merih Erol, whose recent book is an important contribution to the intersection of the cultural and political histories of the Greeks of Istanbul.60 Lastly, the work of the brothers Yorgo, Foti and Stefo Benlisoy should also be mentioned here, as an example of Istanbulite Greeks who have long been contributing to the history of Greeks in Turkey. They are among the founders of the publishing house Istos (Greek: web and tissue), which focuses on the Greek cultural and social presence in the history of the Ottoman Empire and today’s Turkey, with publications in Turkish, Greek and Karamanlidika. Istos recently published Foti Benlisoy’s book on the understudied topic of the resistance of soldiers within the Greek army during the Greek military campaign.61 In the new millennium, collaborations among Turkish and Greek researchers have offered a complex understanding of historical developments within the interrelated communities. There remains a powerful challenge to deconstruct the nationalistic historiographical approaches on both sides of the Aegean by offering combinations of sources in Greek, Turkish and Ottoman languages, and adopting a comparative perspective.62

Greek Historiography on Labour From the history of trade union organizations and their leaders, the history of the labour movement in Greece has been transposed since the 1980s to the study of culture, collective labour action and the ‘spontaneous’ or less organized workers’ reactions that activated the populations of industrial cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early 1980s a brief effort at the creation of an Association for the Study of the Labour Movement’s History gave an impetus to seminars and new research.63 Alongside a history of the labour movement that

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put emphasis on the political history of workers’ organizations (Yannis Kordatos, Kostis Moskoff),64 Greek historiography saw the development of a historiography dealing with institutions, labour legislation and state intervention. Interest has centred on the institution of the social sector of the state mainly in the interwar years, and in its involvement with international organizations like the International Labour Organization (ILO).65 During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the category of age was introduced, in order to study children’s labour and apprenticeship systems;66 the old question of class formation was re-examined in urban and agricultural sectors,67 while more recent approaches have provided an abundance of new realia on productive structures, division of occupations and the labour movement in Macedonia.68 Since the mid 1980s, the history of labour has generated a substantive renewal of the social history of Greece by using the perspective of the history of women and gender.69 The studies on the subject by Efi Avdela are pioneering. Her study of women civil servants in the first half of the twentieth century introduced a systematic treatment of the social history of labour and its involvement with the history of women, linking women’s work with the social, legal and familial inferiority of women.70 Protective provisions for women’s work in labour legislation and the relevant provisions included in collective labour agreements were studied in subsequent research on the history of labour, while other studies have investigated anti-feminist ideas about female paid labour and the demand for the prohibition of women’s work outside the home.71 Focusing on a tobacco workers’ strike in multi-ethnic post-Ottoman Thessaloniki in 1914, much mentioned in the scholarship, and using the city’s Greek press, Efi Avdela has examined how metaphorical uses of class, ethnicity and gender construct meanings and symbolically organize action.72 By using methodologies and sources previously neglected in the Greek historiography, such as the reports of Labour Inspectors, Avdela has demonstrated that these reports ‘construct discursively the reality they purportedly document’, making ‘references to underlying meaning, that is external, yet related to their textuality’.73 Studies from 2000 onwards have examined individual issues in the history of labour from the gender perspective, such as the relations between women’s organizations and political parties in the interwar years with regard to the legislation on the protection of women’s labour,74 or the multiple personae of the working woman in industry and the craft industry of female workers.75 Employing archives of industrial enterprises, other studies have correlated labour markets and the genderbased division of labour with the organization of urban space, and the choice of place of residence of male and female workers.76 The systematic

Introduction 11

use of archives of industrial enterprises has permitted a focus on the labour process at the sites of production of thread and textile mills, a branch of industry with a high concentration of female labour, highlighting the economic dimension of women’s work in industry, investigating the interweaving of technical and gender-based divisions of labour, and examining crucial aspects of the process of industrialization (such as technological modernization, the composition of the workforce, the organization and division of labour, day wages, the occupational hierarchy, the structure of specializations, and the practices of workforce management). These approaches to a new economic history of labour have highlighted the lack of equality in the remuneration of men and women, based on a gendered division of labour and a gendered organization of work in the factory, aimed at reducing labour costs for employers.77 Using a variety of sources, research has focused on the influence of family and gender in the organization of labour and labour relationships in the Greek mines in the mid nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has shown how the organization of labour through the subcontractor system was based to a large extent on systems of kinship and on the family and gender division of labour.78 Research has shown that various industrial enterprises adopted paternalistic gender practices in order to recruit and control the labour force. At the same time, employers’ gender-based policies in the management of the workforce in factories have also been studied. It has been argued that the management of labour issues by employers, trade unions and the state, within the framework either of employers’ paternalism or of workers’ struggles and institutional interventions, was not based exclusively on the distinction between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’, but on underlying gender-based social apportionments of labour.79 The various rhetorics that have been employed in connection with the work performed by women have also been examined.80 Dimitra Lampropoulou deals with the manual labour of a typical male occupation – that of builders – investigating the involvement of gender and class in the make-up of the male worker’s identity, using theoretical elaborations on masculinity and the body, and employing life narrations, the press and archival material.81 A distinct historiographical turn has concerned the non-market labour of servants and domestic workers. In the Greek case, research has been conducted on the legal status of male and female servants and domestic workers in Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order to bring out the experience of housemaids in the supply of paid domestic service, Pothiti Hantzaroula has used life histories and the methodology of oral history in studying domestic service

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as a relationship that is permeated by, but also forms, class and gender hierarchies.82 Her work on the memories of housemaids has shed light on the process by which, on the one hand, subjects were formed by the family and housework was constructed as being inferior, and, on the other, social subjection was achieved.83 Sexual assault in domestic service and the sexual politics that assigned the blame for sexual exploitation to domestic workers is another aspect of this research.84 Research interest has gradually turned to the working experiences of immigrant domestic workers in contemporary Greece and the analysis of gender, class and race hierarchies in the production of their subjectivity. At the same time, the political awakening occasioned in sections of Greek society by the murderous attack upon an immigrant female cleaning worker in December 2008 provided the material for a collection of texts that examined in summary form the courses taken by history and modern policies in relation to forms of unofficial labour in an area characterized by the strong presence of a female immigrant workforce – that of cleaning and service work.85 Since the new millennium, labour as a historiographical subject has captured the interest of a number of historians, mainly of earlier generations. Postgraduate and doctoral theses, as well as articles in books and journals, have suggested a renewed interest in a frontline subject. The study by Kostas Fountanopoulos, in attempting to make use of E.P. Thompson’s concept of the ‘moral economy’ and following the tradition of social and political history cultivated in Greece in the 1980s and 1990s, places emphasis on the dimension of culture in the formation of the identity of the working class as regards workers’ struggles in interwar Thessaloniki, and integrates women’s labour into the process of the formation of the working class.86 A renewal in social and political history from below deals with the social and cultural history of master artisans and shopkeepers in Athens and the ways that this ‘traditional petite bourgeoisie’ constituted itself as a collective subject in the first decades of the twentieth century, as the works by Nikos Potamianos indicate.87 His study on the workers’ mobilization against high prices in Greece during World War I and the Greco-Turkish war, and the legislation against profiteering that was adopted in the context of rising state intervention in the economy, explores the dialectic relationship between traditional representations of the merchant and emerging statism as well as the strategies of the young labour movement towards workers’ unification.88 In a parallel approach, the study by Kostas Paloukis on an interwar Greek Trotskyist organization (the ‘Archive of Marxism’) focuses on social mobilizations, ideology, political organization and the cultural practices of the workers’ strata.89

Introduction 13

Regarding the formation and historical evolution of the regimes and relations of labour, new research examines the social practices and legal regulations on slave labour during the Greek Revolution, in the period of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state.90 Other studies since 2000 have explored skilled work, the divisions of labour in specific branches (printing, tobacco) and the transformations in labour process caused by technological change,91 and labour in the services, especially in the retail trade.92 Paid and unpaid labour offered by members of the family in the house, in family businesses and in the workplace, as well as the different family responses to economic crises and to the labour markets, constitute a new research field.93 The history of techniques and artisans, as recorded by ethnographic approaches, has provided rich material on labour and everyday life in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy.94 The history of occupational health has also been studied, linked with the handling of the very acute problems of public health and the spread of concerns about social welfare in the process of capitalist modernization in Greece in the first decades of the twentieth century. Studies have shown that medical and technical knowledge in connection with health risks in workplaces took shape socially, and crystallized in terms of institutions within a system of power relations, the elements of which were the employers, working men and women, and the state.95 In general, the history of occupational health and safety has not yet been developed through specific studies, except in the cases of the textile industry and mining.96 The history of migration is a field in which policies on labour and working conditions are discussed on a transnational level.97 Since the end of the 1990s and in the following decades, new approaches have emerged on the policies of the Greek state and of the receiving societies, in Europe and the Americas, relating to migration as well as to migrants’ subjectivities in relation to gender, class and race. These studies have introduced new topics and research tools, while highlighting the multiplicity of the immigrants’ experiences.98

Labour History of the Ottoman Past in Greek Historiography Guilds as occupational institutions dominated the landscape of urban economic activities in the Ottoman Empire. The conventional literature on guilds,99 both in Greek as well as in Turkish historiography, includes valuable accounts on the history of work and labour relations. However,

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until recently neither the authors who have contributed to this subfield, nor the readership of these valuable studies, have perceived them within the genre or perspective of labour history. Thanks to the opening up of labour historiography and the inclusion of labour organizations beyond trade unions, the existing literature on guilds can now be revisited through the lens of a new labour history.100 Although guilds attracted the interest of scholars in Greece in the 1970s and 1980s, the focus was on the Greek-Christian guilds and their inherent democratic character.101 Because of the available sources, and because of the questions posed by the researchers, the emphasis has been on the regulation of prices and wages through the guilds, rather than on the internal division and organization of labour into the guilds, the composition and recruitment of the workforce, or the subcontracting of labour within and outside the guilds. In this respect, the Greek historiography on guilds offers an economic history perspective in the broader sense, but at the same time also adopts a limited perception of labour. The relations and/or antagonisms among the different ethno-religious occupational organizations, or the discrimination and harassment along ethno-religious lines regarding guild members in the mixed guilds of the Greek lands of the Ottoman Empire, have not yet been researched. In labour history and the history of the labour movement, a special place is held by the case of multi-ethnic Ottoman Thessaloniki and the prominent role of the Jewish workers in the city. The mainly Jewish socialist organization Socialist Workers’ Federation (Fédération socialiste ouvrière, Federacion), founded in 1909 in Ottoman Thessaloniki, had been treated by Marxist Greek historiography as the inevitable consequence of the formation of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Greece, founded in the context of the Greek state in 1918.102 The change of paradigm came in the 1980s and 1990s, when historical research focused on the culture of the federation and introduced the concepts of gender and ethnicity into the analysis, challenging the previous interpretations of the Greek ‘national’ labour movement.103 Research on aspects of Jewish, Muslim and Christian Orthodox working life in Ottoman Thessaloniki has been conducted by Greek as well as Turkish and Israeli historians, in this way recognizing the case of Thessaloniki as exemplary in the context of the Ottoman Empire and during the transition to the Greek nation-state.104 Undoubtedly, many gains have been made by the Greek historiography of labour: new sources, an expansion of the subject matter, an undermining of certainties, new questions and methodologies, and the introduction of new concepts. Many of the studies cited above converse with and take part in the international historiographical debate, both

Introduction 15

with regards to their theoretical elaborations and with regard to the material to which they draw attention. In 2014 a loose group of historians created the Greek Labour and Labour Movement History Network in Athens. The main objectives of the network are the promotion of communication and discussion between researchers, the coordination of activities, cooperation in accomplishing research projects, and communication with colleagues from other countries and with the European Labour History Network (ELHN).105 As trends in labour history stimulated cross-border collaboration, since its creation in 2013 the ELHN has favoured diverse working groups with specific topics (like free and unfree labour, feminist labour history, occupational health and safety, remuneration, factory history), and organized three conferences (in Turin, December 2015, in Paris, November 2017 and in Amsterdam, September 2019) in order to promote research collaboration across borders.106 As a recent sign of increased cooperation between historians in Greece and Turkey, several sessions were dedicated to Ottoman economic, social and labour history at the 3rd International Conference in Economic and Social History, which was organized in Greece with the special theme ‘Labour History: Production, Markets, Relations, Policies (from the Late Middle Ages to the Early 21st Century)’ (Ioannina, May 2017).107

Ottoman and Turkish Labour Historiography Labour history remained an underdeveloped subfield of the twentiethcentury Turkish historiography. An assessment of the literature published in 2002 described the status of labour history as miserable.108 The main reasons for the severe underdevelopment of the field can be summed up with a twofold argument: a methodological one and a historical one. First, the gaze of labour history in Turkey was confined to the experiences of workers, limited to a class-based understanding of labour. This perception was based on the assumption that the working class consisted or should have consisted of proletarianized male, industrial and politically organized workers. This exclusionary and self-limiting methodology left fruitful areas of research off the radar and disqualified the vast majority of male and especially female labourers as agents or actors in labour history, since presumably they did not belong to the working class. Secondly, due to the late and limited scope of mechanized industrial production and the concomitant low level of unionization and limited success of labour organizations, the history of labour – which meant the history of the labour struggle in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey – remained

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a neglected field.109 Starting from the new millennium, this academic landscape began to transform itself through an opening initiated by a new generation of labour historians. Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, one of the leading labour historians of this new generation, has recently produced a masterful review of the limitations of twentieth-century labour history in Turkey.110 Although Çetinkaya’s review and evaluation is timely and explanatory, the fact that he himself is using the lens of a newly defined broader understanding of the working class differentiates his position from the main methodological axis of this volume. Our effort aims not to broaden the limitations of working-class history, but to pursue the aims of global labour history and so use class as one of the multiple signifiers of labour history – and not as the only one. With the development of international historiography on labour, going through the stages of comparative, international and global, class as the dominant paradigm has lost ground to multiple identities. The years immediately after the turn of the millennium also mark the revision of the methodological toolbox of labour history.111 This paradigm shift can be seen as both the cause and result of the internationalization of labour history writing. In this regard it is not surprising that the first special section devoted to Ottoman labour history (Labor History of the Ottoman Middle East, 1700–1922), organized by Donald Quataert, appeared in one of the most prominent international journals, International Labor and WorkingClass History, in 2001. In his introductory essay, Quataert highlighted the expansion of focus of Ottoman labour history to include non-guild, non-union labour, including women and children.112 It is this opening of the field to which we would like to contribute further. The articles in the 2001 collection (Chalcraft’s study on coal heavers’ methods of resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century in Port Sa’id; Kırlı’s work on the importance of regional allegiances to finding employment in Istanbul in the early nineteenth century; Zarinebaf-Shahr’s article on the role of women in the Istanbul economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; and Quataert and Duman’s study of a first-person narrative of a mine worker in Zonguldak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) paved the way for a new Ottoman labour history.113 If we take into consideration his oeuvre, his students’ work and also the studies of academics influenced by him, it is no exaggeration to talk about a ‘Quataert effect’ on the internationalization of Ottoman labour history. As a matter of fact, the second collection on Ottoman and Republican Turkish labour history, edited by Gavin Brockett and Touraj Atabaki and published in 2009 as a supplement of another very influential journal on international labour history, International Review of Social History, clearly showed this effect.114 Quataert’s epilogue to this supplement

Introduction 17

provides us with a good assessment of the achievements and limitations of Ottoman/Turkish labour history and the opportunities for comparative history in 2009. His urge to reconnect the histories of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire has been a major motivation for the preparation of this volume.115 The recent expansion of the field of labour history in Turkey has also gained additional momentum with the revitalization of non-university, NGO-based involvements. A joint effort orchestrated by Erden Akbulut from the Social History Research Foundation of Turkey (TÜSTAV), with the cooperation of the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfı) and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK), started to organize a series of biennial conferences. The first conference, in November 2013, was on the sources of the history of the Ottoman and Turkish labour movements. The second, in October 2015, had a thematic focus on the emergence of the working class in the Ottoman Empire. These two events were attempts to connect labour historians active both in academia as well as in labour organizations. The contributions of these conferences have not been published as proceedings, but functioned as initiators for two recent collections.116 These publications are also in accord with new developments in the field, and are part of the expansion of the perspective beyond the limitations of the dominant conventional working-class paradigm. The connection of labour historiography on the Ottoman Middle East and Turkey with global labour history and the global history of work has very recently been introduced and examined by Brockett and Balkılıç,117 whose work serves as the most updated evaluation of historiography in this regard. A non-exhaustive list of themes incorporated into labour history would include: gender and women’s labour history; the role of ethnicity and religion in finding employment; non-unionized forms of resistance; agricultural labour relations; the variety of experiences in workplaces including daily life in factories, other shop floors and domestic service; and informal and unfree forms of labour. In the following we will review the emerging literature in these fields since 2000 in the Ottoman and Turkish labour historiography. The contributions to the present volume can be seen as a part of this new and expanded labour history writing.

Gender and Women’s Labour History, Ethnicity and Religion in Ottoman Historiography in Turkey Although there have been attempts to place women’s labour history on the agenda, we should admit that Ottoman and Turkish labour history

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remains gender blind to a high degree. Female labour constituted the majority of the Bursa silk industry in the late nineteenth century, and thanks to this high concentration of women in the industrial workforce of late Ottoman Bursa, female workers became visible in Ottoman Studies as early as 1976 in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.118 The case of female workers in the Bursa silk industry remains an exception to the dearth of studies on female participation in the industrial workforce of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman labour history has benefited only to a limited extent from the incorporation of gender into social and economic history writing since the 1990s. Faroqhi’s work at the intersection of economic and social history and women’s history119 is surely of crucial importance in this regard, and Quataert was again pioneering in bringing a gender perspective to Ottoman labour history as early as the 1990s.120 Although there were a few individual studies on the role of women in the Ottoman economy published in the first decade of the twenty-first century,121 it is not yet possible to argue that gender constituted a strand of Ottoman labour history. Gülhan Balsoy’s article from 2009 is an important attempt to gender Ottoman labour history. In her study she points to the disconnect between gender and labour history in Ottoman Studies.122 A recent contribution on women’s history in the late Ottoman Empire includes one study on female tobacco workers in the province of Salonika and another on the integration of home-based female labour into factory production in Istanbul.123 The most recent publication in the field is a novel contribution to international labour history, which skilfully compares Bursa’s raw silk industry and Bombay’s spinning industries in the late nineteenth century, from a gendered labour perspective.124 Yet although limited in their number and scope, studies on Ottoman labour history which consider the gender aspect are more developed than comparable studies conducted on the labour history of Republican Turkey. As a whole, the severe underdevelopment of gendered perspectives is a double-edged sword for Ottoman and Turkish labour history. This gender blindness not only hobbles the studies on female labourers, but due to the non-existence of masculinity studies in the field we also have a genderless and handicapped account of male workers and labourers in Ottoman and Turkish labour history. The role of ethnicity and religion is another underdeveloped aspect of Ottoman and Turkish labour history. The Ottoman populace was multi-ethnic and multi-religious for the duration of the empire from its very beginning. Yet the historiography in general suffers from methodological nationalism. Marcel van der Linden has precisely delineated two major limitations of methodological nationalism, and highlighted the

Introduction 19

dangers of being confined to it for labour history. First, methodological nationalists naturalize the nation-state, and in doing so utilize it as the unit of historical research; they thus project the national unity back into history. Secondly, methodological nationalism blurs the differentiations between society, state and national territory.125 In the specific case of the Ottoman Empire, we are unfortunately confronted with national historiographies that work in their own silos of knowledge production without engaging with each other. Surely, as we delineated above, the borders of the historiographies in Greece and Turkey have been more permeable than this, yet we have still a long way to go. In particular, the survival of the ill-conceived perception that Republican Turkey is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire126 limits our understanding and analysis, and pushes us to include non-Turkish, non-Muslim elements of Ottoman society in Ottoman and Turkish labour history. Concomitantly, the role of religion and ethnicity in the field has been understudied. Similar to other avenues of research, there has been improvement in the state of the field in this topic since the new millennium, again following the lead of Quataert. Kırlı’s aforementioned work from 2001 and Yıldırım’s work on ethno-religious conflict in an Istanbul guild in the eighteenth century mark a change in this regard.127 Kabadayı’s article in the aforementioned collection and Akın Sefer’s contribution to the present volume can also be included in this trend.128 Informal and unfree forms of labour have also been a neglected theme. As in several other areas, Quataert’s work has been path-breaking in this subject as well. In his 2006 book on labour relations in the Zonguldak coalfield, he devoted a chapter to labour enforcement;129 Nurs¸en Gürboğa’s study explores the continuation of labour enforcement in the coalfield in the mid twentieth century.130 Other forms of unfree labour such as convict131 and conscripted132 labour are also finding their places in the new agenda for Ottoman and Turkish labour history, and the study of forms of military labour from the perspective of labour history is another promising field of research.133 An important research desideratum is the inclusion into the historiography of slavery as a form of unfree labour and labour relations. Agricultural labour relations and forms of labour recruitment and control are among the related topics that are being newly explored. Alp Yücel Kaya’s studies134 fall into this category, revisiting previous studies that did not belong to the Ottoman labour historiography, and examining their implications for labour regimes in agricultural production. This opening to rural and agricultural labour and the inclusion into labour history of the most important sector of the Ottoman economy is crucially important.

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In a similar vein, recent studies on migration have had strong components of labour migration and therefore a high degree of relevance to labour history.135 Erol Kahveci has just contributed to this newly emerging field at the intersection of migration and labour history with his article in the special issue ‘Migration and Ethnicity in Coalfield History’ in the International Review of Social History, adding the role of ethnicity to the case of the Zonguldak coalfield.136 A new strain of research in the labour historiography are non-unionized forms of labour politics. Weakening the dominant position of union-centred historiography, new studies on daily forms of resistance have come to the fore. Examples of such studies include Yiğit Akın’s and Kabadayı’s work on petitions as forms of protest intended to find, retain or improve conditions of employment.137 Can Nacar’s recent articles address a number of pertinent themes: elaborating methods of resistance among tobacco workers in Ottoman Xanthi and Kavala in the first years of the twentieth century, which oscillated between labour activism and militancy;138 analysing the dynamics of local conflicts between merchants and boatmen, and the Ottoman government’s flexible mechanisms of mediation in Black Sea ports, especially Samsun in the 1910s;139 and studying the vested interests and methods of resistance of porters in the Istanbul harbour, struggling both with the state as well as the Istanbul Quay Company.140 One important aspect that is still missing in the Ottoman and Turkish labour historiography is a focus on experiences in the daily working lives141 of the labourers, including domestic servants. It is our hope that this and other neglected and/or understudied topics will find their researchers in the near future.

Contributions to this Volume The contributions to this volume are grouped into three parts. Part I, Agrarian Property and Labour Relations, Rural and Urban Organization of Work, consists of five studies focusing mainly on the nineteenth century. We think it is useful to open the volume with two pieces on the relatively neglected yet important question of rural property regimes and their accompanying agrarian labour relations (Kaya, Hadziiossif), followed by studies on rural labour relations (Çelik, Öncel) and urban occupational structures (Kabadayı and Güvenç). Alp Yücel Kaya’s opening piece, ‘Were Peasants Bound to the Soil in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans? A Reappraisal of the Question of the New/Second Serfdom in Ottoman Historiography’, addresses the

Introduction 21

key issue of bondage to the soil. He firstly revisits the new and second serfdom debate by a critical re-reading of the cornerstone texts on the topic. Then, focusing on property regimes especially in the çiftliks, and the organization of labour relations in Tırhala in the 1850s, he examines bylaws relating to labour organization, claiming that these bylaws legitimized, institutionalized and reinforced bondage to the soil. He claims that through these bylaws the state did not introduce a second serfdom but rather adjusted and regulated labour recruitment for the changing needs of the capitalistic dynamics of agricultural production. Furthermore, by comparing the 1860 bylaw from Tırhala with contemporaneous examples from other locations in the Balkans, he asserts that bondage to the soil was not a local anomaly in Tırhala, but a common practice in the Ottoman Balkans of the time. In his piece, ‘The “Invisible” Army of Greek Labourers’, Christos Hadziiossif takes undocumented agricultural labourers in twenty-firstcentury western Peloponnese as a departure point, and then goes back to the nineteenth-century property and land regimes, deconstructing the illusion in Greek economic historiography that the nineteenth-century agricultural labour force consisted almost entirely of free and smalllandholding peasantry based upon egalitarian structures. Contrary to the generally accepted view, Hadziiossif argues that in big currant plantations the labour organization was imposed by landowners on propertyless wage-labouring agricultural workers. He states that historians working on agricultural production and property dynamics back-project to the entire Greek territory a late-period land reform that in fact was limited to a region, and argues instead for an egalitarian structure of land distribution and labour organization. By taking into consideration the technicalities of export-oriented agricultural production, property relations and the terminology used for agricultural workers in archival documentation, his analysis more clearly delineates the social stratifications and the repressive wage policies that were in operation, breaking with the egalitarian model that had hitherto been assumed. The third piece of this part is Semih Çelik’s ‘“No Work for Anyone in this Country of Misery”: Famine and Labour Relations in MidNineteenth-Century Anatolia’. Çelik’s starting point is the general disconnect between labour and environmental history. Although there are recent studies that aim to overcome this deficiency, Çelik rightfully argues that for the Ottoman case this limitation is still valid. In his chapter he uses environmental shocks, especially the mid-nineteenthcentury famines, to understand and examine Ottoman perceptions of labour and nature. Based upon a close reading of petitions (which he carefully embeds in a wider range of sources) submitted by famine-struck

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common people, including peasants and bakers, and the Ottoman state’s reaction to them, Çelik uses famine as a nexus to analyse labourers’ agency and reactions – such as making the decision to migrate, sending off their children or adapting to drastic circumstances. Fatma Öncel’s ‘Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside: Textile Workers in Three Plovdiv Villages’ is the fourth piece of Part I. Öncel revisits the proto-industrialization concept, which has generally been perceived as rather over-used within the European economic historiography. Nevertheless, she shows the usefulness of proto-industrialization as a conceptual tool for studying rural nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria. By focusing on manufacturing activity in three villages in the Plovdiv region, and specifically the composition of household incomes for textile workers, she highlights the fact that economic activity in these villages was to an extent specialized, and that incomes generated by rural industrial production surpassed the shares of agriculture and animal husbandry to such a level that industrial production was not merely a side-employment, but became the main occupation for some of the mid-nineteenth-century Plovdiv villagers. After assessing this situation, which is unexpected from the conventional economic perception of the Ottoman countryside, she brings in aspects of labour organization within households and workshops, technological changes, and labour mobility and migration as explanatory factors. Öncel provides a novel approach by marrying her main sources, namely the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman tax (temettuat) registers, which have provided the backbone for numerous studies on late Ottoman economic history, with a creative and adapted use of the concept of proto-industrialization. The last piece of Part I, ‘Ethno-religious Division of Labour in Urban Economies of the Ottoman Empire in the Nineteenth Century’ by M. Erdem Kabadayı and Murat Güvenç, also revisits the temettuat registers dating to the 1840s. This chapter is a product of the ongoing UrbanOccupationsOETR project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 679097. Using the methods of digital humanities, and thanks to the efforts of members of the research project team, for this chapter Kabadayı and Güvenç examined around eight hundred temettuat registers and extracted data on occupations and ethno-religious belongings for around fifty thousand observations from sixteen urban locations. After curating and coding the data, which are categorical in their nature, they first address the biases and problems in their archival sources, and then attempt to revisit the old, yet unsettled debate on the role of ethnicity and religion in the

Introduction 23

occupational choices of Ottomans, that is, the argument over the ethnoreligious division of labour. Part II: Political Change, Migration and Nationalisms, contains four pieces all focusing on the politically unstable, transformative, and both destructive and moulding decades between the 1880s and the 1920s, for three polities: the Ottoman Empire, and the early national states of Greece and Turkey. The four pieces follow a chronological order, starting from a case study on labour relations in the port of Istanbul, and the social organization and political lives of migrant Armenian workers in the United States in the 1890s (Sefer, Dinçer), and ending with labour disputes tainted by early nationalistic fervours in Athens (Potamianos) and in Istanbul (Ülker) in the first decades of the twentieth century. Akın Sefer’s piece, ‘Class Formation on the Modern Waterfront: Port Workers and Their Struggles in Late Ottoman Istanbul’, has at its core the drastic contemporaneous political changes and their consequences for Armenian port workers in the Ottoman capital in the 1890s. The increased and militarized political activity of Armenian political organizations resulted in the expulsion of Armenians from this key and traditionally advantageous venue for labour organization and struggle by the increasingly authoritarian Ottoman state. The politicization of the port resulted in the consolidation if not the re-emergence of labour organizations such as guilds at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, these organizations, unlike their predecessors from earlier eras, reinvented themselves as proto-nationalistic and exclusionary interest groups along strict religious lines of belonging. The second piece from Sinan Dinçer, ‘Labourers, Refugees, Revolutionaries: Ottoman Perceptions of Armenian Emigration’, follows the migratory lives of Ottoman Armenian workers abroad, specifically in the United States, after they were expelled or forced to look for better prospects outside the Ottoman borders in the politicized and hostile environment of the 1890s, framed by Armenian revolutionary activities, repressive measures by the Ottoman state, and massacres. Mainly politically triggered, the outward international migration of Ottoman Armenians looking for employment in the United States constitutes one of the earliest examples of cross-border labour migration from the Ottoman territories. The Ottoman state first attempted to regulate and then illegalized both the departure from and the return to the Ottoman lands by Armenian subjects, which had dramatic consequences for Armenians living and working within the Ottoman Empire, and those clandestinely trying to leave the empire for work, as well as for Armenian migrant organizations in the United States.

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In the third chapter in this part, ‘The Greek Labour Movement and National Preference Demands, 1890–1922’, Nikos Potamianos questions the validity of the concept of national preference relating to tensions among the workers of Athens and Piraeus, focusing on the early twentieth century. In his case study, both locals and foreigners (refugees from Anatolia) belong to the same Greek nation at an important conjuncture in its formation. The influx of refugees, who went through abrupt expropriation and consequent sudden proletarianization, created antagonisms among the established labour organizations in Athens and Piraeus. Potamianos’s study on the ‘othering’ of these refugees by their class comrades provides multifaceted insights into the daily lives and forms of struggle of the workers on both sides of this divide. The fourth and last chapter in this part is Erol Ülker’s ‘Refugees, Foreigners, Non-Muslims: Nationalism and Workers in the Silahtarağa Power Plant, 1914–24’, which selects the only power plant of the Ottoman Empire as a venue for labour conflict in the very last years of the empire. Similar to the dynamics examined by Potamianos in the previous piece, Ülker focuses on labour conflicts among workers, which are expressed within nationalistic discourses, and carefully represented as parts of a larger process of ongoing nationalization/Turkification of the late Ottoman/early Republican Turkish labour force. Ülker’s study makes critical use of workers’ petitions to the newly emerging Turkish state organs, as well as archives, virtually untapped until now, belonging to the municipal organizations of Istanbul in these transformative years between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the inauguration of the Republic of Turkey. The chapters in Part III: Labour Market and Emotions in the Twentieth Century have a temporal focus extending to the 1940s and 1950s. They elaborate on feelings and emotions, both genuinely felt as well as strategically constructed on a discursive level (Hantzaroula), at two ends of labour relations: workers (Palaiologos) and their employers (Papastefanaki, Özden). In her ‘“Fatherly Interest…”: Industrial Paternalism, Labour Management and Gender in the Textile Mills of a Greek Island (Hermoupolis, Syros, 1900–1940)’, Leda Papastefanaki analyses the meaning and role of industrial paternalism in connection with labour management and gender. Her study focuses on a declining industrial city, mainly textile-producing, on the central island of Cyclades in the preWorld War II decades of the twentieth century. In the interwar period, with increasing financial burdens, the textile mill owners of Hermoupolis developed paternalistic strategies, including gifts and selective bonuses and other additional benefits, and sought to reshape the workforce

Introduction 25

and suppress wages by opting for more young and female workers. Papastefanaki argues that paternalistic measures were taken to decrease the mobility of the workforce and increase its submission. Additional indirect disciplinary measures were introduced, especially regarding the female workers. She concludes that gender-selective paternalistic practices not only legitimized capitalistic labour relations but also reshaped the social hierarchy among workers. In ‘The Changing Organization of Production and Modes of Control, and the Workers’ Response: The Turkish Textile Industry in the 1940s and 1950s’, Barıs¸ Alp Özden puts the micro-worlds of production relations, labour control and discipline mechanisms at the core of his analysis. Özden convincingly argues that these areas provide the stage upon which workers’ identities are formed, as well as labour action performed. The introduction of new control and remuneration techniques by the employers, as well as their paternalistic measures to undermine labour resistance expressed through unionized action, provide fruitful ground to analyse these understudied yet decisive determinants of workers’ lives. In ‘“It Is Fair to Ask for the Improvement of Their Fate”: The Demands, Mobilization and Political Orientation of the Press Workers and Printers of Patras, 1900–1940’, Asimakis Palaiologos examines the labouring lives of a particular group of workers. Press workers and printers have generally been excluded from conventional labour historiography, with its focus on blue-collar workers with low levels of education. Patras, a port city, went through fast industrialization and urbanization in the first half of the twentieth century and housed numerous printing houses. Palaiologos elaborates on the methods of mobilization and political orientation of press workers and printers in this important industrial urban centre of Greece, and on their positioning among other labour organizations. The last piece in this volume is by Pothiti Hantzaroula, entitled ‘Children’s Domestic Labour: Intimate Relations, Family Politics and the Construction of Identity of Domestic Workers in Interwar Greece’. Relying mainly on oral testimonies, Hantzaroula brings a neglected yet important group of workers into the research agenda. Domestic workers’ lives have been gaining attention in global labour historiography and also in Greek and Turkish labour history. Hantzaroula discerns intermingled labour and family relations, tainted with intimacy, for child and mainly female domestic servants in interwar Greece. It is our hope through this volume to facilitate an expansion and deepening of the new Ottoman, Turkish and Greek labour history. We are convinced that only after achieving such an expansion can truly comparative perspectives be pursued. This volume, and especially this

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historiographical essay, should be seen as an effort to prepare the ground for future comparative work. Leda Papastefanaki is Associate Professor of Economic and Social History in the Department of History-Archaeology, University of Ioannina. She is Collaborating Faculty Member at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/Foundation for Research and Technology. Her monographs in Greek are: Ergasia, technologia kai fylo stin elliniki viomichania: I klostoyfantourgia tou Peiraia (1870–1940 [Labour, Technology and Gender in Greek Industry: The Textile Industry of Piraeus (1870–1940)] (Crete University Press, 2009) and I fleva tis gis: Ta metalleia tis Elladas, 19os– 20os aionas [The Veins of the Earth: The Mines of Greece, Nineteenth– Twentieth Century] (Vivliorama, 2017). Her research interests focus on the social and economic history of industrialization and labour in the Mediterranean context in the nineteenth to twentieth century, gender history and Jewish history. She has published articles on these issues in English, French and Greek and has co-edited volumes and special sections in academic journals. M. Erdem Kabadayı is Associate Professor of Economic History and History of Economic Thought at Koç University, Istanbul. The economic and labour history of the Ottoman Empire have been central to his research agenda. Since 2016 as the principal investigator of UrbanOccupationsOETR, an ERC StG Project (urbanoccupations. ku.edu.tr), he is pursuing his academic career further as an economic historian focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey by using geospatial humanities methods.

Notes  1. Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, Prolegomena for a Global Labour History (Amsterdam: IISH, 1999).   2. Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History, Studies in Global Social History 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 3–6. For a detailed discussion of the development of global labour history, see Marcel van der Linden, ‘The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History’, International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012), 57–76. The other contributions to the scholarly controversy under the heading ‘Defining Global Labor History’ in the same volume of the same journal introduced by Carolyn A. Brown, ‘Introduction’, International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012), 54–56, are also extremely useful as an assessment of the field in 2012. For a recent evaluation and also forecast for the future development of global labour history, see

Introduction 27

  3.

 4.

 5.

  6.

 7.

Leo Lucassen, ‘Working Together: New Directions in Global Labour History’, Journal of Global History 11(1) (2016), 66–87. The conference was organized by M. Erdem Kabadayı with the help of Kate Elizabeth Creasey at Istanbul Bilgi University, 18–20 November 2011. For a detailed report about its goals and individual contributions, see M. Erdem Kabadayı and Kate Elizabeth Creasey, ‘Working in the Ottoman Empire and in Turkey: Ottoman and Turkish Labor History within a Global Perspective’, International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012), 187–200. On historiographical accounts of Greek economic and social history, see Christos Hadziiossif, ‘To ergo tou Nikou Svoronou kai i elliniki istoriografia: Peninta chronia apokliseon kai sygkliseon’, Synchrona Themata 38 (1989), 24–33; Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘Anazitontas tous ylikous orous tis oikonomikis kathysterisis: Oikonomiki kai Koinoniki Istoria tis Elladas kata ta proima nea chronia’, in Synantiseis tis ellinikis me ti galliki istoriografia apo ti Metapolitefsi eos simera, ed. Vangelis Karamanolakis, Maria Couroucli and Triantafyllos Sklavenitis (Athens: École Française d’Athènes – Ethniko Idryma Erevnon – Etaireia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, periodiko Mnemon, 2015), 127–40; Eleftheria Zei, ‘I meleti tou koinonikou apo ti Gallia stin Ellada sti Metapolitefsi: Koinoniki Istoria i Koinoniologia?’, in Karamanolakis, Couroucli and Sklavenitis, Synantiseis, 201–10. On specific accounts of rural history, see Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘I istoria tou agrotikou kosmou apo ton Mesopolemo os simera: Akyroseis kai metatopiseis’, in Istoriografia tis neoteris kai synchronis Elladas, 1833–2002, vol. 2, ed. Paschalis Kitromilides and Triantafyllos Sklavenitis (Athens: Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2004), 201–20; Evgenia Bournova, ‘I elliniki istoriografia apenanti stin agrotiki metarrythmisi’, in Kitromilides and Sklavenitis, Istoriografia, vol. 2, 373–87; on industrial history, see Christina Agriantoni and Evrydiki Sifnaios, ‘Oikonomiki kai koinoniki istoria, viomichaniki istoria: Anoichta monopatia’, in Kitromilides and Sklavenitis, Istoriografia, vol. 2, 519–30; on accounts of business and maritime history, see Maria Christina Chatziioannou, ‘Istoriografikes prosengiseis mias diethnopoiimenis drastiriotitas: To emporio (18os–19os aionas)’, in Kitromilides and Sklavenitis, Istoriografia, vol. 2, 407–23; Maria Christina Chatziioannou, ‘When the History of Merchant Houses Met Business History: A Comparative Approach’, in ‘La Grèce et l’histoire des enterprises’, special issue, Enterprises et Histoire 63 (2011), 53–65; Gelina Harlaftis, ‘I naftiliaki istoria “en plo kai yp’ atmon”, in Kitromilides and Sklavenitis, Istoriografia, vol. 2, 425–45; Gelina Harlaftis, ‘International Business of Southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, 18th Century: Sources, Methods and Interpretive Issues’, in Dove va la storia economica? Metodi e prospettive. Secc. XIII–XVIII – Where Is Economic History Going? Methods and Prospects from the 13th to the 18th Centuries, Proceedings of ‘Quarantaduesima Settimana di Studi’ (18–22 April 2010), ed. Francesco Ammannati (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2011), 389–418; Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, ‘Epicheirimatikotita’, in I anaptyxi tis ellinikis oikonomias ton 19o aiona (1830– 1914), ed. Kostas Kostis and Socrates Petmezas (Athens: Alexandreia, 2006), 463–96. Nicolas G. Svoronos, Le commerce de Salonique au XVIIIe siècle, preface by Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956); Greek translation: Nikos G. Svoronos, To emporio tis Thessalonikis tou 18o aiona, preface by Ernest Labrousse, trans. Spyros Asdrachas et al. (Athens: Themelio, 1996). Gilles Grivaud, ‘Semer et cueillir’, in Byzantina et Moderna: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Hélène Antoniadis-Bibicou, ed. Gilles Grivaud and Socrates Petmezas (Athens: Alexandreia, 2007), 467–76; Petmezas, ‘Anazitontas tous ylikous orous’, 129–30. Spyros Asdrachas, ed., I oikonomiki domi ton valkanikon choron sta chronia tis othomanikis kyriarchias, 15os–19os aionas (Athens: Melissa, 1979). The volume included translated articles by twenty-one historians of the Balkans and the Mediterranean, among them four Turks (Ömer Lütfi Barkan, Bistra A. T⁀svetkova, Sencer Divitçioğlu, H.H. Stahl, St. S¸tefanescu, D. Mioc, H. Chircă, Ligor Mile, Hélène Antoniadis-Bibicou, Nikolai Todorov,

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Traian Stoianovich, José Gentil da Silva, Arno Mehlan, Jorjo Tadic´, Nikos G. Svoronos, Vassilis Panayotopoulos, İlhan Tekeli, Halil İnalcık, L⁀ iubrn Berov, Gabriel Baer, Giorgos Veloudis). The introduction of this volume was also published in English; see Spyros I. Asdrachas, ‘Problems of Economic History of the Period of Ottoman Domination in Greece’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 6(2) (1979), 5–37.  8. Vassilis Panayotopoulos et al., Eksynchronismos kai viomichaniki epanastasi sta Valkania ton 19o aiona, trans. Ch. Agriantoni et al. (Athens: Themelio, 1980). The volume includes articles by Klaus-Detlev Grothusen, José Gentil da Silva, Hermann Gross, Juri Petrosian, Peter F. Sugar, Maria Todorova, Valentin Georgescu, Nikolai Todorov, Traian Stoianovich, Nikola Vuco, Danica Milic´, V. Panayotopoulos, Paul Dumont, Vera Kazarkova, Irwin T. Sanders and Mehmet Genç.  9. Économies Méditerranéennes. Équilibres et Intercommunications (XIIIe–XIXe siècles): Actes du IIe Colloque Internationale d’Histoire (Athènes, 18–25 septembre 1983), 3 vols (Athens: Centre de Recherche Néohellénique/Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1985). 10. See the critical review of the conference Économies Méditerranéennes by Kostas Kostis, ‘Mesogeios kai oikonomies’, Ta Historica 3(6) (1986), 452–62, especially 453–54; Petmezas, ‘Anazitontas tous ylikous orous’, 137–38. 11. Neoelliniki poli: Othomanikes klironomies kai elliniko kratos, Proceedings of the International Conference, Athens–Hermoupolis, 26–30 September 1984, 2 vols (Athens: Etaireia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, 1985). 12. See, mainly, his works: Spyros I. Asdrachas, Michanismoi tis agrotikis oikonomias stin Tourkokratia (15os–16os ai.) (Athens: Themelio, 1976); idem, Elliniki Koinonia kai Oikonomia, 18os kai 19os ai. (Athens: Ermis, 1982); idem, Oikonomia kai Nootropies (Athens: Ermis, 1988); idem, ‘Le surplus rural dans les régions de la Méditerranée Orientale: Les Mécanismes’, in Économies Méditerranéennes, vol. 2, 29–57. 13. See mainly Socrates Petmezas, I elliniki agrotiki oikonomia kata to 19o aiona (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2003); idem, Prolegomena stin istoria tis ellinikis agrotikis oikonomias tou mesopolemou (Athens: Alexandreia, 2012); idem, ‘Rural Macedonia from Ottoman to Greek Rule, 1900–1920: Bridging the Gap’, in Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean, ed. Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kechriotis (Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2010), 355–94; idem, ‘Agriculture and Economic Development in Greece, 1870–1973’, in Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe since 1870, ed. Pedro Lains and Vicente Pinilla (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 353–74. 14. Christina Agriantoni, Oi aparches tis ekviomichanisis stin Ellada ton 19o aiona (Athens: Istoriko Archeio – Emporiki Trapeza tis Ellados, 1986); Christos Hadziiossif, I giraia selini: I viomichania stin elliniki oikonomia, 1930–1940 (Athens: Themelio, 1993). 15. Socrates Petmezas, ‘Recherches sur l’économie et les finances des villages du Pélion, région d’industries rurales, ca. 1750–1850’ (Ph.D. dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1989); idem, ‘Patterns of Protoindustrialization in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern Thessaly’, Journal of European Economic History 19(3) (1990), 575–603; Spyros I. Asdrachas et al., Elliniki oikonomiki istoria, 15os–19os aionas, vol. 1 (Athens: PIOP, 2003); English translation: Spyros I. Asdrachas et al., Greek Economic History, 15th–19th Centuries, vol. 1 (Athens: Piraeus Group Bank Cultural Foundation, 2007). 16. Asdrachas et al., Elliniki oikonomiki istoria, 357–422. 17. Petmezas, ‘Recherches’, 606–7, 689–91; idem, ‘Patterns of Protoindustrialization’; Vassilis Panayotopoulos, Plithysmos kai oikismoi tis Peloponnisou 13os–18os aionas (Athens: Emporiki Trapeza tis Ellados – Istoriko Archeio, 1985). 18. Spyros I. Asdrachas et al., Elliniki oikonomiki istoria, 15os–19os aionas, vol. 2 (Athens: PIOP, 2003); English translation: Spyros I. Asdrachas et al., Greek Economic History, 15th–19th Centuries, vol. 2 (Athens: Piraeus Group Bank Cultural Foundation, 2007);

Introduction 29

see also Spyros I. Asdrachas, ‘An Introduction to Greek Economic History, Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries: Fields of Observation and Methodological Issues’, The Historical Review / La Revue Historique 2 (2005), 7–30. 19. Vassilis Dimitriadis, I Kentriki kai Dytiki Makedonia kata ton Evligia Tselempi (Thessaloniki: Etaireia Makedonikon Spoudon, 1973). 20. Vassilis Dimitriadis, ed., Deltion Tourkikis Vivliografias (Thessaloniki: Etaireia Makedonikon Spoudon, Idryma Meleton Chersonisou tou Aimou, Tmima Tourkikon Spoudon, 1967–71). 21. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Ai istorikai dimografikai erevnai kai i othomaniki istoria’, Deltion Tourkikis Vivliografias 7 (1969), 5–20; Halil İnalcık, ‘Adaletnameler: Kanones aponomis dikaiosynis’, Deltion Tourkikis Vivliografias 8 (1969), 21–56. 22. Vassilis Dimitriadis, Topografia tis Thessalonikis kata tin epochi tis Tourkokratias, 1430– 1912 (Thessaloniki: Etaireia Makedonikon Spoudon, 1983); idem, I Thessaloniki tis parakmis: I elliniki koinotita tis Thessalonikis kata ti dekaetia tou 1830 me vasi ena othomaniko katasticho apografis tou plithismou (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 1998); see also Vassilis Dimitriadis, Bir Evin Hikayesi: Selanik’teki Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’ün Evi ve Ailesi Hakkında Türkçe ve Yunanca Belgeler (Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu, 2016). 23. On the work of Elizabeth Zachariadou with the many and prestigious international publications, see György Hazai, ed., ‘Melanges en l’honneur d’Elizabeth A. Zachariadou’, special issue, Archivum Ottomanicum 23 (2005–2006); Pinelopi Stathi, ‘Gia ti zoi kai to ergo tis Elisavet Zachariadou’, Ta Historica 23(45) (2006), 496–502. 24. John C. Alexander, Toward a History of Post-Byzantine Greece: The Ottoman Kanunnames for the Greek Lands, circa 1500–circa 1600 (Athens, 1985); on Alexander’s work, see also the Festschrift edited by his students: Elias Kolovos et al., eds, The Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, the Greek Lands: Toward a Social and Economic History; Studies in Honor of John C. Alexander (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2007). 25. For overviews on the Ottoman historiography in Greece, see Ioannis Giannopoulos, ‘I exelixis ton tourkologikon spoudon kai i anagki kalliergeias afton en Elladi’, Mnemon 1 (1971), 5–22; Ioannis Theocharidis, ‘I anaptyxi ton tourkologikon spoudon stin Ellada’, Dodone 17(1) (1988), 19–61; Evangelia Balta, ‘Oi othomanikes spoudes stin Ellada’, Ta Historica 16(31) (1999), 455–60; idem, ‘Oi othomanikes spoudes sti neoelliniki istoriografia’, in Istoriografia tis neoteris kai synchronis Elladas, 1833–2002, vol. 1, ed. Kitromilides and Sklavenitis (Athens: Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2004), 260–71; idem, Ottoman Studies and Archives in Greece, Analecta Isisiana LXX (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2003). 26. Michael Ursinus, ‘Ottoman Studies Triumphant: The Success Story of Rethymno, Crete’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 40 (2016), 89–98. 27. Paul Wittek, I genesi tis Othomanikis Aftokratorias, trans. Evangelia Balta (Athens: Poreia, 1988); Halil İnalcık, I Othomaniki Aftokratoria. I klasiki epochi: 1300–1600, trans. Michalis Kokolakis (Athens: Alexandreia, 1995); Suraiya Faroqhi, Koultoura kai kathimerini zoi stin othomaniki aftokratoria apo ton Mesaiona os tis arches tou 20ou aiona, trans. Katerina Papakonstantinou (Athens: Exantas, 2000); idem, Prosengizontas tin othomaniki istoria: Eisagogi stis piges, trans. Kostas Kampouridis (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2006); idem, I Othomaniki Aftokratoria kai o kosmos gyro tis, trans. Giannis Karachristos, ed. Eleni Gara (Athens: Ekdoseis tou Eikostou Protou, 2009); Erik Jan Zürcher, Synchroni istoria tis Tourkias, trans. Vangelis Kechriotis (Athens: Alexandreia, 2004); Donald Quataert, I Othomaniki Aftokratoria: Oi teleftaioi aiones, 1700–1922, trans. Marinos Sariyannis (Athens: Alexandreia, 2006); Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, eds, Oikonomiki kai koinoniki istoria tis Othomanikis Aftokratorias, 1300–1600, trans. Marinos Sariyannis (Athens: Alexandreia, 2008); Cemal Kafadar, Anamesa se dio kosmous: I kataskevi tou othomanikou kratous, trans. Antonis Anastasopoulos (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 2008); Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, eds, Oikonomiki kai

30

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

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koinoniki istoria tis Othomanikis Aftokratorias, 1600–1914, trans. Marina Dimitriadou, ed. Marinos Sariyannis (Athens: Alexandreia, 2011). The volume by S¸ükrü Ilıcak and Marina Angelopoulou, Ellines kai Evraioi ergates sti Thessaloniki ton Neotourkon (Ioannina: Isnafi, 2004) includes articles by S¸ükrü Ilıcak and Marina Angelopoulou on Greek and Jewish workers in late Ottoman Thessaloniki; the volume edited by Kostas Lapavitsas, Ischnos kapitalismos: I Makedonia kata tin ysteri othomaniki periodo, trans. Marina Dimitriadou (Naoussa: Novoli, 2010) includes articles by D. Quataert, S¸. Pamuk, S. Petmezas, J. Williamson and K. Lapavitsas on the economic history of Macedonia in the late Ottoman period. In some circles this view prevailed up until the 1990s; see Salahi Ramadan Sonyel, Minorities and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Printing House, 1993) for an example. Cos¸kun Çakır, ‘Türkiye’de İktisat Tarihi Çalıs¸malarının Tarihi Üzerine Bir Deneme / Review of the Studies on Turkish Economic History in the Republican Period’, Türkiye Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 1(1) (2003), 7–63. He studied in Strasbourg between 1928 and 1931; for a biography and bibliography of Barkan, see Halil Sahillioğlu, ‘Ömer Lütfi Barkan’, İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 41(1–4) (1985), 3–38. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Vers un renouveau de l’historie ottomane’ (Conférences d’Athènes, Fakülteler Matbaası, Istanbul University, n.d.). This offprint is not dated yet; in the literature it has been dated to 1952 or 1953. Barkan has integrated parts of this talk into his ‘Essai sur les données statistiques des registres de recensement dans l’Empire ottoman aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1(1) (1957), 9–36. We will not comment on the impressive and overwhelming oeuvre of İnalcık here. For a recent account of his academic biography, see Selim Aslantas¸, ‘Halil İnalcık’ın Akademik Biyografisi’, in Halil İnalcık Armag˘anı I, ed. Tas¸kın Takıs¸ and Sunay Aksoy (Ankara: DoğuBatı, 2009), 11–39. Here we will not offer an overview of Faroqhi’s work. Three festschrifts (two in 2008 and one in 2011) were published to honour her work: Vera Costantini and Markus Koller, eds, Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Onur Yıldırım, ed., Osmanlı’nın Pes¸inde Bir Yas¸am: Suraiya Faroqhi’ye Armag˘an (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2008); Eleni Gara, M. Erdem Kabadayı, and Christoph K. Neumann, eds, Popular Protest and Political Participation in the Ottoman Empire: Studies in Honor of Suraiya Faroqhi (Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi, 2011). All three festschrifts include bibliographical information to position her work in Ottoman Studies. Here we would only like to highlight a monograph of hers, Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Contributors to this volume include Halil İnalcık, Suraiya Faroqhi, Huri İslamoğlu, S¸evket Pamuk, Mehmet Genç, Murat Çizakça and Donald Quataert. İslamoğlu’s recent historiographical review on the economic history of the broader region could be consulted for further developments and turning points of the field: Huri İslamoğlu, ‘Economic History in Middle Eurasia: Beyond Histories of Stagnation and Deficiencies’, in Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History, ed. Francesco Boldizzoni and Pat Hudson (London: Routledge, 2016), 670–720. For evaluations of the impact of Quataert’s oeuvre on Ottoman economic and social history, see the special section (with eight articles including a lecture by Quataert) of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, introduced by Kent F. Schull, ‘The Impact of Donald Quataert’s “History from Below” on Ottoman and Turkish Studies’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34(1)

Introduction 31

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

(2014), 126–28; and Selim Karahasanoğlu and Deniz Cenk Demir, eds, History from Below: A Tribute in Memory of Donald Quataert (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2016). Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution, Cambridge Middle East Library 30 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Donald Quataert, ed., Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). This review does not attempt to list or review major contributors or works of Ottoman economic and social history. Therefore it cannot be of an exhaustive nature. However, Edhem Eldem’s prolific, well-connected and multilingual scholarship work must be mentioned here, especially regarding the internationalization of the scholarship. Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas, eds, Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey (London: Routledge, 2005); Thalia Dragonas and Faruk Birtek, eds, Ellada kai Tourkia: Politis kai ethnos-kratos (Athens: Alexandreia, 2006); Anna Frangoudaki and Çağlar Keyder, eds, Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey: Encounters with Europe, 1850–1950 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007); Çağlar Keyder and Anna Frangoudaki, eds, Ellada kai Tourkia: Poreies eksynchronismou; Oi amfisimes scheseis tous me tin Evropi, 1850–1950 (Athens: Alexandreia, 2008); Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Çağlar Keyder, eds, Spatial Conceptions of the Nation: Modernizing Geographies in Greece and Turkey, International Library of Historical Studies 66 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Çağlar Keyder, eds, Ellada kai Tourkia: Eksynchronistikes geografies kai chorikes antilipseis tou ethnous (Athens: Alexandreia, 2012). A Turkish translation has been published recently: Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Çağlar Keyder, eds, Mekan ve Millet: Yunanistan ve Türkiye’nin Cog˘rafyalarının Olus¸umu (Istanbul: Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2018). Vangelis Kechriotis was based at Boğaziçi University and influential in the organization of a monthly Greek–Turkish seminar between 2004 and 2007, co-organized by the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center, the Department of History of the Boğaziçi University, and the Alpha Bank Historical Archives, which resulted in the publication of Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kechriotis, eds, Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean (Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2010). See also Vangelis Kechriotis, ‘Protecting the City’s Interest: The Greek-Orthodox and the Conflict between Municipal and Vilayet Authorities in Izmir (Smyrna) in the Second Constitutional Period’, in ‘The Late Ottoman Port Cities and Their Inhabitants: Subjectivity, Urbanity, and Conflicting Orders’, ed. Malte Fuhrmann and Vangelis Kechriotis, special issue, Mediterranean Historical Review 24(2) (2009), 207–21. Evangelia Balta has been a forerunner in working on both sides of the Aegean and promoting archival research on Ottoman documentation as well as conducting Ottoman history in Greece. For her extensive work, which we cannot list individually in this short introduction, see her generous personal webpage, http://www.evangeliabalta.com. On theoretical and methodological considerations for historiographies on both shores of the Aegean, see Christos Hadziiossif, ‘Common Past, Comparative History and Regional Universalism in Greek and Ottoman Historiography’, in Baruh and Kechriotis, Economy and Society, 527–39. On recent historiographical trends in Ottoman Studies in Greece, see also Elias Kolovos, ‘I othomanologiki istoriografia stin Ellada: Prosengiseis kai taseis’, paper presented at the workshop organized in the memory of Vangelis Kechriotis Diastavroseis: Metaxy Elladas kai Tourkias, metaxy istorias kai politikis (Athens, 28 September 2016). On a recent discussion about modern Greek history and Ottoman Studies in Greece, see Olga Katsiardi-Hering and Vaso Seirinidou, eds, Neoelliniki Istoria kai Othomanikes Spoudes: Mia apopeira chartografisis, Proceedings of the Symposium (Athens, 8 April 2016) (Athens: Tmima Istorias kai Archaiologias, Tomeas Istorias tou Ethnikou kai Kapodistriakou Panepistimiou Athinon, 2017).

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44. Christos Hadziiossif, Synasos: Istoria enos topou choris istoria (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2005). A Turkish translation is being prepared. 45. On the formation of the Greek Orthodox Christian refugees’ identity and memory, see Haris Exertzoglou, ‘I istoria tis prosfygikis mnimis’, in To 1922 kai oi prosfyges: Mia nea matia, ed. Antonis Liakos (Athens: Nefeli, 2011), 191–201; idem, ‘Children of Memory: Narratives of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Making of Refugee Identity in Interwar Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34(2) (2016), 343–66; Emilia Salvanou, ‘The First World War and the Refugee Crisis: Historiography and Memory in the Greek Context’, Historein 16 (2017), 120–38; idem, I sygkrotisi tis prosfygikis mnimis: To parelthon os istoria kai praktiki (Athens: Nefeli, 2018). 46. Sia Anagnostopoulou, Mikra Asia, 19os ai.–1919: Oi ellinorthodoxes koinotites; Apo to Millet ton Romion sto elliniko ethnos (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 1998); idem, The Passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Nation-States: A Long and Difficult Process; The Greek Case (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2004). 47. Paraskevas Konortas, Othomanikes theoriseis gia to Oikoumeniko Patriarcheio (Athens: Alexandreia, 1998). On the relations between Ottoman power and the Orthodox Church and on the tensions among populations forming the millet of Rum, see also Paraskevas Matalas, Ethnos kai orthodoxia: Oi peripeteies mias schesis; Apo to ‘elladiko’ sto voulgariko schisma (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2002); Dimitris Stamatopoulos, Metarrythmisi kai ekkosmikefsi: Pros mia anasynthesi tis istorias tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou ton 19o aiona (Athens: Alexandreia, 2003); Andreas Lyberatos, Oikonomia, politiki kai ethniki ideologia: I diamorfosi ton ethnikon kommaton sti Filippoupoli tou 19ou aiona (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2009). 48. Sophia Laiou, ‘Diverging Realities of a Christian Vakıf, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, Turkish Historical Review 3(1) (2012), 1–18; idem, ‘Between Pious Generosity and Faithful Service to the Ottoman State: The Vakıf of Nikolaos Mavrogenis, End of the Eighteenth Century’, Turkish Historical Review 6(2) (2015), 151–74; Elias Kolovos, ed., Monastiria, oikonomia kai politiki apo tous mesaionikous stous neoterous chronous (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2011). 49. Sophia Laiou, I Samos kata tin othomaniki periodo, 16os–18os ai.: Ptyches tou koinonikou kai oikonomikou viou (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press-Vivliothiki Istorikon Meleton, 2002); Elias Kolovos, I nisiotiki koinonia tis Androu sto othomaniko plaisio: Proti prosengisi me vasi ta othomanika engrafa tis Kaïreiou Vivliothikis (Andros: Kaïreios Vivliothiki, 2006); idem, Opou in kipos… I mesogeiaki nisiotiki oikonomia tis Androu symfona me to othomaniko ktimatologio tou 1670 (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis and Kaïreios Vivliothiki, 2017); Eleni Gara, ‘Çuha for the Janissaries – Velençe for the Poor: Competition for Raw Material and Work-Force between Salonica and Veria, 1600–1650’, in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 121–52; Antonis Anastasopoulos, ed., Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire: Halcyon Days in Crete V; A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 10–12 January 2003 (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2005); Gelina Harlaftis and Sophia Laiou, ‘Ottoman State Policy in Mediterranean Trade and Shipping, c.1780–c.1820: The Rise of the Greek-Owned Ottoman Merchant Fleet’, in Networks of Power in Modern Greece, ed. Mark Mazower (London: Hurst, 2008), 1–44. 50. Irini Renieri, ‘Andronikio: Ena kappadokiko chorio kata ton 19o aiona’, Mnemon 15 (1993), 9–67; idem, ‘Michanismoi sygkrotisis tou noikokyriou: Kappadokia, 19os aionas; I periptosi mias tourkorthodoxis koinotitas’, Ta Historica 30 (1999), 17–46; idem, ‘Household Formation in 19th-Century Central Anatolia: The Case Study of a TurkishSpeaking Orthodox Christian Community’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 34(3) (2002), 441–63.

Introduction 33

51. Phokion Kotzageorgis and Demetrios Papastamatiou, ‘Wealth Accumulation in an Urban Context: The Profile of the Muslim Rich of Thessaloniki in the Eighteenth Century on the Basis of Probate Inventories’, Turkish Historical Review 5 (2014), 165–99; Demetris Papastamatiou, Wealth Distribution, Social Stratification and Material Culture in an Ottoman Metropolis: Thessaloniki According to the Probate Inventories of the Muslim Court, 1761–1770 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2017); Phokion Kotzageorgis, Proimi othomaniki poli: Epta periptoseis apo ton notiovalkaniko choro; Adrianoupoli, Serres, Kastoria, Trikala, Larisa, Thessaloniki, Ioannina (Athens: Vivliorama, 2019). 52. Antonis Anastasopoulos, ed., Political Initiatives ‘From the Bottom Up’ in the Ottoman Empire: Halcyon Days in Crete VII; A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 9–11 January 2009 (Herakleion: Crete University Press, 2012). 53. Marinos Sariyannis, ‘Ottoman Critics of Society and State, Fifteenth to Early Eighteenth Centuries: Toward a Corpus for the Study of Ottoman Political Thought’, Archivum Ottomanicum 25 (2008), 127–50; idem, ‘Ruler and State, State and Society in Ottoman Political Thought’, Turkish Historical Review 4 (2013), 83–117; idem, ‘Ottoman Ideas on Monarchy before the Tanzimat Reforms: Toward a Conceptual History of Ottoman Political Notions’, Turcica 47 (2016), 33–72. 54. Edhem Eldem, Vangelis Kechriotis, and Sophia Laiou, eds, The Economic and Social Development of the Port-Cities of the Southern Black Sea Coast, Late 18th–Beginning of the 20th Century (Corfu: Black Sea Project Working Papers, 2017); Edhem Eldem and Sophia Laiou, eds, Istanbul and the Black Sea Coast: Shipping and Trade, 1770–1920 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2018). 55. Yannis Papadopoulos ‘I metanastefsi apo tin Othomaniki Aftokratoria stis IPA: Oi ellinikes koinotites tis Amerikis kai i alytrotiki politiki tis Elladas’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Panteion University, 2008); idem, ‘From the Ottoman Empire to the United States of America: Identities and Identifications among Greek-Orthodox Immigrants before WWI; Balkan Nationalisms and Nostalgic Ottomanism’, in Socioeconomic and Political Developments in the Greek-Orthodox Community in the Ottoman Empire and Emigration from Anatolia and Cyprus, 19th Century–1930, ed. Sia Anagnostopoulou (Princeton, NJ: Gorgias Press, forthcoming). 56. Efi Canner, ‘Transcultural Encounters: Discourses on Women’s Rights and Feminist Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Turkey from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Interwar Period’, Journal of Women’s History 28(3) (2016), 66–92; idem, ‘From “the Sick”, “the Blind”, and “the Crippled” to the Nation of “Toiling People”: Visions of the Poor in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic’, in Wealth in the Ottoman and Post Ottoman Balkans: A Socio-Economic History, ed. Evguenia Davidova (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 117–36. 57. Onur Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934, Middle East Studies: History, Politics, and Law (New York: Routledge, 2006). 58. Elçin Macar, Cumhuriyet döneminde İstanbul Rum Patrikhanesi (Istanbul: I˙leti¸sim, 2003); idem, İstanbul’un yok olmus¸ iki cemaati: Doğu ritli Katolik Rumlar ve Bulgarlar (Istanbul: I˙leti¸sim, 2002). 59. Ays¸e Ozil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (London: Routledge, 2013). 60. Merih Erol, Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015). 61. Foti Benlisoy, Kahramanlar, kurbanlar, direnis¸çiler: Trakya ve Anadolu’daki Yunan ordusunda propaganda, grev ve isyan (1919–1922) (Istanbul: Istos, 2014). For the publishing house Istos, see http://istospoli.com. Among other important contributions to the field, Istos also published works by Evangelia Balta, such as The Exchange of Populations: Historiography and Refugee Memory (Istanbul: Istos, 2014) and more recently a

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co-authored study, Evangelia Balta and Aytek Soner Alpan, Muhacirnâme-Karamanlı Muhacirler İçin S¸iirin Sedası (Istanbul: Istos, 2016). 62. See, among others, Benjamin C. Fortna et al., eds, State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey: Orthodox and Muslims, 1830–1945 (Oxon: SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, 2013). 63. ‘I istoria tou ergatikou kinimatos’, Ta Historica 1 (1983), 209–11; for the historiography of the Greek working-class movement, see Antonis Liakos, ‘Problems on the Formation of the Greek Working Class’, Etudes Balkaniques 2 (1988), 43–54; idem, ‘I istoriografia tou ellinikou ergatikou kinimatos. Simeioseis gia mia episkopisi’, Synchrona Themata 35–37 (1988), 161–70. 64. Yannis Kordatos, Istoria tou ellinikou ergatikou kinimatos (Athens, 1931); Kostis Moskoff, Eisagogika stin istoria tou kinimatos tis ergatikis taxis: I diamorfosi tis ethnikis kai koinonikis syneidisis stin Ellada (Athens: Kostaniotis, 1988); Giorgos Koukoules, To elliniko syndikalistiko kinima kai oi xenes epemvaseis (1944–1948) (Athens: Odysseas, 1995). 65. George B. Leon, ‘The Greek Labor Movement and the Bourgeois State, 1910–1920’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 4(4) (1978), 5–28; Stavros Moudopoulos, ‘O nomos 281/1914 gia ta epangelmatika somateia kai i epidrasi tou stin exelixi tou syndikalistikou kinimatos’, in Venizelismos kai astikos eksynchronismos, ed. Giorgos Mavrogordatos and Christos Hadziiossif (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 1992), 225–53; Antonis Liakos, Ergasia kai politiki stin Ellada tou mesopolemou: To Diethnes Grafeio Ergasias kai i anadysi ton koinonikon thesmon (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1993). 66. See Christos Konstantinopoulos, I mathiteia stis kompanies ton chtiston tis Peloponnisou (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias, 1987); Michalis Riginos, Morfes paidikis ergasias sti viomichania kai ti viotechnia, 1870–1940 (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias, 1995); idem, ‘Formes du travail des enfants dans l’industrie et l’artisanat en Grèce (XIXe–XXe siècles)’, in Enfants au travail: Attitudes des élites en Europe occidentale et méditerranéenne aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Roland Caty (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2002), 59–70; Maria Papathanassiou, Megalonontas ston oreino choro: paidia kai paidiki ilikia sto Krokyleio Doridas tis protes dekaeties tou 20ou aiona (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias, 2003); idem, ‘Aspects of Childhood in Rural Greece: Children in a Mountain Village (1900–1940)’, The History of the Family 9 (2004), 325–45. 67. Petros Pizanias, Oi ftochoi ton poleon: I technognosia tis epiviosis stin Ellada to mesopolemo (Athens: Themelio, 1993); Serafeim Seferiadis, ‘Gia ti sygkrotisi tis ergatikis taxis stin Ellada (1870–1936): Merikoi provlimatismoi pano se ena palio thema’, Elliniki Epitheorisi Politikis Epistimis 6 (1995), 9–78; Christos Hadziiossif, ‘Class Structure and Class Antagonism in Late Nineteenth Century Greece’, in Greek Society in the Making, 1863–1913, ed. Philip Carabott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 3–17. 68. Alexandros Dagkas, Symvoli stin erevna gia tin oikonomiki kai koinoniki exelixi tis Thessalonikis: Oikonomiki domi kai koinonikos katamerismos tis ergasias, 1912–1940 (Thessaloniki: Epangelmatiko Epimelitirio Thessalonikis, 1998); idem, Recherches sur l’histoire sociale de la Grèce du Nord: Le mouvement des ouvriers du tabac, 1918–1928 (Paris: Association Pierre Belon, 2003); idem, Le mouvement social dans le Sud-Est Européen pendant le XXe siècle: Questions de classe, questions de culture (Thessaloniki: Editions Épicenter, 2008). 69. For historiographical accounts on gender history, see Efi Avdela, Le genre entre classe et nation: Essai d’historiographie grecque, preface by Michelle Perrot (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2006), 13–25; Eleni Fournaraki and Yannis Yannitsiotis, ‘Three Decades of Women’s and Gender History in Greece: An Account’, Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 7 (2013), 162–73; Nikolaos Papadogiannis, ‘Gender in Modern Greek Historiography’, Historein 16(1–2)

Introduction 35

70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

(2017), 74–101. For historiographical accounts on labour and gender, see Dimitra Lampropoulou, Antonis Liakos, and Yannis Yiannitsiotis, ‘Work and Gender in Greek Historiography during the Last Three Decades’, in Professions and Social Identity: New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society, ed. Berteke Waaldijk (Pisa: Plus – Pisa University Press, 2006), 1–14; Leda Papastefanaki, ‘Labour in Economic and Social History and the Perspective of Gender in Greek Historiography’, in ‘Per una nuova storia del lavoro: Genere, economie, soggetti’, ed. Manuela Martini and Cristina Borderías, special issue, Genesis: Rivista della Societá Italiana delle Storiche XV(2) (2016), 59–83. Efi Avdela, Dimosioi ypalliloi genous thilykou: Katamerismos tis ergasias kata fyla ston dimosio tomea, 1908–1955 (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1990). Efi Avdela, ‘“To the Most Weak and Needy”: Women’s Protective Labor Legislation in Greece’, in Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1890–1920, ed. Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris and Jane Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 290–317; idem, Le genre entre classe et nation, 61–95; idem, ‘“Fysikos proorismos” kai o rolos tou kratous: Mia protasi gia tin ergasia ton gynaikon to 1940’, Ta Historica 16 (1992), 121–34. Efi Avdela, ‘O sosialismos ton “allon”: Taxikoi agones, ethnotikes sygkrouseis kai taftotites fylou sti meta-othomaniki Thessaloniki’, Ta Historica 18–19 (1993), 171–204; idem, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Gender in Post-Ottoman Thessaloniki’, in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in Peace and War, 1880–1930, ed. Billie Melman (London: Routledge, 1998), 421–38; idem, Le genre entre classe et nation, 131–51. Efi Avdela, ‘Amfisvitoumena noimata: Prostasia kai antistasi stis Ektheseis ton Epitheoriton Ergasias, 1914–1936’, Ta Historica 28–29 (1998), 171–202; idem, ‘Contested Meanings: Protection and Resistance in Labour Inspectors’ Reports in 20th c. Greece’, Gender & History 9(2) (1997), 310–32, citation on 311; idem, Le genre entre classe et nation, 97–129. Maria Kyriakidou, ‘Labour Law and Women Workers: A Case Study of Protective Legislation in Inter-war Greece’, European History Quarterly 32(4) (2002), 489–513. Zizi Salimpa, Gynaikes ergatries stin elliniki viomichania kai sti viotechnia (1870–1922) (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias, 2002). Leda Papastefanaki, ‘Opseis tis ergatikis egkatastasis ston Peiraia sti dekaetia tou 1930: Fylo, koinonikos katamerismos tis ergasias kai scheseis paragogis’, in Proceedings of the International Conference I poli sti synchroni epochi: Mesogeiakes kai valkanikes opseis (19os– 20os aionas) (Athens: Etaireia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, 2000), 473–89. Leda Papastefanaki, Ergasia, technologia kai fylo stin elliniki viomichania: I klostoyfantourgia tou Peiraia (1870–1940) (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2009), especially 245–79; idem, ‘Salaires, division sexuée du travail et hiérarchies sociales dans l’industrie textile grecque, 1912–1936’, Cahiers Balkaniques 45 (2018), 101–20. Leda Papastefanaki, I fleva tis gis: Ta metalleia tis Elladas, 19 os –20 os aionas (Athens: Vivliorama, 2017), 183–225; idem, ‘Family, Gender, and Labour in the Greek Mines, 1860–1940’, International Review of Social History (2019), 1–22. doi:10.1017/ S0020859019000580. Leda Papastefanaki, ‘To “patriko endiaferon” ton viomichanon kai i diacheirisi tis ergasias stin klostoyfantourgia Karella (Hermoupolis, proto miso tou 20ou aiona)’, in Syros kai Hermoupoli: Symvoles stin istoria tou nisiou, 15os–20os ai., ed. Christina Agriantoni and Dimitris Dimitropoulos (Athens: Institouto Neoellinikon Erevnon/E.I.E., 2008), 155–85; idem, ‘Katamerismoi ergasias kai politikes diacheirisis tis ergasias stis ellinikes poleis (teli 19ou–a´ dekaetia tou 20ou aiona)’, in Proceedings of the Conference I proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona: Allages kai anatropes (Athens: Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias, 2012), 145–66.

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80. Antonis Antoniou and Natasa Kefallinou, ‘Kommounistikes ritorikes gia ti gynaikeia ergasia: Oi kapnergatries stin apergia tou 1936 mesa apo to Rizospasti’, in (Anti)milontas stis vevaiotites: Fyla, anaparastaseis, ypokeimenikotites (Athens: OMIK, 2013), 115–34. 81. Dimitra Lampropoulou, Oikodomoi: Oi anthropoi pou echtisan tin Athina, 1950–1967 (Athens: Vivliorama, 2009). 82. Pothiti Hantzaroula, ‘The Status of Servants’ Labour in State Policy: Greece, 1870– 1960’, in Proceedings of the Servant Project, vol. I, ed. S. Pasleau and I. Schopp, with Raffaella Sarti (Liège: Éditions de l’Université de Liège, 2006), 225–46; idem, ‘The Dynamics of the Mistress–Servant Relationship’, in Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity, ed. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 379–408; idem, Smilevontas tin ypotagi: Oi emmisthes oikiakes ergatries stin Ellada to proto miso tou eikostou aiona (Athens: Papazisis, 2012). 83. Pothiti Hantzaroula, ‘Shame in the Narratives of Domestic Servants in Greece, 1920– 1945’, in Narratives of the Servant, ed. Regina Schulte and Pothiti Hantzaroula (Florence: European University Institute, 2001), 81–102. 84. Pothiti Hantzaroula, ‘Public Discourses on Sexuality and Narratives of Sexual Violence of Domestic Servants in Greece, 1880–1945’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 18(2) (2010), 283–310. 85. Pothiti Hantzaroula, ‘Perceptions of Work in Albanian Immigrants’ Testimonies and the Structure of Domestic Work in Greece’, in Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme, ed. Helma Lutz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 61–76; Efi Avdela et al., Episfalis ergasia, ‘gynaikaia ergasia’: Paremvasi me aformi tin Konstantina Kouneva (Athens: Nefeli-Historein, 2009). 86. Kostas Fountanopoulos, Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima sti Thessaloniki, 1908–1936: Ithiki oikonomia kai syllogiki drasi sto Mesopolemo (Athens: Nefeli, 2005). 87. Nikos Potamianos, ‘From the People to a Class: The Petite Bourgeoisie of Athens, 1901–1923’, in Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Cities, 1900–1923, ed. Andreas Lyberatos (Herakleion: Crete University Press and Institute for Mediterranean Studies, 2013), 133–45; idem, ‘O Syndesmos Syntechnion’, in Proceedings of the Conference I proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona; Allages kai anatropes (Athens: Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias, 2012), 75–91; idem, Oi noikokyraioi: Magazatores kai viotechnes stin Athina, 1880–1925 (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2015). 88. Nikos Potamianos, ‘Moral Economy? Popular Demands and State Intervention in the Struggle over Anti-Profiteering Laws in Greece, 1914–1925’, Journal of Social History 48(4) (2015), 803–15; idem, ‘The Discourse against “Shameful Profiteering” in Greece, 1914–1925: Notions of Exploitation, Anticapitalist Morality and the Concept of Moral Economy’, in Moralizing Capitalism, ed. Stefan Berger and Alexandra Przyrembel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 251–66. 89. Kostas Paloukis, ‘I organosi Archeio tou Marxismou (1919–1934): Koinonikoi agones, politiki organosi, ideologia kai politismikes praktikes sta ergatika stromata tis Elladas kata to proto miso tou 20ou aiona’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Crete, 2016). 90. Christos Hadziiossif, ‘Ot robstvo kŭm naemen trud’, in The Balkans: Modernization, Identities and Ideas; Studies in Honor of Prof. Nadia Danova [in Bulgarian], ed. Yura Konstantinova et al. (Sofia: Institute for Balkan Studies and Center of Thracology, 2011), 88–100; idem, ‘Apo ti douleia sti misthoti ergasia’, in Ta Valkania: Eksynchronismos, taftotites, idees. Syllogi keimenon pros timin tis kathigitrias Nadia Danova, ed. Andreas Lyberatos (Herakleion: Voulgariki Akadimia Epistimon – Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis KritisInstitouto Mesogeiakon Spoudon, 2014), 63–75. 91. On printers, see Christos Loukos, ‘Typografia kai typografoi: Athina, 1930–1990’, Mnemon 24 (2002), 307–26; idem, ‘Enas typografos stin Athina tou 20ou aiona: Prosopikes kai epangelmatikes diadromes’, Mnemon 26 (2004), 239–56; Athina

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Zizopoulou, ‘Typografoi kai ergates typou stin Athina ton 20o aiona: Sygkrotisi kai exelixi enos epangelmatikou chorou’ (Master’s thesis, University of Crete, 2006); idem, ‘I chartopoiia kai i chartoviomichania Aigiou, 1924–1968’, in Viomichanies chartou stin Ellada (19os–20os aionas), ed. Christos Loukos (Athens: Politistiko Idryma Omilou Peiraios, 2008), 79–108; idem, ‘Elliniki Chartopoiia Makedonias AE: I proti chartopoiia tis Thessalonikis, 1936–1990’, in Loukos, Viomichanies, 145–70; Asimakis Palaiologos, ‘Oi ergates Typou tis Patras meta ton V´ Pagkosmio Polemo: Fysiognomia, metavoles, praktikes’ (Master’s thesis, University of Ioannina, 2009); idem, ‘Oi technologikes allages stin paragogi efimeridon kai antiktypos tous stous ergates Typou: I periptosi tis Patras meta ton B´ Pagkosmio Polemo’, Mnemon 34 (2015), 125–59. On tobacco and cigarette workers, see: Thanassis Betas, ‘Syndikalismos kai ergatiki diamartyria sto metapolemiko Volo: To paradeigma tis kapnoviomichanias Matsangou’, En Volo 30 (2008), 68–75; idem, ‘Kapnoviomichania Matsangos en Volo, 1918–1972: Ergasia kai epiviosi sto Volo’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Thessaly, 2015); idem, ‘From the Tobacco Shop to the Cigarette Factory: Technological Changes, Gender and Surveillance in a Greek Cigarette Firm in the Early 20th Century’, Advances in Historical Studies 5 (2016), 49–62. 92. Maria Christina Chatziioannou, ‘Gia mia istoria tis syllogikotitas ton emporoüpallilon tis Athinas sto proto miso tou eikostou aiona: Erotimata kai syzitiseis’, in Morfes dimosias koinonikotitas stin Ellada tou 20ou aiona, ed. Efi Avdela, Haris Exertzoglou and Christos Lyrintizis (Rethymno: Panepistimio Kritis, 2015), 145–68; Nikos Potamianos, ‘Regulation and the Retailing Community: The Struggle Over the Establishment of the Holiday of Sunday in Greece, 1872–1925’, History of Retailing and Consumption 3(3) (2017), 168–83. 93. Potamianos, Oi noikokyraioi, 99–112, 231–37; Manuela Martini and Leda Papastefanaki, ‘Introduction: Des économies familiales adaptatives en temps de crise dans l’Europe méditerranéenne’, The Historical Revue / La Revue Historique 15 (2018), 9–22; Michalis A. Bardanis, ‘Family Business in the Brick and Tile Industry in Athens, 1900–1940’, The Historical Revue / La Revue Historique 15 (2018), 91–132; Dimitrios Kopanas, ‘Family and Labour in Corfu Manufacturing, 1920–1944’, The Historical Revue / La Revue Historique 15 (2018), 133–92. 94. See, for example, Katerina Korre-Zografou and Evdokia Olympitou, Anthropoi kai paradosiaka epangelmata sto Aigaio (Athens: Idryma Meizonos Ellinismou, 2003); Vasiliki Rokou, Ta vyrsodepseia ton Ioanninon: Apo to ergastirio sto ‘ergostasio’ tis viotechnikis polis (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2004); Evangeli Ntatsi, Ta isnafia mas ta vasilemena: Ta Giannina ton mastoron kai ton kalfadon (Athens: Mouseio Benaki – Ekdoseis Gavriilidi, 2006); Evdokia Olympitou, Spogallieutiki drastiriotita kai koinoniki sygkrotisi sto nisi tis Kalymnou, 19os–20os aionas (Athens: Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2014). 95. Leda Papastefanaki, ‘Politics, Modernisation and Public Health in Greece, 1900–1940: The Case of Occupational Health’, in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, ed. Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 165–91; idem, ‘Apo tin “ygieini ton epitidevmaton” stin “iyximenin nosirotita tis ergatikis taxeos”: I epangelmatiki ygeia stin Ellada, 1870–1940’, in Conference Proceedings Dimosia ygeia kai koinoniki politiki: O Eleftherios Venizelos kai i epochi tou (Athens: Ethniki Scholi Dimosias Ygeias; Ethniko Idryma Erevnon ‘El. Venizelos’; Papazisis, 2008), 265–88. 96. Papastefanaki, Ergasia, technologia kai fylo, 310–57; idem, I fleva tis gis, 50–64, 228–37. For a historiographical account on the genesis of scientific interest in occupational health in Europe and in Greece, see Leda Papastefanaki, ‘“Arrostoi apo ergasia?”: Istoriografika kai methodologika zitimata stin istoria tis ygeias ton ergazomenon’, in Dierevnontas tis Koinonikes Scheseis me Orous Ygeias kai Astheneias: I Koinoniki Istoria tis Iatrikis os Erevnitiko Pedio, ed. Leda Papastefanaki, Manolis Tzanakis and Sevasti Trubeta (Rethymno: Panepistimio Kritis, 2013), 89–115.

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97. On historiographical accounts of diaspora and migration history, see Olga KatsiardiHering, ‘Apo tis “ellinikes koinotites tou exoterikou” stin istoriografia tou metanasteftikou fainomenou (15os–19os ai.)’, in Kitromilides and Sklavenitis, Istoriografia, vol. 2, 223–50; Lina Venturas, ‘Metapolemikes prosengiseis stin elliniki metanastefsi’, in Kitromilides and Sklavenitis, Istoriografia, vol. 2, 251–70; Lena Korma, ‘The Historiography of the Greek Diaspora and Migration in the Twentieth Century’, Historein 16(1–2) (2017), 47–73. 98. Lina Venturas, Ellines metanastes sto Velgio (Athens: Nefeli, 1999); idem, ‘The Beginnings of Greek Postwar Emigration to Belgium: Networks and Strategies’, in Griechische Migration in Europa: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Philhellenische Studien 8, ed. Evangelos Konstantinou (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 217–26; idem, ‘Greek Governments, Political Parties and Emigrants in Western Europe: Struggles for Control (1950–1974)’, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 17(3) (2001), 43–66; idem, ‘Greek Immigrants in Postwar Belgium: Community and Identity Formation Processes’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 28(1) (2002), 33–72; Ioanna Laliotou, Transatlantic Subjects: Acts of Migration and Culture of Transnationalism between Europe and America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Kostis Karpozilos, Kokkini Ameriki: Ellines metanastes kai to orama enos Neou Kosmou, 1900–1950 (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2017); Maria Damilakou, I elliniki metanastefsi stin Argentini: Diadikasies sygkrotisis kai metaschimatismoi mias metanasteftikis koinotitas, 1900–1970 (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Emporikis Trapezas, 2004); idem, ‘Estrategias de supervivencia en un mundo laboral conflictivo: Los prácticos del puerto de Buenos Aires, 1856–1924’, Revista de Estudios Marítimos y Sociales 5(6) (2012), 69–78. 99. For major representations of this literature, see Gabriel Baer, ‘The Administrative, Economic and Social Functions of Turkish Guilds’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 1(1) (1970), 28–50; the article is translated into Greek, see idem, ‘Oi dioikitikes, oikonomikes kai koinonikes leitourgies ton tourkikon syntechnion’, in Asdrachas, I oikonomiki domi, 575–96; idem, ‘Monopolies and Restrictive Practices of Turkish Guilds’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13(2) (1970), 145–65; this article is also translated into Greek, see idem, ‘Monopolio kai perioristikes praktikes ton tourkikon syntechnion’, in Asdrachas, I oikonomiki domi, 597–612. See also Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts, and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); idem, Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara and Kayseri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 100. Yıldırım’s article is a good example of bringing the history of guilds into the realm of Ottoman labour history: Onur Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds as a Setting for Ethno-Religious Conflict: The Case of the Silk-Thread Spinners’ Guild in Istanbul’, International Review of Social History 47(3) (2002), 407–19. 101. Giorgos Papageorgiou, Oi syntechnies sta Giannena kata ton 19o kai tis arches tou 20ou aiona (Ioannina: Etaireia Ipeirotikon Meleton–Idryma Meleton Ioniou kai Adriatikou Chorou, 1988); Evanghelos Hekimoglou, ‘Christianikes syntechnies tis Thessalonikis sta teli tou 18ou aiona’, in Proceedings of the Symposium Christianiki Thessaloniki: Othomaniki periodos, 1430–1912 (Thessaloniki, 1993), 115–36; Maria Tsikaloudaki, ‘I agora ston Chandaka (1699–1765): Oi syntechnies kai o kathorismos ton timon’, Ta Historica 12(22) (1995), 49–84; idem, ‘Pouvoirs et professions des communautés chrétiennes urbaines dans l’Empire Ottoman (XVIIe–XIIe siècles): Serrès, Philippopoli, Kozani, Larissa’, 2 vols (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Paris I, 2000), 305–474; Vassilis Dimitriadis, ‘The Esnaf System and Professions in Nineteenth-Century Thessaloniki’, in Hazai, ‘Melanges en l’honneur d’Elizabeth A. Zachariadou’, 131–41; for a general overview, see Spyros Asdrachas, ‘I katanomi kai i synthesi tis viotechnias: Viotechnia tis ypaithrou kai viotechnia ton poleon’, in Asdrachas et al., Elliniki oikonomiki istoria, 357–422.

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102. Moskoff, Eisagogika stin istoria, 334–407; Alexandros Dagkas and Akis Apostolidis, I sosialistiki organosi Fédération Thessalonikis, 1909–1918 (Athens: Kentro Marxistikon Erevnon and Synchroni Epochi, 1989). For a historiographical review, see Kostas Paloukis, ‘Greek Historiography about the Making of the Working Class in Ottoman Macedonia: A Critical Presentation’ (paper presented at the conference ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda İs¸çi Sınıfının Olus¸umu / The Emergence of Working Class in the Ottoman Empire’, Istanbul, 17–18 October 2015, organized by the Social History Research Foundation of Turkey (TÜSTAV), with the cooperation of the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfı) and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK)). 103. Antonis Liakos, I Sosialistiki Ergatiki Omospondia Thessalonikis (Fédération) kai i Sosialistiki Neolaia: Ta katastatika tous (Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 1985); Avdela, ‘O sosialismos ton “allon”’; idem, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Gender’; Spyros Marketos, ‘I “Fédération” kai i edraiosi tou ellinikou sosialismou’, in Conference Proceedings Oi Evraioi ston elliniko choro: Zitimata istorias sti makra diarkeia (Athens: Etaireia Meletis Ellinikou Evraïsmou, 1995), 151–72. 104. Avdela, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Gender’; Rena Molho, ‘Jewish Working-Class Neighborhoods in Salonika Following the 1890 and 1917 Fires’, in The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond, vol. 2, ed. Minna Rozen (Tel Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Tel Aviv University, 2002), 188–94. See also Ilıcak and Angelopoulou, Ellines kai Evraioi ergates; S¸ükrü Ilıcak, ‘Jewish Socialism in Ottoman Salonica’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 2(3) (2002), 115–46; Eyal Ginio, ‘Migrants and Workers in an Ottoman Port: Ottoman Salonica in the Eighteenth Century’, in On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, ed. Eugene Rogan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 126–48; Shai Srougo, ‘Professional Characteristics of the Jewish Guild in the Muslim World: Thessaloniki Dockers at the End of the Ottoman Era’, Mediterranean Historical Review 26(2) (2011), 115–33; Gila Hadar, ‘Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context of Social and Ethnic Strife’, in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, ed. Amila Buturovic´ and Irvin Cemil Schick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 127–52. 105. Leda Papastefanaki, Kostas Paloukis, and Nikos Potamianos, ‘To elliniko Diktyo gia tin Istoria tis Ergasias kai tou Ergatikou Kinimatos: Ellinikes kai evropaïkes allilepidraseis’, Archeiotaxio 18 (2016), 218–22. 106. Marcel van der Linden, ‘The Growth of a European Network of Labor Historians’, International Labor and Working-Class History 90 (2016), 266–73. 107. Leda Papastefanaki, ‘3rd International Conference in Economic and Social History: “Labour History: Production, Markets, Relations, Policies (from the Late Middle Ages to the Early 21st Century)”, 24–27 May 2017, Ioannina, Greece’, Report, https:// socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/308776; Konstantinos Kolokythas et al., ‘Trito Diethnes Synedrio Oikonomikis kai Koinonikis Istorias “Istoria tis ergasias: Paragogi, agores, scheseis, politikes (telos Mesaiona-arches 21ou ai.)”, Ioannina, 24–27 Maïou 2017’, Ta Historica 66 (2017), 233–50. 108. Yüksel Akkaya, ‘Türkiye’de Emek Tarihinin Sefaleti Üzerine Bazı Notlar’, Toplum ve Bilim 91 (2001/2002), 285–94. 109. Although limited, there have been a few important studies on the history of the Turkish working class. Zafer Toprak’s work in this regard is exemplary. He has very recently republished his earlier studies on the subject. See Zafer Toprak, Türkiye’de is¸çi sınıfı, 1908– 1946 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2016). 110. Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, ‘“Sefaletten İhyaya”: Türkiye İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihi, E.P. Thompson ve Yeni Kus¸ak Çalıs¸malar’, in Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türkiye İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihi, 1839–2014: Yeni Yaklas¸ımlar, Yeni Alanlar, Yeni Sorunlar, ed. Y. Doğan Çetinkaya and Mehmet Ö. Alkan (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2015), 1–28. 111. For a marker of this methodological change, see the introduction and contributions in the edited volume, Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden, eds, Class and Other

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Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labor History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). 112. Donald Quataert, ‘Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700–1922’, International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 93–109. 113. John Chalcraft, ‘The Coal Heavers of Port Sa’id: State-Making and Worker Protest, 1869–1914’, 110–24; Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early NineteenthCentury Istanbul’, 125–40; Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, ‘The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700–1850’, 141–52; Donald Quataert and Yüksel Duman, ‘A Coal Miner’s Life during the Late Ottoman Empire’, 153–79, all in International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001). 114. Touraj Atabaki and Gavin Brockett, ‘Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History: An Introduction’, in ‘Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History’, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Gavin Brockett, supplement, International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 1–17. 115. Donald Quataert, ‘Epilogue’, in Atabaki and Brockett, ‘Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History’, 189–93, 192. 116. A special section of the journal Toplumsal Tarih 245 (2015) and the aforementioned collection in Çetinkaya and Alkan, Türkiye İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihi include revised versions of some of the papers presented at these conferences. 117. Gavin D. Brockett and Özgür Balkılıç, ‘The Ottoman Middle East and Modern Turkey’, in Handbook Global History of Work, ed. Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), 201–16. 118. Leila Erder, ‘The Making of Industrial Bursa: Economic Activity and Population in a Turkish City, 1835–1975’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1976). Studies on the specific case of the Bursa silk industry continued to highlight the importance of female workers. See Donald Quataert, ‘The Silk Industry of Bursa, 1880–1914’, in İslamoğlu-İnan, The Ottoman Empire, 284–99. For a recent study providing information on female workers of the Ottoman state silk factory in Bursa, see Mustafa Çakıcı, ‘Osmanlı Sanayiles¸me Çabalarında Bursa İpek Fabrikası Örneği (1851–1873)’ (Master’s thesis, İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2010). 119. Although Faroqhi cannot be seen as a gender historian, giving a voice to women has been a priority in her oeuvre; for a selection of some case studies, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Stories of Ottoman Men and Women: Establishing Status, Establishing Control (Istanbul: Eren, 2002). 120. Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800– 1914’, in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 161–76. 121. The work of Karakıs¸la, who is a Quataert student, is worth mentioning here: Yavuz Selim Karakıs¸la, Women, War and Work in the Ottoman Empire: Society for the Employment of Ottoman Muslim Women, 1916–1923 (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2005). Karakıs¸la continued to publish on the role of women in specific occupations such as post office workers, tailors and domestic servants in the late Ottoman Empire. 122. Gülhan Balsoy, ‘Gendering Ottoman Labor History: The Cibali Régie Factory in the Early Twentieth Century’, International Review of Social History 54(17) (2009), 45–68. 123. E. Tutku Vardağlı, ‘Searching for Women’s Agency in the Tobacco Workshops: Female Tobacco Workers of the Province of Selanik’, and M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Working from Home: Division of Labor among Female Workers of Feshane in Late Nineteenth Century Istanbul’, both in A Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, ed. Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 124. Hatice Yıldız, ‘Parallels and Contrasts in Gendered Histories of Industrial Labour in Bursa and Bombay 1850–1910’, The Historical Journal 60 (2017), 443–70.

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125. Van der Linden, Workers of the World, 7–8. 126. Quataert aptly formulates this problem in Quataert, ‘Epilogue’, 192. 127. Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force’, and Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds’, 407–19. 128. M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines’, in Atabaki and Brockett, ‘Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History’, 69–90. 129. See Chapter 5, ‘Ties That Bind: Village Mine Relations’ in Donald Quataert, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). Quataert had already touched upon this topic with Duman in Quataert and Duman, ‘A Coal Miner’s Life’. Quataert published on this issue again; see Donald Quataert, ‘Unpaid Ottoman Coal Miners during the Early Twentieth Century’, in Costantini and Koller, Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community, 247–64. 130. Nurs¸en Gürboğa, ‘Compulsory Mine Work: The Single-Party Regime and the Zonguldak Coalfield as a Site of Contention, 1940–1947’, in Atabaki and Brockett, ‘Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History’, 115–42. 131. For the most recent study on this topic, see Ali Sipahi, ‘Convict Labor in Turkey, 1936– 1953: A Capitalist Corporation in the State?’, International Labor and Working-Class History 90 (2016), 244–65. Kabadayı also gave examples of the recruitment of convict labour in state factories in Istanbul in the 1850s; see M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Nascent Factories, Labour Recruitment and Ottoman Industrial Policy in the Wake of Tanzimat’, in IXth International Congress of Economic and Social History of Turkey Dubrovnik – Croatia, 20–23 August 2002 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2005), 263–72. 132. Both Kabadayı and Sefer give accounts on conscripted labour at state industrial enterprises: M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Unfreie Arbeit in den staatlichen Fabriken im Istanbul des 19. Jh.’, in Unfreie Arbeit: Ökonomische und kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven, ed. M. Erdem Kabadayı and Tobias Reichardt (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2007), 230–42; and Akın Sefer, ‘From Class Solidarity to Revolution: The Radicalization of Arsenal Workers in the Late Ottoman Empire’, International Review of Social History 58(3) (2013), 395–428. 133. An edited volume coming out of an international research project includes studies on Ottoman military labour; see Erik Jan Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 134. In addition to his contribution to this volume, see Alp Yücel Kaya, ‘On the Çiftlik Regulation in Tırhala in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Economists, Pashas, Governors, Çiftlik-Holders, Subas¸ıs, and Sharecroppers’, in Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies: Halcyon Days in Crete, VIII; a Symposium held in Rethymno, 13–15 January 2012, ed. Elias Kolovos (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2015), 333–80. 135. The studies of Florian Riedler and Can Nacar are good examples: Florian Riedler, ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of the 1890s’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 160–76, and idem, ‘The Role of Labour Migration for the Urban Economy and Governance of Nineteenth Century Istanbul’, in Urban Governance Under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict, ed. Nora Lafi and Ulrike Freitag (London: Routledge, 2014), 145–58; Can Nacar, ‘İstanbul Gurbetinde Çalıs¸mak ve Yas¸amak’, in Çetinkaya and Alkan, Türkiye İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihi, 120–44. 136. Erol Kahveci, ‘Migration, Ethnicity, and Divisions of Labour in the Zonguldak Coalfield, Turkey’, International Review of Social History 60(S1) (2015), 207–26. 137. Yiğit Akın, ‘The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics in Early Republican Turkey: Language, Identity, and Experience’ International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 167–188; M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Petitioning as Political Action: Petitioning

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Practices of Workers in Ottoman Factories’, in Gara, Kabadayı and Neumann, Popular Protest, 57–74. 138. Can Nacar, ‘Labor Activism and the State in the Ottoman Tobacco Industry’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 46(3) (2014), 533–51. 139. Can Nacar, ‘Free Trade or an Alternative Path: The Queue System and Struggle over the Conditions of Work in Ottoman Ports, 1900–1910’, Middle Eastern Studies 52(5) (2016), 772–86. 140. Can Nacar, ‘20. Yüzyılın Bas¸ında İstanbul Limanı: Hamallar Dersaadet Rıhtım S¸irketi ve Osmanlı Hükümeti’, Kebikeç: İnsan Bilimleri İçin Kaynak Aras¸tırmaları Dergisi 41 (2016), 51–66. 141. Two relatively recent Ph.D. dissertations, Özgür Balkılıç, ‘For the Union Makes Us Strong: The İstanbul Metal Workers and Their Struggle for Unionization in Turkey, 1947–1970’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2015) and Görkem Akgöz, ‘Many Voices of a Turkish State Factory: Working at Bakirköy Cloth Factory, 1932–50’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2012) address this issue. See also Görkem Akgöz, ‘İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihyazımında İs¸yeri ve Çalıs¸ma Deneyiminin Yeri: Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Fabrikalarının Kapısından Girmek’, in Çetinkaya and Alkan, Türkiye İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihi, 231–53.

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 . ‘Aspects of Childhood in Rural Greece: Children in a Mountain Village (1900–1940)’. The History of the Family 9 (2004), 325–45. Petmezas, Socrates D. ‘Recherches sur l’économie et les finances des villages du Pélion, région d’industries rurales, ca. 1750–1850’. Ph.D. dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1989.  . ‘Patterns of Protoindustrialization in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern Thessaly’. Journal of European Economic History 19(3) (1990), 575–603.  . I elliniki agrotiki oikonomia kata to 19o aiona. Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2003.  . ‘I istoria tou agrotikou kosmou apo ton Mesopolemo os simera: akyroseis kai metatopiseis’, in Istoriografia tis neoteris kai synchronis Elladas, 1833–2002, vol. 2, edited by Paschalis Kitromilides and Triantafyllos Sklavenitis, 201–20. Athens: Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2004.  . ‘Agriculture and Economic Development in Greece, 1870–1973’, in Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe since 1870, edited by Pedro Lains and Vicente Pinilla, 353–74. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.  . ‘Rural Macedonia from Ottoman to Greek Rule, 1900–1920: Bridging the Gap’, in Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean, edited by Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kechriotis, 355–94. Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2010.  . Prolegomena stin istoria tis ellinikis agrotikis oikonomias tou mesopolemou. Athens: Alexandreia, 2012.  . ‘Anazitontas tous ylikous orous tis oikonomikis kathysterisis: Oikonomiki kai Koinoniki Istoria tis Elladas kata ta proima nea chronia’, in Synantiseis tis ellinikis me ti galliki istoriografia apo ti Metapolitefsi eos simera, edited by Vangelis Karamanolakis, Maria Couroucli and Triantafyllos Sklavenitis, 127–40. Athens: École Française d’Athènes – Ethniko Idryma Erevnon – Etaireia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, periodiko Mnemon, 2015. Pizanias, Petros. Oi ftochoi ton poleon: I technognosia tis epiviosis stin Ellada to mesopolemo. Athens: Themelio, 1993. Potamianos, Nikos. ‘O Syndesmos Syntechnion’, in Proceedings of the Conference I proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona; Allages kai anatropes, 75–91. Athens: Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias, 2012.  . ‘From the People to a Class: The Petite Bourgeoisie of Athens, 1901–1923’, in Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Cities, 1900–1923, edited by Andreas Lyberatos, 133–45. Herakleion: Crete University Press and Institute for Mediterranean Studies, 2013.  . ‘Moral Economy? Popular Demands and State Intervention in the Struggle over AntiProfiteering Laws in Greece, 1914–1925’. Journal of Social History 48(4) (2015), 803–15.  . Oi noikokyraioi: Magazatores kai viotechnes stin Athina, 1880–1925. Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2015.  . ‘Regulation and the Retailing Community: The Struggle Over the Establishment of the Holiday of Sunday in Greece, 1872–1925’. History of Retailing and Consumption 3(3) (2017), 168–83.  . ‘The Discourse against “Shameful Profiteering” in Greece, 1914–1925: Notions of Exploitation, Anticapitalist Morality and the Concept of Moral Economy’, in Moralizing Capitalism, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexandra Przyrembel, 251–66. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Quataert, Donald. ‘The Silk Industry of Bursa, 1880–1914’, in The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, edited by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, 284–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.  . Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge Middle East Library 30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  . ‘Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800–1914’, in Women in

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Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, 161–76. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1993.  , ed. Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.  . ‘Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700–1922’. International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 93–109.  . I Othomaniki Aftokratoria: Oi teleftaioi aiones, 1700–1922. Translated by Marinos Sariyannis. Athens: Alexandreia, 2006.  . Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.  . ‘Unpaid Ottoman Coal Miners during the Early Twentieth Century’, in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi, edited by Vera Costantini and Markus Koller, 247–64. Leiden: Brill, 2008.  . ‘Epilogue’, in ‘Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History’, edited by Touraj Atabaki and Gavin Brockett, supplement, International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 189–93. Quataert, Donald, and Yüksel Duman. ‘A Coal Miner’s Life during the Late Ottoman Empire’. International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 153–79. Renieri, Irini. ‘Andronikio: Ena kappadokiko chorio kata ton 19o aiona’. Mnemon 15 (1993), 9–67.  . ‘Michanismoi sygkrotisis tou noikokyriou: Kappadokia, 19os aionas; I periptosi mias tourkorthodoxis koinotitas’. Ta Historica 30 (1999), 17–46.  . ‘Household Formation in 19th-Century Central Anatolia: The Case Study of a Turkish-Speaking Orthodox Christian Community’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 34(3) (2002), 441–63. Riedler, Florian. ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of the 1890s’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, edited by Ulrike Freitag et al., 160–76. London: Routledge, 2011.  . ‘The Role of Labour Migration for the Urban Economy and Governance of Nineteenth Century Istanbul’, in Urban Governance Under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict, edited by Nora Lafi and Ulrike Freitag, 145–58. London: Routledge, 2014. Riginos, Michalis. Morfes paidikis ergasias sti viomichania kai ti viotechnia, 1870–1940. Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias, 1995.  . ‘Formes du travail des enfants dans l’industrie et l’artisanat en Grèce (XIXe–XXe siècles)’, in Enfants au travail: Attitudes des élites en Europe occidentale et méditerranéenne aux XIXe et XXe siècles, edited by Roland Caty, 59–70. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2002. Rokou, Vasiliki. Ta vyrsodepseia ton Ioanninon: Apo to ergastirio sto ‘ergostasio’ tis viotechnikis polis. Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2004. Sahillioğlu, Halil. ‘Ömer Lütfi Barkan’. İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 41(1–4) (1985), 3–38. Salimpa, Zizi. Gynaikes ergatries stin elliniki viomichania kai sti viotechnia (1870–1922). Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaia, 2002. Salvanou, Emilia. ‘The First World War and the Refugee Crisis: Historiography and Memory in the Greek Context’. Historein 16 (2017), 120–38.  . I sygkrotisi tis prosfygikis mnimis: To parelthon os istoria kai praktiki. Athens: Nefeli, 2018. Sariyannis, Marinos. ‘Ottoman Critics of Society and State, Fifteenth to Early Eighteenth Centuries: Toward a Corpus for the Study of Ottoman Political Thought’. Archivum Ottomanicum 25 (2008), 127–50.  . ‘Ruler and State, State and Society in Ottoman Political Thought’. Turkish Historical Review 4 (2013), 83–117.

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 . ‘Ottoman Ideas on Monarchy before the Tanzimat Reforms: Toward a Conceptual History of Ottoman Political Notions’. Turcica 47 (2016), 33–72. Schull, Kent F. ‘The Impact of Donald Quataert’s “History from Below” on Ottoman and Turkish Studies’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34(1) (2014), 126–28. Sefer, Akın. ‘From Class Solidarity to Revolution: The Radicalization of Arsenal Workers in the Late Ottoman Empire’. International Review of Social History 58(3) (2013), 395–428. Seferiadis, Serafeim. ‘Gia ti sygkrotisi tis ergatikis taxis stin Ellada (1870–1936): Merikoi provlimatismoi pano se ena palio thema’. Elliniki Epitheorisi Politikis Epistimis 6 (1995), 9–78. Sipahi, Ali. ‘Convict Labor in Turkey, 1936–1953: A Capitalist Corporation in the State?’ International Labor and Working-Class History 90 (2016), 244–65. Sonyel, Salahi Ramadan. Minorities and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire. Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Printing House, 1993. Srougo, Shai. ‘Professional Characteristics of the Jewish Guild in the Muslim World: Thessaloniki Dockers at the End of the Ottoman Era’. Mediterranean Historical Review 26(2) (2011), 115–33. Stamatopoulos, Dimitris. Metarrythmisi kai ekkosmikefsi: Pros mia anasynthesi tis istorias tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou ton 19o aiona. Athens: Alexandreia, 2003. Stathi, Pinelopi. ‘Gia ti zoi kai to ergo tis Elisavet Zachariadou’. Ta Historica 23(45) (2006), 496–502. Svoronos, Nicolas G. Le commerce de Salonique au XVIIIe siècle. With preface by Ernest Labrousse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956. Svoronos, Nikos G. To emporio tis Thessalonikis tou 18o aiona. With preface by Ernest Labrousse. Translated by Spyros Asdrachas, Xenofontas Giataganas, Filippos Eliou, Thanassis Kalafatis and Christos Hadziiossif. Athens: Themelio, 1996. Theocharidis, Ioannis. ‘I anaptyxi ton tourkologikon spoudon stin Ellada’. Dodone 17(1) (1988), 19–61. Toprak, Zafer. Türkiye’de İs¸çi Sınıfı, 1908–1946. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2016. Tsicaloudaki, Maria. ‘I agora ston Chandaka (1699–1765): Oi syntechnies kai o kathorismos ton timon’. Ta Historica 12(22) (1995), 49–84.  . ‘Pouvoirs et professions des communautés chrétiennes urbaines dans l’Empire Ottoman (XVIIe–XIIe Siècles): Serrès, Philippopoli, Kozani, Larissa’. 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Université Paris I, 2000. Ursinus, Michael. ‘Ottoman Studies Triumphant: The Success Story of Rethymno, Crete’. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 40 (2016), 89–98. van der Linden, Marcel. Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History. Studies in Global Social History 1. Leiden: Brill, 2008.  . ‘The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History’. International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012), 57–76.  . ‘The Growth of a European Network of Labor Historians’. International Labor and Working-Class History 90 (2016), 266–73. van der Linden, Marcel, and Jan Lucassen. Prolegomena for a Global Labour History. Amsterdam: IISH, 1999. Retrieved 7 September 2019 from http://www.iisg.nl/publications/prolegom.pdf. Vardağlı, E. Tutku. ‘Searching for Women’s Agency in the Tobacco Workshops: Female Tobacco Workers of the Province of Selanik’, in A Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, edited by Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou, 47–64. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Venturas, Lina. Ellines Metanastes Sto Velgio. Athens: Nefeli, 1999.  . ‘The Beginnings of Greek Postwar Emigration to Belgium: Networks and Strategies’, in Griechische Migration in Europa: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Philhellenische Studien 8, edited by Evangelos Konstantinou, 217–26. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000.  . ‘Greek Governments, Political Parties and Emigrants in Western Europe: Struggles for

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Control (1950–1974)’. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 17(3) (2001), 43–66.  . ‘Greek Immigrants in Postwar Belgium: Community and Identity Formation Processes’. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 28(1) (2002), 33–72.  . ‘Metapolemikes prosengiseis stin elliniki metanastefsi’, in Istoriografia tis neoteris kai synchronis Elladas, 1833–2002, vol. 2, edited by Paschalis Kitromilides and Triantafyllos Sklavenitis, 251–70. Athens: Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2004. Wittek, Paul. I genesi tis Othomanikis Aftokratorias. Translated by Evangelia Balta. Athens: Poreia, 1988. Yıldırım, Onur. ‘Ottoman Guilds as a Setting for Ethno-Religious Conflict: The Case of the SilkThread Spinners’ Guild in Istanbul’. International Review of Social History 47(3) (2002), 407–19.  . Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934. Middle East Studies: History, Politics, and Law. New York: Routledge, 2006.  , ed. Osmanlı’nın Pes¸inde Bir Yas¸am: Suraiya Faroqhi’ye Armag˘an. Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2008. Yıldız, Hatice. ‘Parallels and Contrasts in Gendered Histories of Industrial Labour in Bursa and Bombay 1850–1910’. The Historical Journal 60 (2017), 443–70.  Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba. ‘The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700– 1850’. International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 141–52. Zei, Eleftheria. ‘I meleti tou koinonikou apo ti Gallia stin Ellada sti Metapolitefsi: Koinoniki Istoria i Koinoniologia?’, in Synantiseis tis ellinikis me ti galliki istoriografia apo ti Metapolitefsi eos simera, edited by Vangelis Karamanolakis, Maria Couroucli and Triantafyllos Sklavenitis, 201–10. Athens: École Française d’Athènes – Ethniko Idryma Erevnon – Etaireia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, periodiko Mnemon, 2015. Zizopoulou, Athina. ‘Typografoi kai ergates typou stin Athina ton 20o aiona: Sygkrotisi kai exelixi enos epangelmatikou chorou’. Master’s thesis, University of Crete, 2006.  . ‘Elliniki Chartopoiia Makedonias AE: I proti chartopoiia tis Thessalonikis, 1936–1990’, in Viomichanies chartou stin Ellada (19os–20os aionas), edited by Christos Loukos, 145–70. Athens: Politistiko Idryma Omilou Peiraios, 2008.  . ‘I chartopoiia kai i chartoviomichania Aigiou, 1924–1968’, in Viomichanies chartou stin Ellada (19os–20os aionas), edited by Christos Loukos, 79–108. Athens: Politistiko Idryma Omilou Peiraios, 2008. Zürcher, Erik Jan. Synchroni istoria tis Tourkias. Translated by Vangelis Kechriotis. Athens: Alexandreia, 2004.  , ed. Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour, 1500–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

Part I

Agrarian Property and Labour Relations, Rural and Urban Organization of Work

Chapter 1

Were Peasants Bound to the Soil in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans?

A Reappraisal of the Question of the New/Second Serfdom in Ottoman Historiography

Alp Yücel Kaya

In his magnum opus La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Fernand Braudel observed (in the first edition of 1949) that starting from the seventeenth century, the condition of the serfs in the Ottoman Balkans deteriorated, and a re-enserfment process took place, which he called the ‘new serfdom’ (see the second edition of 1966 and the English translation of 1972–73), in the large estates called çiftliks: As a rule, the çiftlik converted the low-lying lands of the plains, the marshes between Larissa and Volos for example, along the muddy banks of Lake Jezero or the wet river-valleys. It was a conqueror’s type of farming. The çiftliks produced cereals, first and foremost. And cereal-growing, in Turkey as in the Danube provinces or in Poland, when linked to a huge export trade, created from the first the conditions leading to the ‘new serfdom’ observable in Turkey. These large estates everywhere debased the peasantry and took advantage of its debasement. … As in the West, large proprietors put to use the depopulated land whose possibilities had never been fully explored by previous generations of nobles and peasants. The price of progress, here as elsewhere, was clearly social oppression. Only the poor gained nothing, could hope for nothing from this progress.1

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His argument concerning the ‘new serfdom’ referred, on theoretical grounds, to George I. Bratianu’s comparative study on the re-establishment of real serfdom (servage de la glèbe) in sixteenth-century Eastern and Southeastern Europe2 and, on factual grounds, to Richard BuschZantner’s study on the historical geography of the agrarian structure in the Balkans in general, and in nineteenth-century Thessaly in particular.3 On the theoretical level, Bratianu contrasted real serfdom to personal serfdom from a historical perspective. While the latter builds on subjection or bondage to the landlord, the former is based on subjection or bondage to the estate’s land by means of restrictions imposed on cultivators’ mobility.4 This argument, in fact, followed Marc Bloch’s critical elucidation on relations of dependence in medieval agrarian regimes:5 The serf of early times was, in the full sense of the word, an homme de corps. Whatever he did, wherever he went, whatever land he cultivated, he remained attached to his lord by a bond that was indissoluble by anything less than manumission, that was hereditary, nearly physical; it was a bond, … that stuck ‘to flesh and bones’. He remained always under the jurisdiction of his lord for certain misdemeanors, and he remained always indebted to him for the duties of his station. On the other hand, a free man who acquired a field from the possession of a serf did not on that account cease to be free. There were servile people, or rather servile families; there were no servile landholdings. Thus composed, serfdom did not appear as an anomaly. Nearly the entire social structure was founded upon analogous conceptions. Nothing seemed so strong as the bonds between man and man. But this system of personal relations broke down very quickly, because the collective ideas that supported them were worn away. We hesitate to give dates in such a matter, but we can say that from the beginning of the thirteenth century, in northern France, society had begun to change its appearance. Now, serfdom did not disappear along with the whole of the customs and juridical notions from which it had been born. It survived in many French provinces until the sixteenth century, and in some, until 1789; but it was slowly and deeply transformed. After that the servile ‘stain’ adhered less to the man than to the earth. Whoever inhabited a certain contaminated holding became a serf, while whoever left it became free. Real serfdom slowly superseded serfdom ‘de corps’.6

As for the genealogy of the term ‘new serfdom’, economic historians would immediately link it to the term ‘second serfdom’, whose imposition by estate owners in Eastern Europe during the sixteenth century was a tricky point, especially for the historiography of the ‘transition debate’, in the discussion of its causes ranging from export-oriented production to political conflict.7 Frederick Engels, in fact, first used the term in a letter written to Karl Marx dated 15 December 1882, while

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presenting his short paper on the history of collective land ownership practice, called the ‘mark’ in German history.8 Engels’ argument on the dynamics of the second serfdom balanced considerations of commercial orientation and political struggle. Bratianu’s argument, however, did not follow that of Engels.9 Indeed, in his comparative research, following and referring directly to the arguments of Henri Pirenne and Henri Sée, Bratianu correlated the resurrection of serfdom in Eastern Europe (Poland and the Baltic countries) with the increase of the export trade to Western Europe.10 As for the revival of serfdom in Russia and Southeastern Europe (Danubian principalities), he argued based on his own research on Byzantine history that it was fiscal necessities and the subsequent fiscal system of the central states that resulted in real serfdom. What he underlined in the article referred to by Braudel was that different causes resulted in the same phenomenon, which was real serfdom. Braudel, who in the first edition of La Méditerranée was perplexed by these two competing causalities, in the second edition forcefully enlarged the geography of the ‘new serfdom’ argument to the Ottoman Balkans, following the argument of Henri Pirenne and Henri Sée which stressed the impact of the export trade on the resurrection of serfdom.11 As for the factual level of Braudel’s argument, Busch-Zantner’s account of Thessaly was based on his own field research undertaken in the 1930s, after the postwar agrarian reforms, and the studies of the geographer Alfred Philippson carried out in the 1890s.12 In fact, BuschZantner’s book was severely criticized by Marc Bloch for using ambiguous terminology, especially with respect to his discussion on feudalism.13 Braudel, who was well aware of the criticism of this ‘erudition’,14 gave credit, although conditional, to the book: [Richard Busch-Zantner’s] stimulating book met with a cool and perhaps undeserved response from the world of scholarship … . He has … been criticized for imprecise terminology, but this is something which seems to me unavoidable. For any western historian approaching the world of the East, all the words at his disposal are ambiguous and past definitions … or general explanations (such as those of J. Cvijic) are not the best guide. The increasing use of original Turkish sources will in any case lead to the re-statement of these problems and inevitably to a total revision of our ideas on Turkish history.15

In fact, such a call for research in the Ottoman archives, published in the second edition of La Méditerranée, had already been made by Ömer Lütfi Barkan to historians of the Ottoman Empire in the review of La Méditerranée in the Annales in 1954:

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In conclusion, this magnificent book represents an important work program for Turkish historians. They, by posing similar problems identically, will be able to renew them thanks to the materials contained in the Turkish archives – which Professor Braudel lacked greatly; our historians will thus make their contribution not only to the history of their country, but also to the general history of the Mediterranean States.16

This chapter will take this call seriously and revisit the question of real serfdom or bondage to the land, with a special emphasis on its evolution in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans. Indeed, Ottoman historiography has addressed the question quite indirectly, except for articles written by Barkan17 and Halil İnalcık.18 Scholars generally limited themselves to discussing the competing sources and causes of the origins of large estates called çiftliks, in which the ‘new serfdom’, according to Braudel, took place.19 Servile or serfdom-like labour relations were such natural and evident outcomes, within the context of çiftliks, that they rarely attracted the interest of researchers. In this chapter, however, we shall be concerned exclusively with the labour relations found in the çiftliks. By doing so, instead of focusing on the competing sources and causes of çiftliks, this chapter will propose a fresh perspective from which to analyse the economic and social transformation in the Ottoman Balkans: the evolution of labour bondage to the land and its place within çiftlik agriculture in the nineteenth century. To do so, however, we will first reappraise the question of bondage to the soil or real serfdom in Ottoman and Balkan historiography. We will start the discussion by using the gate opened by Braudel, through which have passed those scholars emphasizing peasant bondage to the soil, on the one hand (Traian Stoianovich, Deena Ruth Sadat, Immanuel Wallerstein, Huri İslamoğlu, Çağlar Keyder), and, on the other, those scholars underlining the mobility of the peasantry (Ömer Lütfi Barkan, Suraiya Faroqhi, Gilles Veinstein, Fikret Adanır). We will then present research that depicts the conditions of Balkan peasant units as oscillations between, or the simultaneous survival of, mobility and bondage to the soil (Halil İnalcık, Bruce McGowan, S¸evket Pamuk). In this first section we finally review the historiography (Vera P. Mutafcieva, Bistra A. Cvetkova, Aleksandar Matkovski, Halil Berktay) favouring, instead of a ‘new serfdom’, the rather conflictual evolution of feudal and serfdom dynamics in the Ottoman Balkans, from the fifteenth century up to the nineteenth century. The factual basis of Braudel’s argument on ‘new serfdom’ was based on the example of nineteenth-century Thessaly, corresponding to the Tırhala (Trikala today) district in the Ottoman provincial administration.

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After a reappraisal of the historiography on bondage to the soil in the second section, we will concentrate in the third section on Tırhala, using as a basis Ion Ionescu de la Brad’s articles published in the Journal de Constantinople during the 1850s. We will then discuss the bylaw of 1862, which regulated sharecropping relations in Tırhala, based on documentation found in the Ottoman archives. A comparative analysis with the bylaws of other Balkan provinces will follow, in order to question the survival of bondage to the soil in the nineteenth-century Balkans. We propose that the nature of social and economic transformation during the nineteenth century could be better understood by focusing on conflict in agrarian labour relations. As we argue in the second section of the chapter, cultivators’ desire to be mobile for subsistence needs and landlords’ desire to bind them to the soil for higher profits constituted one of the essential knots of such conflicts in Tırhala in particular, and in the Balkans in general.20

A Reappraisal of the Historiography on Bondage to the Soil The ‘New/Second Serfdom’ in the Balkans Traian Stoianovich, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Fernand Braudel in the 1950s, further explored the idea of the

Figure 1.1 Historiographical exchanges between studies on serfdom, new/second serfdom and free peasantry. Figure created by the author.

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‘new serfdom’ in the Ottoman Balkans.21 He first argued that because peasants were ‘legally although not always practically tied to the land’, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they fled to the cities or mountains, and the countryside became depopulated.22 On the other hand, several factors resulted in the rise of çiftlik agriculture: the decline of the urban population, manufacturing and commerce in the sixteenth century oriented urban investment towards rural investment; the growing provisioning requirements of Istanbul resulted in an additional impulse for rural colonization; and rural demographic decline led to the expansion of manorial reserves. These dynamics contributed, within the context of labour shortage, to ‘the subjection of the peasantry to the glèbe’. Bondage to the land was reinforced in the eighteenth century by the foreign demand for agricultural goods and subsequently by agricultural product specialization (cotton, maize, etc.).23 The ultimate result of the evolutionary pattern we have described is the transformation of the seigneur from a Grundherr, frequently having a military rather than economic orientation and receiving rent in kind with few if any labor services, to a Gutsherr, conscious of his economic functions, converting his benefice or conditional property into private or quasi-private property: allodium, ciftlik, waqf, malikane, vocina (termed pomestye), or métaire.24

Stoianovich referred extensively to a long article by the Marxist historian Branislav Djurdjev on Ottoman feudalism25 and, as his maître, once again to the book of Richard Busch-Zantner in order to detail the evolution of labour relations in the çiftliks: The çiftlik marks the transition from a social and economic structure founded upon a system of moderate land rent and few labor services to one of excessive land rent and exaggerated service. As proprietor of çiftlik-village, the new landlord requires that his peasants share their production with him and normally receives half of their produce after the payment of the land tax to the state. Field, transportation, and other labor services supplement the newly augmented rent in kind given to the landlord.26

The research agenda set by Braudel was inherited in the 1960s by Deena Ruth Sadat, a Ph.D. student of Stoianovich.27 Her research focus was on the rise of urban notables in the eighteenth century, when ‘the intensification and extension of world commerce … became an increasingly significant economic factor within the Ottoman lands’.28 She underlined their role in the emergence of ‘new serfdom’ in the Balkans. According to her, as the tax farming system started to dominate the Ottoman fiscal apparatus, the rise of ayan (urban notables) went hand in

Were Peasants Bound to the Soil in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans? 67

hand with the increase in economic and social pressure on the peasantry, especially in the çiftliks:29 On the çiftlik estates, the consequences of this fiscal extortion were particularly severe, since the payments taken in money or kind were compounded by demands for services. The peasants not only furnished the labor but also the material for any public repairs or private construction the ayan wished to undertake, and they were also required to quarter and provide for local troops, official and feudal. Moreover, due to the changes which were taking place in the land-tenure system, often more than one lord claimed dues from the same peasants, dues which were in many cases forcibly extracted. These exactions, combined with the political disorders attendant upon the usurpation of power by the ayan, had two contradictory effects. On the one hand, especially toward the end of the century, peasants began to commend themselves to the protection of a powerful lord, exchanging freedom for security. Others simply abandoned their holdings and fled, accelerating the depopulation of parts of Rumeli which had begun in the seventeenth century.30

Like Stoianovich, Sadat argued that the shortage of labour resulted in an increase in çiftlik-holders’ efforts to bind the peasant to the land. In a comparative framework, she depicted the emergence of second serfdom in the Ottoman Balkans: as elsewhere in eastern Europe, the peasants lost not only their land but also their mobility; and the results in the Ottoman Empire resemble the agricultural colonization which was occurring simultaneously in the Austrian and Russian domains.31

In the 1970s, the World System Analysis developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and influenced largely by the theoretical framework of Werner Sombart, and especially by that of Braudel on the understanding of historical capitalist dynamics,32 started to have a huge (often hegemonic) impact on Ottoman Studies. As the incorporation of the Ottoman economy into the world economy constituted the essential research problem, discussion on labour relations in the context of the division of labour between the centre and peripheral regions of the world economy was nearly closed. According to the schema designed by Wallerstein: the periphery (eastern Europe and Hispanic America) used forced labor (slavery and coerced cash-crop labor). The core … increasingly used free labor. The semi periphery (former core areas turning in the direction of peripheral structures) developed an in-between form, share cropping, as a widespread alternative.33

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Çağlar Keyder reproduced this scheme in Ottoman geography, which was represented as being the periphery and/or semi-periphery: As to commercial agriculture, it has been mentioned that the appropriation of surplus resembles the feudal mode. If sharecropping is the dominant mechanism, a part of the peasant’s product is appropriated from him by the owner of the land. Alternatively, the peasants have to work on the owner’s field. This quasi-serfdom is reinforced by relations of indebtedness. The essential point is that this is a situation characterized by an absence of free labour.34

Similarly, in a very influential paper, Huri İslamoǧlu and Çağlar Keyder described the Ottoman incorporation into the World System through the commercialization of agriculture and the subsequent transformation in labour relations: Çiftliks were examples of commercial farming where enserfed peasantry or share-croppers were employed. Aside from the novelty of the labor organization, çiftliks also altered the traditional crop pattern. Cash-crops replaced subsistence grains.35

To sum up, from this perspective, a combination of several factors, such as the development of çiftlik agriculture (rural colonization) within a context of labour shortage, the commercialization of agriculture due to foreign demand, the expansion of tax farming practices and the rise of local notables, resulted in the emergence of second serfdom or serfdomlike labour relations in the Ottoman regions affected by commercial expansion, especially in the Balkans and Western Anatolia.

Free Cultivators and Peasant Mobility In his seminal article published in 1956 in Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations as a synthesis of his previous research on labour relations in the Ottoman countryside, Ömer Lütfi Barkan argued, in contrast to Braudel, that serfdom-like labour existed in the Ottoman Empire, although it concerned a minority of the population before the sixteenth century.36 Stoianovich, who was present at a lecture given by Barkan in Paris, wrote in a footnote of his dissertation that ‘Mr Barkan sees an evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to relative freedom during the sixteenth century’.37 What Barkan sought to underline was the workings of a fully fledged agrarian regime consisting of free peasants of small property under the government of a well-ordered central state and its judicial system, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This article of 1956, in addition to some others written by Barkan on

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agrarian labour relations,38 had a long-lasting influence on scholars interested in the Ottoman agrarian regime and its transformation and, with a few exceptions,39 kept them away from further discussion on the various forms of serfdom in general, and on bondage to the soil in particular. Nevertheless, after carefully reading Barkan’s 1956 article, we notice at the very end that, in spite of his compelling argument, he did not pretend to differentiate between personal and real serfdom and listed restrictions imposed on ‘free’ cultivators that one could describe in the same manner as conditions of real serfdom or cultivators’ bondage to the soil, within the Ottoman context: the cultivation of land was a hereditary obligation passed from father to son; any peasant registered in the fiscal registers as the possessor of a çift (pair of oxen) had no right to desert his land to migrate to the cities or another tımar (fief); the tımar holder had the right to repatriate deserted cultivators over a ten-year time span; and those who deserted the land for another occupation were to pay an indemnity called çift-bozan, the equivalent value of the tımar holder’s lost produce.40 According to Barkan, the peasants were indeed bonded to the soil, but this was due more to the political and fiscal organization of the state (depending on public law) than personal dependence on the landlords (depending on private law). For Barkan, who was mostly interested in the central state’s economic and social policies, all restrictions to peasant mobility served the central government in its organization of provisioning, fiscal and security policies.41 In such a context, characteristics pertaining to real serfdom, as described by Barkan, became undermined in favour of free peasantry.42 It is, however, surprising to see in support of this state-centred argument on labour organization a reference to Bratianu’s article that was also Braudel’s reference in the argument of ‘new serfdom’ in Southeastern Europe.43 On the other hand, some scholars did not respond overtly to works observing real serfdom in the Ottoman lands. For example, Fikret Adanır argued that Ottoman peasants ‘enjoyed a remarkable degree of mobility’ despite the existence of the above-mentioned çift-bozan. He suggested that these ‘were post factum measures, indicating not only that peasants left the land in significant numbers, but also that they could do so legally’.44 Suraiya Faroqhi further proposed that they represented ‘attempts to cope with a rather intractable situation, rather than as well established rules regularly applied in daily life’.45 Nonetheless, according to her, such rules found in the provincial codes became outdated by the second half of the sixteenth century, as the compilation of tax registers describing peasants on fiefs and in villages was put aside.46 It was, therefore, more appropriate for her to ‘think of Ottoman rural society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as extremely mobile’.47

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However, it is interesting to observe that Keyder and İslamoğlu, who favoured the idea of the development of second serfdom in the eighteenth century, also referred to Barkan’s article on servage to describe the relative freedom of the peasantry in the early modern period: The peasant was ‘free’ in the sense that he was not a serf. He was, however, restricted in movement. He had to pay a tax if he wanted to leave his village permanently and his land could be confiscated if left uncultivated for three years in succession.48

Because their analysis was based on the argument that the Asiatic mode of production prevailed in the Ottoman lands before incorporation into the world economy, the reconciliation of opposing arguments on free and unfree labour became possible, at least in a chronological sense. In fact, such an argument could also be found in earlier articles by Barkan (1935–36 and 1943), which analysed agrarian reforms of the post-World War I period in the Balkan countries and respective transformations in agrarian regimes.49 Barkan put forth in these articles an argument which paralleled that of Braudel yet pre-dated him. According to Barkan, spectres of the old (pre-Ottoman) feudal regime re-emerged from the eighteenth century onwards, by way of resurrecting serfdom relations during the formation of large estates, çiftliks, found in the Balkans.50 But such a resurrection, always in line with the conclusion of the 1956 article, was nothing but the result of the ‘degeneration’ of the Ottoman classical agrarian regime, composed of free peasants under the rule of a well-ordered central state.51 We can, therefore, conclude that Barkan and Braudel both shared observations on the evolution of agrarian labour relations in the Balkan çiftliks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially on peasant bondage to the soil. But by focusing on different historical periods, each weighted in a completely disproportional way the degree of peasant subjection: the former privileged ‘new serfdom’ in his research, while the latter favoured ‘free cultivators’. Nevertheless, in contrast to the ‘degeneration’ thesis of Barkan found in the 1943 article, some scholars following his approach observed a relative, rather than a radical, transformation in labour relations in the Ottoman countryside. Faroqhi agreed on the fact that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, ‘peasants ended up as day-labourers or sharecroppers, and their quality of life sank accordingly’. However, she also argued that: this process differed significantly from the ‘second serfdom’ introduced into central and eastern Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, to which it

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is often compared. For the landed aristocrats of Eastern Europe who reduced the farmers on their estates to serfs could count on the support of the crown. By contrast, this was not the case in the Ottoman territories. … However, the sultan always refused to grant a legal basis to the subordination of agricultural laborers to their masters.52

In a similar vein, Gilles Veinstein observed a continuity in the traditional status of the peasants as formulated within the çift-hane system, which organized rural society and economy on the basis of peasant families in possession of a pair of oxen. Referring to Bruce McGowan, he proposed that: the Ottoman government never had to acknowledge and legitimate by official dispositions a new social and legal status for the peasants, something tantamount to the second serfdom spelled out in edicts by central European governments. Contrary to the assumption of Stoianovich and Braudel, such an evolution did not occur in the Ottoman Empire, neither de facto nor de jure.53

Peasant Units’ Simultaneous Mobility and Bondage to the Soil Despite Veinstein’s effort to find support for the argument of a free peasantry, the discussion of the çift-hane system and its continuity was represented differently in the works of Halil İnalcık and Bruce McGowan. In contrast to the studies discussed above, they characterized the condition of Balkan peasant units by the co-existence of, and oscillations between, mobility and bondage to the soil. İnalcık’s interpretation of dependency and freedom had, indeed, a Chayanovian perspective: Chayanov’s theory … furnishes a comprehensive framework for understanding the basic agrarian structure in the core lands of the Ottoman Empire. However, it is necessary to add that the most important pre-requisite for the continuity of such a system appears to have been centralist state control over land possession and family labor. An Imperial bureaucracy had systematically to struggle to eliminate encroachments of local lords, while concomitantly striving to prevent its own provincial agents from transforming themselves into provincial gentry. In this system, the peasant was both dependent and free: ‘dependent’ in the sense that his mobility and use of land were regulated strictly by the state to ensure that he surrendered to the government whatever amount of revenue had been decided in the state registers, and ‘free’ in the sense that he could independently organize the production of the family farm and no one could use his labor arbitrarily.54

Despite the fact that tension between mobility and bondage characterized the conditions of the peasantry, İnalcık also acknowledged, referring

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to Barkan’s research on servile labour, the use of unfree labour on large estates, especially on state farms and waqf (pious foundation) çiftliks managed by powerful members of the ruling class: the reaya, free peasants registered in the state survey books for taxation in a defined area, could not, under the law, be used in the newly established farm lands. The majority of the privately owned çiftliks and many of the state farms and trusts were formed on the uncultivated waste-lands, pastures, and uninhabited lands with servile labor.55

In his influential article discussing the çiftlik question, on the one hand, he favoured internal factors rather than external factors in their genesis; and on the other, he reiterated his argument based on the existence of servile labour outside the çift-hane system.56 What differentiated İnalcık’s analysis from that of Barkan was his emphasis on the relationship between peasant and landlord, and between the peasantry and the state, as well as his recognition of peasant bondage to the soil in addition to the freedom that they exercised. Bruce McGowan, in his critical stance on Braudel and Wallerstein’s ‘temptation to relate the quasi-serfdom (the reaya institution) established by the Ottomans directly to the “second” or “later” serfdom which developed more or less contemporaneously throughout Eastern Europe’, rejected not only the category of second serfdom but also that of free peasantry, when describing the Ottoman peasantry.57 He argued that ‘a sparsely populated countryside’ and ‘fierce competition for labour between landholders’ characterized late Byzantine geography as well as Ottoman economic geography. The Ottoman state that inherited it continued, therefore, to impose some form of serfdom on the peasants – restrictions on their ability to leave the land and the capacity to alienate a peasant’s rights to land. A peasant’s right to remain on the land and to pass on his tenure to his heirs constituted the basis of the quasi-serfdom of the peasantry in the Ottoman lands.58 Under these conditions, McGowan observed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘the usurpation of labor force, that is, the alienation of cultivators from the miri system (cultivation of stateowned lands by çift-hanes) by çiftlik owners who attracted, and then harbored fugitives’.59 He stressed that until the 1630s, peasants who had fled continued to pay çift-bozan to the sipahi (spahi). But as the population declined and the labour shortage became acute in the seventeenth century, regulations enforcing the return of fugitives began to appear in order to conserve the integrity of the tımar and the miri status of the land. Additionally, the increasing use of avarız (tax house) registers

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imposing collective fiscal responsibility on communities reinforced such a trend from the fiscal point of view of the central government.60 The transition from the rule which demanded only compensation to a regime demanding the return of fugitives was not smooth. In 1636 there appeared an imperial rescript (hatt-ı hümayun) requiring the return of fugitives to their villages of registration up to a limit of forty years after their flight. Yet two years later there appeared a ferman [firman] stipulating a limitation of ten years on returns, while in 1641 yet another ferman stipulated application of the compensation rule, an apparent reversion. In fact an exhaustive study of the reaya institution recently completed by Aleksandar Matkovski shows that the Ottomans never fully made up their minds on the matter of limitations, so that although return of fugitive reaya was demanded by law for over two centuries preceding the Tanzimat, the term of limitation applied alternated between ten, twenty, thirty and forty years or, in the case of pious (vakıf) land, no limitation at all. The most commonly applied rule, however, was the ten years rule.61

After analysing the avarız registers, which registered peasants or bound them to their place of registry from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, McGowan reached a controversial result, taking into consideration the above-mentioned restrictions on peasant mobility, on the one hand, and their eventual flight, on the other, which could be derived from data showing an abrupt decrease in tax houses. His tables reveal the descriptive potential of the tax house system itself, the spatial distribution of implied economic and demographic strength throughout the European and Asiatic provinces. … We are left to wonder at the swift fall in the overall number of tax houses in the period 1650–1700, particularly on the European (Rumeli) side. Even if we hypothesize that the average size of the tax house was allowed to grow, we must then explain why the European totals fall so much further and faster. Also puzzling is the fact that figures for the most heavily chiftlicized zones of the latter seventeenth century – Thessaly (Tırhala) and Salonica (Selanik) – fell the furthest. What does this imply?62

S¸evket Pamuk, in his discussion on the relations of production in agriculture during the nineteenth century, depicted another version of the argument on peasant mobility and simultaneous bondage to the soil. His analysis was based on the differentiation and subsequent categorization of labour organizations in the Ottoman countryside, dependent on the economic and social dynamics of each province. According to him, ‘the relative scarcity of labour, availability of marginal lands, dominance of small peasant ownership and the limited nature of capital accumulation’ in Western Anatolia, Thrace, Northern Greece, led the large landowners

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‘to rent their land out to sharecropper families who represented a relatively inexpensive source of labor power’ and ‘did not have the means to cultivate marginal lands on their own’.63 Pamuk distinguished two different forms of sharecropping in large estates found in these regions: in Western Anatolia, ties between landlords and peasants were weaker and ‘sharecropping represented a more limited, economic arrangement for rent payments’;64 in the Selanik and Manastır provinces of Northern Greece, bonds between landlords and peasants were quite strong, and the corvée, despite its official abolition in the European provinces of the Empire in 1818 and 1839, dominated relations of production throughout the nineteenth century.65 In the third section of this chapter, we will discuss how these ‘strong bonds’ evolved and imposed on the peasants harsher conditions of bondage to the soil in the mid nineteenth century. However, before doing so, in order to better evaluate the strength of these bonds, we will discuss in the next sub-section the historiography concerning labour relations in the Ottoman Balkans, with regards to the dynamics of serfdom.

The Dynamics of Serfdom in the Ottoman Lands Sir Hamilton Gibb and Harold Bowen, in their classical work on the Ottoman Empire, observed that ‘the rights and duties of peasants were … well balanced’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they also advanced the argument that regulations ‘virtually bound the peasantry to the soil’: Peasant families might wish to abandon their holdings, and migrate to other fiefs or properties where they would be welcome because they must pay tapu [fee for possession of çift-hane] before acquiring a new tasarruf [possession of çift-hane], or take up other ways of life. Such movements, however, were not at all to the government’s taste. Its object was to keep its feudal cavalry and the other beneficiaries of the fief-system properly supplied with revenues. Hence Kanuns [provincial codes] were promulgated that virtually bound the peasantry to the soil, except in so far as landowners sanctioned migration. The latter might force migrant peasants to return to their original holdings up to ten years from the date of departure. Peasants were thus obliged to work and provide revenues for the landowners, unless they chose to starve: in fact they were virtually serfs, even in theory.66

Indeed, many scholars who subscribed to the Marxist analysis of relations of production observed in the Ottoman countryside from the fifteenth century onwards a feudal society and the conflictual evolution of serfdom dynamics among the peasantry. Among them, Bistra A. Cvetkova, whose

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several works also constituted the basis of Braudel’s discussion on ‘aristocracies in Turkey’ just before his discussion on the çiftliks,67 proposed that peasants became officially servile and bound to the soil when they were registered during the census of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; once registered, peasants undertook obligations to cultivate the land for the benefit of both the state (the supreme proprietor) and the feudal landlord (sahib-i arz and sahib-i raiyyet).68 The central state, in order to protect the interests of feudal landlords in exchange for their military and administrative support, forbade the peasantry to allow the land to lie fallow and imposed measures to prevent their flight from the feudal domain.69 As Halil Berktay put forward, peasants were not free and ‘the superimposition of the political relationship on the surplus-extraction relationship applies to the Ottoman Empire as to any (other) feudal society’.70 In such a context, Berktay depicted feudalism as a conflictual relationship between the rent-collecting classes and a class of peasant direct producers in possession of their own small economies, who have to be tied to the land (and otherwise coerced extra-economically) to make possible the appropriation of their surplus labour.71 According to Vera P. Moutafchieva, the feudal restrictions imposed on the peasants were only in force if they possessed land included in a fief; the first restriction concerned their mobility, on the basis of migration conditions known as celay-ı vatan: The categorical decree that bound the peasant to the land dates from the reign of Beyazit II: ‘According to the old law, if a settled raiyet [peasant subject], whatever he might be, should move, let him be returned to his place’. ‘But if any person of the raiyye [peasant subject] category should live in a town for fifteen years … according to the law, he is not a raiyet, he is a townsman’. Many similar laws from the reign of Süleyman I prove that this measure had become generally applied, although the term for the return of peasants who had left illegally was still not uniform, it varied from ten to twenty years.72

After an analysis of several cases from court records on peasant flight, Moutafchieva concluded that: The task of searching for the runaways belonged to the kadis [local judges], but, in all probability, this was done by the interested parties, the feudal lords themselves. The sipahi would summon the runaway to the kadi court, and the peasant would be obliged to prove the time that had elapsed since his departure. If this period was less than ten years, the raiyet was returned to his former place of residence by the organs of the government.73

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The second measure restricting peasant mobility was the imposition of çift-bozan: If, however, his move had taken place sufficiently long ago, he would pay his former sipahi the required sum for çift bozan and thus wipe the slate clean as far as his old debts were concerned.74

Thirdly, as a proof of peasant dependency, Moutafchieva underlined the prohibition of leaving the land uncultivated for more than three years: During the reign of Mehmet II, this period was limited to one year, but in the kanunnames of the sixteenth century, it was without exception equal to three years, after which the sipahi was empowered to issue a deed for the land to another person.75

Within such a contextualization of relations of production in the Ottoman ‘classical age’, Aleksandar Matkovski, who studied peasant resistance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, proposed that the flight of peasants constituted one form of anti-feudal struggle, allowing them to escape from the intense exploitation of feudal lords, to attach themselves to another lord whose conditions were more tolerable, or to settle in the city or flee to the mountains where animal husbandry represented freedom from bondage to the soil.76 According to a firman (imperial edict) dated 1634, even if it was accepted as a regulation that it was not possible to force a peasant who spent ten years in a village to return to their old estate, because of the increasing dispersal of peasants it was ordered that peasants who had settled elsewhere, if forty years had not elapsed from the day of their flight, must return to their old village.77 In another firman dated May 1635 and analysed by Matkovski, it was ordered that a peasant had to return to their old village however much time had passed since their displacement, even if they had paid their taxes for twenty or forty years in the new village. Matkovski also underlined that regulations from the seventeenth century, related to the mobility of peasants who lived in waqf villages and on sultans’ estates, were even more severe; there was no time limit at all. Other measures that Matkovski highlighted from the court registers were collective fiscal responsibility that bound peasants to each other, the imposition of double ös¸r (tithe) to runaways (one to the older sipahi and one to the new sipahi) and the imposition of çift-bozan to compensate for the loss of a sipahi because the land would become uncultivated after the flight of a peasant.78 Cvetkova argued that the increase in feudal charges and the oppression of feudal landlords from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries

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resulted in the Balkans’ anti-feudal movements. As social resistance took the form of peasant flights and runaways, according to her research, the central state in collaboration with feudal landlords counteracted by imposing serfdom regulations, even up to the nineteenth century.79 It is within this historical context that we will discuss, in the next section, peasant bondage to the soil in Tırhala and in the Balkans, during the nineteenth century.

Bondage to the Soil in Nineteenth-Century Tırhala The Sharecroppers of Tırhala in 1851 In 1851, Ion Ionescu de la Brad (1818–91)80 made a four-month trip to the Tırhala district of the province of Selanik (today Thessaloniki).81 The results of his fieldwork were published in the Journal de Constantinople throughout 1851. In his articles, Ionescu noted that two types of land tenure existed in Tırhala:82 small peasant holdings farmed by individual peasant households in the simple villages called kefalochoria, and large estates, çiftliks, cultivated by sharecroppers in the çiftlik villages.83 According to the figures he provided, 187 kefalochoria villages and nearly 500 çiftliks existed in the Tırhala district.84 In the çiftliks, peasants who did not have any land farmed by ‘associating’ with çiftlik-holders on the condition that the yield products were shared. Ion Ionescu argued that the high land–labour ratio of the region resulted in scarce and expensive labour, on the one hand, and available and cheap land, on the other. The landlord therefore engaged in annual advances in fixed and circulating capital: the landlord gave as fixed capital land, pastures and some plots of land for the cultivation of vineyards and fruit orchards; and as circulating capital, seeds and firewood. And because sharecroppers had neither land nor houses, the landlord also provided rural buildings in which sharecroppers could live. As for advances from the circulating capital necessary for buying and feeding plough animals, paying the wages of day labourers and buying household provisions, all these became debts owed by the sharecroppers, who would pay off advances and the interest by their labour.85 According to Ion Ionescu’s calculations, advances from fixed capital constituted in total, on average, 1,330 piastres (p.) per sharecropper household.86 Production figures showed, however, a social differentiation among sharecroppers: some of them were richer and some were poorer.87 Ion Ionescu argued that such a phenomenon depended on the sharecropping organization practised in Tırhala, since the sharing

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of production concerned only vegetable cultivation and not livestock breeding. The fact that sharecroppers could profit exclusively and entirely from livestock breeding encouraged those who had the means to invest in it.88 Given this differentiation, ‘rich sharecroppers’ who had livestock made advances of animals to ‘poor sharecroppers’ who did not have draught animals. According to Ion Ionescu’s observations, sharecroppers without livestock shared their production first with the landlord by giving him one-third of the annual production; they then shared the remaining two-thirds in equal parts with the rich sharecroppers who had advanced them livestock.89 Ion Ionescu observed that under these conditions, the poor sharecropper found himself unable to pay off the interest and could not even think thereafter of refunding the circulating capital advanced by the landlord. In such a depressed situation, sharecroppers restricted the cultivation of cereals or abandoned it totally. In Tırhala, the large estates consisted therefore of sharecroppers who held a huge debt burden holding back cultivation, and sharecroppers without debt yielding a higher rent for the land and higher interest on the capital. As for the account of production among the ‘associates’, according to the figures of Ion Ionescu, the average production of a sharecropper being 1,500 p., the sum to be shared after the deduction of ös¸r (10 per cent) was 1,350 p. – the landlord received 450 p., one-third of production, and the sharecropper received 900 p., two-thirds of production. This meant that the landlord who made an advance of 1,330 p. at the beginning of the production year would lose 880 p. (1,330 minus 450) at the end of each year; in other words, two-thirds of his advances.90 Therefore, we can conclude from this that landlords were living through a crisis of profitability.

Sharecroppers of Tırhala between 1853 and 1857 In 1853, Ion Ionescu left his office in Istanbul and worked until 1857 as the director/manager of eighteen Emlâk-ı Hümayun çiftliks held by Mustafa Res¸id Pasha in Tırhala.91 During these years, he continued to publish reform-minded articles in the Journal de Constantinople and prepare reports to be presented to the local and central administration. In his reports of 1854 and 1855, he differentiated three types of landholding and their respective indebtedness patterns in Tırhala:92 small peasant holdings in kefalochoria, the large estate holdings of the beys (notables) and ag˘as (landlords) of the district, and the large estates of the Emlâk-ı Hümayun managed by entrepreneurs. In other words, the

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discussion of large estates was thereafter divided under two headings: the large estates of beys and ag˘as, and those of the Emlâk-ı Hümayun.

Çiftliks of Beys and Ag˘as of the District Tırhala had some large estates whose holders were Muslim beys and ag˘as from Yenis¸ehir-i Fener (Larisa) and Tırhala.93 These çiftliks, 570 in number, were under a sharecropping organization coordinated by a particular managerial system called subas¸ılık. In the case of those situated on the lower slopes of the mountains, the çiftlik-holder, who usually paid half of the expenses of the harvest, shared the produce in equal parts (1/2) with sharecroppers, after taking the seed already advanced. In those situated on the plain and also in the valley of Tempi and Olympos, the çiftlik-holder did not contribute to any of the costs of labour or harvest, he did not give the seed, and he received one-third of the production, while the sharecroppers received two-thirds.94 The çiftlik-holder owned the land of the estate and all that depended on it, such as houses, forests, pastures and so on; the cultivator only owned the agricultural equipment and draught animals. The cultivator was obliged to farm the land, to prepare and seed it at his own expense. At the time of harvest, on çiftliks in which the sharing proportion was halved, the çiftlik-holder, or more likely the manager, the subas¸ı, paid half of the expenses incurred by the harvesters,95 and the cultivator had to thresh the cereals and transport them, after the sharing, to the stores of the property owner. On çiftliks in which the sharing proportion was one-third to two-thirds, it was the subas¸ı who advanced annual expenses to cultivators as credit.96

Çiftliks of Emlâk-ı Hümayun According to Ion Ionescu, the çiftliks of the Emlâk-ı Hümayun dependent on the Imperial Treasury numbered 721; they were sold in return for a down payment and instalments to entrepreneurs in order to be managed on the spot by subas¸ıs.97 In Tırhala, these consisted largely of Tepedelenli Ali Pasha and his sons’ çiftliks, which had been confiscated by the Darbhane-i Amire (Imperial Mint) in 1820.98 In fact, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, the Imperial Mint began to take control of more and more çiftliks and tımars as mukataas (tax farm units); the confiscation of çiftliks of deposed ayan (local notables) in the early nineteenth century multiplied their number.99 During the Tanzimat period, it was the Imperial Treasury that farmed them out

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to entrepreneurs, who were generally absentee holders including pashas holding high offices in the central or provincial administration and financiers from Galata, the financial centre of Istanbul.100 In this category, the çiftlik-holder gave the necessary seed to each sharecropper, paid half of the expenses of the harvest, and received, after the deduction of ös¸r and the next year’s seed, half of the produce. The sharecropper was obliged to prepare the land for seeding, thresh the wheat and bring it to the store of the çiftlik-holder.101 The sharecropper or ‘vassal farmer’,102 as defined by Ion Ionescu, of an estate did not possess any agricultural equipment or draught animals, with the exception of a few croppers who were rich enough to be able to replace an ox. After a bad harvest year, by way of a loan at 20 per cent interest, the subas¸ı advanced to ‘vassals’ the wheat they needed, and he paid their tax, their cizye (poll-tax) and so on; all of this constituted the debt of the sharecroppers. Out of fifteen thousand ‘vassal families’ in çiftliks belonging to individuals, there were very few çiftliks that owed only 10,000 to 20,000 p.103 Why did Ion Ionescu call the sharecroppers of Tırhala ‘vassals’ or ‘vassal farmers’? According to the example given by him, a proprietor who in 1855 paid 100,000 p. for a çiftlik bought not only agricultural fields, forests and pastures dependent on it, but also a village consisting of twelve çifts and twenty-four houses (a çift consisted of two ploughs, two families and eight oxen). The çiftlik contained additionally a large manor, granaries, barns, stables, about ten other houses, which were rented during the winter to Wallachian nomad shepherds, and last but not least, the individuals born in the çiftlik. This last item might appear paradoxical, according to Ion Ionescu, ‘but it is nonetheless true, that (only) in Thessaly a sharecropper, even if he is not really a slave of the proprietor, cannot leave the village to work anywhere else on pain of imprisonment’.104 Bound to the soil and not to the çiftlik-holder, such a ‘vassal farmer’ did not own anything personally; he brought into the ‘association’ nothing but his limbs, his agricultural knowledge, his health, the work of all his family, and if he were rich enough to buy them, his equipment and his plough animals.105 Ion Ionescu concluded therefore that the sharecroppers of Tırhala lived within the context of soaring tension between bondage to the soil and dispersion.106 Dispersed people either fled from the çiftlik to the mountains for a nomadic life, or simply abandoned cultivation while continuing to live in the çiftlik.107 One of the material impetuses behind this was animal breeding, as already observed to a certain extent by Ion Ionescu during his earlier fieldwork. However, as a manager of çiftliks who had to defend the çiftlik-holder’s interests, he

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characterized perakende (dispersed) people as ‘parasites’, since they did not work for the çiftlik-holders and lived at the expense of others. The vital question for çiftlik-holders was how to bind potential ‘parasites’ to the soil and prevent dispersion in such a way that the stability of cultivation and production was assured. In such a context, the cultivators’ indebtedness (to either çiftlik-holders or subas¸ıs) was to serve as a tool to bind the peasants to the soil. But such debt bondage, despite its positive effect on bondage to the soil, according to Ion Ionescu’s analysis, apparently served the interests of subas¸ıs and other local intermediaries more than the interests of the çiftlik-holders. Such a context of disorder was not only fed by, but also further deepened, the social distress of a region whose agricultural economy was organized by sharecropping arrangements on large estates. For cultivators who became increasingly bound to the land in the çiftliks, nomadic life based not only on animal husbandry but also on brigandage was a solution; but such a nomadic life endangered the çiftlik’s agricultural economy in terms of both labour and security.108 Indeed, in the report presented to Res¸id Pasha, Ion Ionescu complained particularly of the (historical) tendency to suspend the cultivation of fields in favour of animal breeding.109 According to him, in recent years forty-four families had totally abandoned cultivation in the çiftlik of Lefterochori; out of 806 families living on the çiftliks of Res¸id Pasha, there were only 364 families who cultivated the land; others, as ‘parasites’, raised income from animal husbandry without paying rent on pastures or sharing animal products.110

Komisyon-ı Mahsus and the Bylaw of Tırhala In 1857, the deputy governor of Tırhala, Hüsnü Pasha, established a komisyon-ı mahsus (special commission) composed of notables, çiftlikholders and ‘esteemed members of the agricultural and Christian population’.111 Its task, to all appearances, was to negotiate ways in which the conditions of oppression and indebtedness that cultivators of çiftliks suffered were to be relieved; its task, in actual fact, was to negotiate ways in which the post of subas¸ı could be abolished and sharecropper dispersion be prevented, in order to increase production and profit levels in the çiftliks. In such a context, the pasha nominated as president of the commission Giritli Cemal Efendi,112 who in June 1857 replaced Ion Ionescu in the post of manager of the çiftliks of Res¸id Pasha.113 The commission, whose composition became biased towards absentee pashas, discussed the predominant social question in the district, in order to seek ways of promoting agricultural productivity and profitability within

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sharecropping relations. Although the commission came close to setting up an arrangement in 1857, some members caused the breakdown of the agreement: the work of the commission was impaired and the layiha (bylaw) that was in preparation became stuck at draft stage.114 In 1859, Hüsnü Pasha became the governor of Selanik, on which the district of Tırhala depended. He summoned all parties for another meeting of the commission. In spite of the constant opposition of some members, Hüsnü Pasha’s authoritarian statement on the necessity of reform resulted in decisive negotiations among the members of the commission, and finally, on 10 June 1860, in the signing of a bylaw. The bylaw contained twenty-six articles.115 The Meclis-i Vala-ı Ahkam-ı Adliye (Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances), functioning as both the legislative council and the court of cassation, decided in February 1862 in favour of the bylaw’s approval on condition of the revision of some articles. The final version included, therefore, both the articles of the commission as they were and the postscripts of the Meclis-i Vala.116 The twenty-sixth article of the bylaw, however, represented the only exception in the revising and approval process. The Meclis resolved in the final step on its exclusion from the bylaw, in spite of the existence of a postscript attached to it. Finally, on 7 April 1862, the irade-i seniyye (imperial rescript) officially approving the bylaw was signed by the sultan, and accordingly the bylaw, consisting of twenty-five articles, was not only to be inscribed in the registers of the Divan-ı Hümayun (Imperial Chancery) and the Treasury, but also one thousand Turkish and three thousand Greek copies were to be printed and distributed throughout the district.117 What the bylaw decreed can be summarized in six headings: abolition of the subas¸ılık; revision of the obligations in the çiftlik; regulation of the credit market; restrictions on animal husbandry; redefinition of property and customary rights; and bondage to the soil. The cultivators’ desire to be mobile for subsistence needs and the landlords’ desire to bind them to the soil for higher profits represented, however, the essential problem of the bylaw. The tone of the bill becomes more apparent when one considers several articles (Articles 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 24), although contested, on the restriction of animal husbandry in order to indirectly bind peasants to the land and cultivation. According to the reasoning of the commission, despite the fact that the preferred system was based on the development of agriculture, some cultivators were engaged in commerce by raising sheep and mares, selling wood and coal, and working as carriers. In order to push them into agriculture, the commission decreed the imposition of a pasture fee to be paid to the çiftlik-holder for animals raised for

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the market, in addition to animals raised for subsistence needs and used in cultivation: three gurus¸ per sheep and goat, and twenty gurus¸ per horse and mare raised on pastures suitable or unsuitable for agriculture. Otherwise, animals other than those used for subsistence and agricultural requirements were to be sold in order to buy oxen and tools for land cultivation. The commission made a similar statement concerning pig raising; because for quite a long time cultivators had increasingly been raising pigs for personal income, and those pigs were damaging fields, cultivators raising such destructive animals were to keep them in a pigsty and not to let them out. If they damaged fields, cultivators were to pay double the cost of the damage to the çiftlik-holder (Art. 16). In fact, the Meclis-i Vala agreed (in the postscript of Art. 5) that raising animals other than for subsistence and agricultural requirements was to incur a pasture fee, even if the fee was not going to the Treasury but to the çiftlik-holders. It added the reservation that there was no imposition on cows additionally raised. Limits on the number of animals to be raised were set by the commission as follows: two ploughs being equivalent to one çift, the cultivator using one plough could raise up to fifteen sheep, one cow and one donkey; with two çifts, up to thirty sheep, two cows and two donkeys; any other animals besides these were to be subject to a pasture fee (Art. 11).118 The limits were revised following some criticism, which voiced the demands of cultivators. The bylaw decreed, therefore, that cultivators were able to raise, without paying a pasture fee, up to twenty-five sheep or goats, two cows and one donkey per plough (Art. 24). The çiftlik-holder was to provide pasture, a shed and barn for the animals used in cultivation (Arts 6, 12), but if the cultivators needed more space for their additional animals, they were to rent it from the çiftlik-holder (Art. 12). The commission further reinforced the çiftlik-holders’ determination to bind cultivators to the land and to agriculture by direct statements on bondage to the soil. First, Article 21 of the bylaw discussed the conditions whereby cultivators cut back production: in the Hass and Bayırlar region and on some parts of the plain, cultivators generally harvested ten to twelve kara kile119 of wheat seed, three kara kile of barley seed, and a few seeds of other cereals; some of them, although they did not leave the land fallow, did not cultivate all of the seed and caused loss to the çiftlik-holder by cultivating less than the average production level. In such cases, the çiftlik-holder was to bring the issue to the local council of agriculture in order to obtain a judgement to indemnify lawfully half of the çiftlik-holder’s share in the first year. In the event of a recurrence, the cultivator was to indemnify the çiftlik-holder in proportion to the damage he had caused. The same procedure was to be applied in favour

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of the cultivators in the event of damage caused by the çiftlik-holder. On the other hand, the çiftlik-holder and the director were required to warn a cultivator who was damaging agricultural production; if the cultivator did not accept the accusation, he was to address himself to the local government, from where the case would be sent to the local council of agriculture for judgement. If the cultivator was at fault, the local government was, on the first occurrence, to warn him, and on the second occurrence to punish him; the third time it happened, they were to expel him from cultivation to the class of perakende. The bondage of cultivators to the soil therefore became possible by the collaboration of çiftlik-holders with the local administrative authority. The bylaw provided, moreover, for the election of four additional representatives, two çiftlik-holders and two cultivators, to the local council of agriculture, which was already composed of çiftlik-holders and people ‘competent’ in agriculture (Arts 22 and 23).120 Nonetheless, according to Article 21, the council of agriculture, by acquiring judiciary power over rural disputes, served in this context as a ‘manorial court’ in favour of the çiftlik-holders’ interests. The bylaw, therefore, legitimized the çiftlik-holders’ appropriation of not only local administrative but also local judicial authority. In addition to Article 21, the last article of the bylaw made clearer the condition of bondage to the soil in Tırhala (Art. 26): A cultivator who was born and grew up in a çiftlik, who was of native ancestry, could not be expelled by the çiftlik-holder unless he was at fault; on the other hand, according to the settlement conditions and regulations, he could never leave the country. A cultivator who was brought from another locality by the çiftlik-holder, or who entered the çiftlik on his own volition, could be expelled by the çiftlik-holder and/or was allowed to leave the çiftlik.121

The postscript inserted by the Meclis-i Vala did not really challenge the commission’s statement. Accordingly, even if it was appropriate on the basis of the settlement condition that natives could not leave the çiftlik they depended on, in the event of their being oppressed by the çiftlik-holder, such a condition would not be just and right. Alternatively, if they left the çiftlik, cultivation would be abandoned in such a way that it would damage the çiftlik’s agricultural output; therefore, the case of oppression had to be examined in order to prevent desertion by cultivators and a decision would be reached accordingly. Although Article 26 was eventually excluded from the final version of the bylaw by the irade decreeing it, it clearly reflected the heavy atmosphere prevailing in the çiftliks of Tırhala in the mid nineteenth century.122

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The bylaw established, in fact, the power of absentee çiftlik-holders over local çiftlik-holders, on the one hand, and the power of çiftlikholders (whether absentee or local) over sharecroppers, on the other. The abolition of the subas¸ılık and the related impositions based on it were to serve to undermine the institutional power base of the local çiftlik-holders, because they had close relations with the subas¸ıs, who were themselves mostly on the way to becoming çiftlik-holders. Nonetheless, the clauses of the bylaw aimed at increasing the control of çiftlik-holders over credit markets by directing the credit sources of cultivators from local power networks to çiftlik-holders in general, and absentee holders in particular. Indeed, the high-finance circles of Galata, who pursued their own war in the credit markets, were also supporting absentee holders in undermining the power base of local landholding interests.123 In this context of fierce competition, the bylaw strengthened the loose connection between absentee pashas and the district. In spite of their competition, the motivation of the çiftlik-holders, both absentee and local, to achieve an increase in agricultural production and profitability, if not outright stability, led them to collaborate in order to increase labour control in the district. The historical dynamics of a conflicting and exclusive relationship between settled agricultural activity inclining to bondage to the soil, and nomadic animal husbandry leaning to both mobility and brigandage, shaped economic and social life in the district. Cultivators were living through the dilemma of being either farmers, bound to the soil, or perakendes, wandering in search of subsistence. The regulation of the bylaw on sharecropping labour was, then, twofold. At first, the çiftlik-holders introduced indirect measures to bind cultivators to the land, such as the imposition of rents on the use of çiftlik properties, the imposition of a pasture fee, and a limitation on animals to be raised in the çiftlik. Such restrictions on animal breeding or rents on seasonal grazing in pastures had already existed since the sixteenth century; they were paid to the sipahis before they became increasingly subject to tax farming, from the seventeenth century onwards.124 In 1840, with the fiscal reforms of the Tanzimat, they started to be collected by officials dependent on the central government, and constituted one of the revenue items of the central treasury even after the reintroduction of tax farming into the fiscal system.125 In such a context, the decision of the commission to let çiftlik-holders impose, on their own account, pasture fees on cultivators, and its approval by the central government, throws light on the driving force behind the bylaw: the çiftlik-holders’ exclusive material interest at the expense of the cultivators’ customary subsistence rights.

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Secondly, the regulation of the bylaw on sharecropping labour in Tırhala brought about direct measures to bind cultivators to the land. In order to create conditions for stability in land cultivation, the çiftlikholders gained support for their action from the Land Code of 1858, which codified the rights of possession on lands of miri status. It was the contested character of the Code that enabled this support; despite several articles of the Code instituting an individual property regime on land, several articles inherited from earlier codifications conserved the composite character of the older property regime.126 More particularly, the articles of the Code on dispossession, in the case of lands that remained uncultivated for three consecutive years for no legitimate reason, were adopted into the bylaw. But the inclusion brought about additional impositions on cultivators who did not cultivate the land, such as increasing indemnities for each year of interruption in cultivation. Such instrumental adoption was to give the çiftlik-holders another particular judicial tool in binding sharecroppers to the soil and cultivation. The final blow of the bylaw, despite its exclusion from the final version, was Article 26, which directly decreed bondage to the soil in Tırhala. Such a restrictive regulation on labour mobility existed already in the codes of the early modern period under the title celay-ı vatan, the conditions of which have been exposed especially by the historiography on the serfdom dynamics of the peasantry in the Balkans. Çiftlik-holders of Tırhala, in spite of their abortive challenge, searched to introduce even harsher conditions than those set by the regulations of earlier centuries. The time limit to force runaway peasants to return to their ‘home’ was, in general, ten years in the older regulations; however, no time limit was set in the bylaw of Tırhala as codified by the special commission. In other words, peasants could ‘never’ leave the country. The history of sharecropping in mid-nineteenth-century Tırhala reveals, therefore, that labour bondage to the soil, as regulated in the codes of the early modern period and as reinforced in the context of the economic and social transformation of Ottoman society in the eighteenth century, survived well into the mid nineteenth century. The difference was that in the mid nineteenth century the quest for a more profitable form of agriculture, as one can observe from Ion Ionescu’s managerial activity in the çiftliks, was the leading impetus behind it. Although the defining character of competition between landlords, and production relations between landlords and peasants, was political in the early modern period, in the mid nineteenth century it was primarily economic; in other words, the peasantry’s political subjection was in the process of being transformed into economic subjection, despite a continuity in the conditioning character of bondage to the soil.

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Was the Bylaw of Tırhala Unique in the Imposition of Bondage to the Soil on Sharecroppers? The Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century, moving from the dissolution of indeterminate/collective property structures to the institutionalization of an individual/exclusive property regime, brought about radical economic and social transformation and engendered a long period of restlessness in the Ottoman countryside. The tension created by this transformation was greater in sharecropping regions where social classes were more differentiated. Special regulatory commissions in addition to that of Tırhala were established in the 1840s and 1870s in regions where agricultural production was mostly organized around çiftlik units and sharecropping regimes, varying from one locality to another, and, depending on particular customary regulations, dominated the relations of production: the provinces of Yanya (today Ioannina), Vidin, Bosna and Canik, the districts of Nis¸ and Leskofça (today Leskovac, in the Ottoman province of Nis¸), the town of Parga (in the province of Yanya) and the sub-district of Karaferye (today Veria, in the Ottoman province of Selanik). As was the case in Tırhala, the work of each commission, consisting of local groups with conflicting interests (sharecroppers, peasants, farm managers, çiftlik-holders, notables, etc.) under the supervision of an imperial official, ended in the production of a legal document, a bylaw approved by the central government, which regulated and fixed social and economic relations locally. The local regulations produced by these commissions resulted in nothing but the institutionalization of already existing local social hierarchies and the consolidation of the interests of çiftlik-holders at the expense of those of intermediaries located in the çiftliks, and propertyless sharecroppers. They also had a lasting impact on Balkan geography, since they continued to be enforced in spite of the codification of sharecropping relations in the Mecelle (Civil Code) in 1876,127 until the implementation of the land reforms of the post-World War I period in Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.128 Although the economic and social context within which special commissions worked and bylaws were codified was nearly the same for each case, we may still ask whether all bylaws resulted in the imposition on sharecroppers of bondage to the soil, as those of Tırhala did. First, taking into consideration the indirect measures used to bind cultivators to the soil, the answer is affirmative for the bylaws of Yanya, Vidin, Leskofça and Karaferye. The bylaws of Yanya (1848), Vidin (1850), Leskofça (1859) and Karaferye (1865), by citing the sharecropper’s tendency to cut back cultivation in favour of animal breeding, which

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was not subject to the sharecropping set limits on animals to be raised in the çiftlik and imposed pasture fees for additional animals, stated the following: – Sharecroppers working in the çiftliks of Yanya were to raise at most 30 sheep and/or goats; they were to pay a kıyye (1300 gr.) of cheese per additional dozen sheep and/or goat and a lamb if their number exceeded 50; perakende people found in the çiftliks of Yanya were to pay as pasture fee 5 gurus¸ for any sheep and/or goat, 25 gurus¸ for any cow and horse; widows belonging to the perakende status were to raise at most 25 sheep and/or goats, they were to pay pasture fees for any additional ones.129 – Sharecroppers working in the çiftliks of Vidin were to pay as pasture fee 1 okka (1300 gr.) of cheese for each dozen sheep.130 – In Leskofça the sharecropper was not to transform arable fields found in his bas¸tine (çift-hane) into meadow (for additional animal breeding); if he did, he was to pay its icare-i zemin (land rent amounting to one-ninth of the harvest to be given to the landlord).131 – Sharecroppers working in the çiftliks of Karaferye were to raise at most 20 sheep and/or goats, two water buffalo, two cows and two unbroken horses; they were to pay as pasture fee 2 gurus¸ for any additional sheep and/or goat, 7 gurus¸ for any additional cow and unbroken horse, 10 gurus¸ for any other additional animals.132 – The bylaw of Parga (1875), different from other bylaws, depending on the dynamics of the local agrarian regime, bound sharecroppers (indirectly) not to the soil but to the orchards. According to it, as the cultivation of kokoroz (Indian corn – the basic subsistence crop of sharecroppers) in the fields and orchards was completely prohibited, saplings of lemon, orange and mulberry trees or vegetables were to be planted instead; if the sharecropper did not act thus, the landlord was to take over these fields.133

Second, taking into consideration the direct measures used to bind cultivators to the soil (or orchards), the answer to the above question is also affirmative for the bylaws of Nis¸ (1859), Leskofça (1859), Bosna (1842, 1859) and Parga (1875). – Both the bylaws of Nis¸ and Leskofça enacted that a peasant’s bas¸tine, composed of arable field, threshing floor, meadow, vineyard, wood and house, was to be cultivated by the peasant himself and was not to be let to anybody else, either by the landlord or the peasant himself; if the peasant did not cultivate the bas¸tine or give its icare-i zemin two years consecutively, the landlord was to give it to somebody else.134 – Bosna’s bylaw of 1842 stated that peasants were not to quit their land without a legitimate reason. If peasants refused, or simply pretended to fulfil their obligations and work in the çiftlik as they were supposed to do, in such

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a way that they hindered cultivation activity, the landlord was to resort to the gendarmerie and the judge in order to discipline him; if the disciplinary measures were not carried out, the landlord was free to fire him from the çiftlik and replace him with another peasant.135 – Bosna’s bylaw of 1859 codified that a landlord was not free to fire a peasant working in the çiftliks unless some conditions were met: if the peasant did not work and kept the land uncultivated in such a way as to cause loss or damage to the landlord, or if he did not give the share due to the landlord, or if he did not follow the clauses of the sharecropping contract, the landlord was to appeal to the local council which would then investigate the dispute. If it was not possible to discipline and rehabilitate the defective peasant, then the council had the right to fire the peasant from the çiftlik. On the other hand, if the peasant wished to quit the çiftlik, he was to give notice to the landlord after the harvest; if he quit without giving notice to the landlord, the damage he caused was to be indemnified by the local council.136 – Parga’s bylaw of 1875 enacted that as long as a sharecropper did not inform the çiftlik manager and have his name removed from the çiftlik register, he had no right to quit the orchards in his possession; if someone living in Parga wished to move and settle in another region, he had to relinquish the orchards in his possession.137

As such, the bylaws reflected the landlords’ point of view, or more precisely, their economic interest concerning cultivation stability. The articles on restricting labour mobility, by forcing sharecroppers to cultivate fields or orchards, expounded conditions where it was almost impossible to fire sharecroppers; in fact, firing was a last resort, to be used only if disciplining failed. In 1875, Cevdet Pasha, one of the most important statesmen of the Tanzimat period, especially because of the role he played in the codification of the Land Code (1858) and the Civil Code (1868–76), was the imperial official supervising the work of the special commission of Parga. As he saw conflicts from the perspective of the landlords, he underlined that the continuity of cultivation was of primary importance; according to him, to fulfil such a priority, on the one hand, landlords were obliged to keep sharecropper families on the land, but on the other, sharecroppers were not to be fired unless they refused to cultivated the land.138 In other words, sharecroppers who were obliged to cultivate the land had no right to leave the çiftliks – they were bound to the soil. The degree of their bondage as reflected in the bylaws differed, however, from one region to another depending on the conflictual relationship between landlords, intermediaries found in the çiftliks, and sharecroppers. Firstly, in comparison with the limits of animals allowed to be raised freely and the pasture fees set by the bylaw of Tırhala, those

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decreed by the bylaws of Yanya, Vidin, Leskofça and Karaferye represented relatively mild conditions for sharecroppers; secondly, regarding the restrictions on mobility, those set by the bylaws of Bosna and Tırhala were harsher than those of Nis¸, Leskofça and Parga, at least as detailed in the bylaws.

Conclusion According to a firman dated August 1838, a year before the declaration of the Tanzimat, and sent to the governors of Rumeli about ongoing unrest among the peasants, the condition of cultivators was not so different from the account described by Braudel: Notables in many parts of Rumeli treated the rayas [peasants] on their land as if they were their personal slaves,139 forcing them to work without pay on the fields of their çiftliks and exacting scores of other personal services from them. They did not allow the raya to move from one piece of land or one place of work to another, and they interfered even with their marriage arrangements.140

In such a context, what were the reactions of the cultivators? Much like Ion Ionescu, Dervis¸ Pasha, inspector of the çiftliks of the Emlâk-ı Hümayun found in Rumeli, reported in 1850 on the strong tendency of peasants to abandon cultivation in favour of animal raising and herding, woodcutting, and working as labourers.141 Another solution for them, however, was desertion, with ten peasants running away in 1852 from a çiftlik called Kalyon in the sub-county of Vardar, in the province of Selanik.142 Faced with desertion, efforts to bind cultivators to the soil were overwhelming. In the petition sent to the council of Selanik, the çiftlik-holder Mehmet Said Bey requested their recall to their meva-ı kadim (immemorial shelter) on the basis of çiftlikat ¸sürutu (conditions of the çiftliks). Requests to bind peasants to the soil, directed to the administrative bodies both local and central, were not exceptional in the mid-nineteenth-century Balkans region. In 1857, Ahmed Sermed Pasha, an absentee çiftlik-holder, as a member of the Meclis-i Muhasebe-i Maliye (Council of Fiscal Accounts) in the Ottoman capital, requested from the Meclis-i Vala the repatriation of sharecroppers who had left his çiftliks in Vardar-ı Kebir and Sagir, near Selanik, for their meva-ı kadimeleri (immemorial shelters).143 We do not have any more information about the above-mentioned desertion case from the çiftlik of Kalyon, but we do for the case of the çiftliks of Vardar. The Meclis-i Vala adjudicated

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the case and decided, in conformity with the request, on repatriation in May 1857. The basis of its decision was iskân hakkında ¸serait-i atike (the old regulation on settlement), which determined that the village in which someone had resided for at least ten years was to be his native village, and decreed the repatriation of deserters to their native villages within this ten-year period by force of the gendarmerie. This explication was nothing but a reiteration of the principles of celay-ı vatan inherited from the codes of the early modern period, despite not explicitly calling it so.144 A few months later, in August 1857, the alarming question of the flight of sharecroppers and labourers from one çiftlik to another led the Meclis-i Vala to re-address the question in a session. According to the minutes of the Meclis-i Vala, çiftlik-holders in the Balkan provinces claimed that sharecroppers and labourers resident in their çiftliks were their immemorial cultivators, and they refused to let them move away to another çiftlik. For the members of the Meclis-i Vala, the çiftlik-holders were employing them as if they were slaves, and the sharecroppers and labourers, in this context, were trying to free themselves from oppression and corvées. According to an argument put forward in the Meclis, sharecroppers were free to leave the çiftliks, but on condition that they did not leave the sub-district where they were living, and that the new çiftlik-holder register them with the local fiscal office. The administrative point of view was based on the integrity of fiscal units and stability in agricultural production on a district level. Even if this decision was deemed suitable, the Meclis-i Vala was reluctant to apply such a general ruling in the provinces and decided that local councils were to become institutions where such cases were to be deliberated and ratified. The Meclis-i Vala sent this decision to the provinces where çiftlik and sharecropping agriculture dominated the regional economy, namely Vidin, Yanya, Edirne, Selanik, Silistre, Rumeli, and to the district of Tırhala.145 Indeed, local çiftlik-holders who wanted to impose bondage to the soil on their sharecroppers or labourers first made use of local councils. Local councils composed of local landholders adjudicated in cases of flight mostly on the repatriation of deserters to the çiftliks to which they were bound. In 1861 the council of the sub-district of Tikves¸ in this way decided on the flight of eight sharecropper families from a çiftlik in Tikves¸ in the district of Manastır (Bitola) to another çiftlik in the subcounty of Vardar-ı Kebir in the sub-district of Selanik.146 Such cases of repatriation at the decision of a local council in fact reflected the competition among çiftlik-holders. The çiftlik-holder of Vardar-ı Kebir, in search of a labour force, took on the families of deserters who were searching for refuge by means of simply taking over their

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debts to the çiftlik-holder of Tikves¸. As the families were repatriated to Tikves¸, the case was reported to the central government by the çiftlikholder of Vardar-ı Kebir. In line with the decision of 1857 delivered by the Meclis-i Vala, the government left the final decision to the local council.147 Another petition from a çiftlik-holder in İvranya, Süleyman Bey, openly exposed the competitive environment in which çiftlik-holders were found.148 Petitioning in 1858 on the flight of fifteen labourers from his çiftlik, he argued that they had been deceived by another çiftlikholder, named Abdi Çorbacı, to work in a çiftlik found in Nis¸. Fearful of finding no solution to his problem in the local council, Süleyman Bey made a request to the central government that either they be repatriated or pay the debts owed to him. The central government decided in line with its decision of 1857, however, that the case was to be adjudicated in the local council. While the Meclis-i Vala approved the request of Ahmed Sermed Pasha on the question of repatriation, in the same year of 1857 it did not approve the petitions of others and left the decision to local councils. What made the Meclis-i Vala take these different decisions? The difference depended, in fact, in the cases of repatriation, on the degree of interference of absentee pashas holding high offices in the central administration or government: cases that were not adjudicated directly by the Meclis-i Vala were relegated to local çiftlik-holders. It is also important to note that Mustafa Res¸id Pasha, as one of the most important absentee çiftlik-holders, was the Grand Vizier heading the government in May 1857 when the Meclis-i Vala approved Ahmed Sermed Pasha’s request, and he was not in office in August 1857 when the council rejected the adjudication of other requests due to a lack of jurisprudence.149 To sum up, in the mid-nineteenth-century Balkans, peasant bondage to the soil was essential for the çiftlik-holder. But the quest for bound labour meant competition among çiftlik-holders. In such a context, the work of local councils and commissions, as well as that of the Meclis-i Vala, depended on competition among çiftlik-holders. Dervis¸ Pasha, inspector of the çiftliks of the Emlâk-ı Hümayun, reported in 1850 that while some çiftliks did not have enough labour for cultivation, some had more than enough.150 The competition in acquiring and binding a labour force was evident in such a context. Although absentee and local çiftlik-holders collaborated, on the theoretical level, in the preparation of bylaws, on the practical level, in the labour market, they competed ferociously. In the event of a confrontation between an absentee and a local landholder over the bondage of the labour force to the soil, absentee

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holders were in a more advantageous position, thanks to their political leverage in the Ottoman capital. Such a competitive environment became much more heated at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century when the Ottoman Balkans experienced a period of incessant social and economic crisis: as commodification extended its limits throughout the Ottoman countryside and the peasantry became dispossessed of individual and common property rights, the adjacent domains of debt bondage and bondage to the soil became increasingly intertwined. Cases of flight from one çiftlik to another increased and began to be heard gradually in the civil courts as lawsuits for debt following the Civil Code (Mecelle). Çiftlik-holders opposed to such a procedure requested first that such cases be heard not by the courts but urgently by the local councils and, secondly, demanded from the government a new law codifying the employment conditions of labourers and sharecroppers in the çiftliks.151 From a historical perspective, çiftlik-holders’ pursuit of economic interests resulted, in the 1850s, in the codification of provincial bylaws by special commissions and, in the 1910s, in the codification of a law by the Ottoman parliament. Despite the fact that the second initiative failed to achieve its ends due to the Balkan Wars, the evolution of the power of the çiftlik-holder class vis-à-vis the agrarian labouring class followed a linear, although contested path in the Ottoman Empire. To return to Braudel’s argument on bondage to the soil, the research pursued here shows that real serfdom based on bondage to the land existed during the nineteenth century in the Balkans in general, and in Thessaly in particular. Our research confirms, therefore, the factual grounds of Braudel’s argument. Nevertheless, it diverges from it by proposing that rather than a new or second serfdom, a continuity of peasant bondage to the soil prevailed in production relations from the early modern period onwards. Not only restrictive conditions on labour mobility but also the related classical administrative vocabulary of celay-ı vatan (i.e. meva-ı kadime, çiftlikat ¸sürutu, iskan ¸sürutu, etc.) survived in the petitions of çiftlik-holders and in the minutes of the local councils or the special commissions of the Tanzimat period. Furthermore, other regulations from the early modern period imposing either restrictions on peasant mobility (peasant dispossession in the case of lands that remained uncultivated for three consecutive years) or imposts on animal breeding and rents on pastures in order to attach peasants to land cultivation, survived in different bylaws prepared for the regulation of relations of production in the Balkan provinces. What was new in this context was, indeed, the capitalist dynamics that started to frame peasant bondage to the soil. As the research

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undertaken by Özer Ergenç, Traian Stoianovich and Deena Sadat suggested,152 urban notables, including high-ranked pashas, from the eighteenth century onwards began to invest in agricultural land. As absentee landownership started to prevail, sharecropping became the dominant form of labour organization in such investments; commercialization and increasing fiscal obligations pushed peasants to credit markets controlled by the same network of entrepreneurs. The subsequent development of debt bondage in the sharecropping units not only facilitated transmission of forms and conditions of bondage to the soil through the centuries, but also increased control over the labour force in order to maximize profitability and achieve stability in cultivation. Ion Ionescu’s managerial activity in Mustafa Res¸ id Pasha’s çiftliks in Tırhala represents the highest stage of such capitalist development under an unfree labour regime. But an objection could be raised to such an argument, as Braudel did for the case of second serfdom dynamics in Eastern Europe: But to return to our original question, what, among all the many aspects of the second serfdom, had anything to do with capitalism? … It does seem to me that the second serfdom was the counterpart of a merchant capitalism which discovered in the structures of Eastern Europe certain advantages and even in some cases its raison d’être. The great landowner was not a capitalist, but he was a tool and a collaborator in the service of capitalism in Amsterdam and elsewhere. He was part of the system. … This was not a feudal system since, far from being a self-sufficient economy, this was a system in which, as Kula himself says, the noble was seeking, by every traditional means, a way of increasing the quantity of grain for marketing. Nor was it, by any means, a modern capitalist agriculture on the English model. This was a monopoly economy: there was monopoly of production, monopoly of distribution, and all in the service of an international system itself thoroughly and indisputably capitalist.153

Firstly, recent research has challenged Braudel’s argument that underlined the exclusive impact of export trade on the agricultural production of peripheral regions and its successor variant found in the World System Analysis. On the basis of extensive quantitative research on Macedonian agriculture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ahmet Akarlı argued that urban growth and the subsequent rise in domestic and urban demand, in addition to export demand, provided a progressive impetus to labour-intensive commercial agriculture in the Macedonian hinterlands.154 Secondly, the causality in Braudel’s argument runs from exchange relations to production relations; in his model, production relations

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represent a dependent variable and exchange relations an independent one. From a theoretical perspective, our research diverges from that of Braudel; in this chapter, we have concentrated exclusively on the dynamics of relations of production and argued that peasant bondage to the soil served nothing but the economic interests of çiftlik-holders who were searching for profitability and stability in production. We have underlined that local administrative and judicial bodies of the Tanzimat period became scenes of pursuit of these economic interests, and arenas where fierce competition among local and/or absentee çiftlik-holders for not only acquiring labour but also binding labourers to the soil was displayed. Rather than a ‘monopoly economy’, as suggested by Braudel for Eastern Europe, we argue that in the Balkans a competitive economy in search of profitability carried the day. Such a conclusion also follows up the recent research of Tom Brass, who stressed that capitalist enterprises reintroduce or reproduce labour relations that are unfree, even – contrary to Braudel’s argument – ones inscribed into ‘the English model’.155 In conclusion, in the nineteenth century, in the Balkans in general, and in Tırhala in particular, the çiftlik-holders’ competitive quest for agricultural profitability did not exclude labour bondage to the soil; it even reinforced it during a period of social and economic crisis. Prof. Alp Yücel Kaya teaches Economic History and Political Economy at the Department of Economics, Ege University, İzmir. He studied at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on the conflictual world of property relations and agrarian transformation in France, the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. He is the author of ‘On the Çiftlik Regulation in Tırhala in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Economists, Pashas, Governors, Çiftlik-Holders, Subas¸ıs, and Sharecroppers’, in Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies, edited by Elias Kolovos (Crete University Press, 2015).

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Notes This research was funded by a grant from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK, Project number 112K263, 2012–15). I would like to thank the project team, Yücel Terzibas¸oğlu, Dilek Akyalçın Kaya and Fatma Öncel, for their contributions to this article.  1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 2, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, Fontana, 1972), 725. See also Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949), 642.  2. George I. Bratianu, ‘Servage de la glèbe et régime fiscal, essai d’histoire comparée roumaine, slave et byzantine’, in his Études byzantines d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1938), 241–64 (the article was first published in Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 5(23) (1933), 446–62).  3. Richard Busch-Zantner, Agrarverfassung, Gesellschaft und Siedlung in Südosteuropa, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Türkenzeit (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1938).  4. Bratianu, ‘Servage’, 259.  5. Marc Bloch, ‘Serf de la glèbe, histoire d’une expression toute faite’, Revue historique 2 (1921), 220–42; for its translation in English, see Marc Bloch, ‘Serf de la glèbe’, in Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, Selected Essays by Marc Bloch, trans. William R. Beer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 179–201, 264–71. See also Michael Bush, ‘Serfdom in Medieval and Modern Europe: A Comparison’, in Serfdom and Slavery, ed. Michael L. Bush (London: Longman, 1996), 199–224; and Roman Rosdolsky, ‘On the Nature of Peasant Serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe’, Journal of Central European Affairs 12 (1952), 128–39.  6. Bloch, ‘Serf de la glèbe’ (English version), 190.  7. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1963); Robert Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe’, in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 10–63.  8. ‘I consider the view expounded here regarding the conditions of the peasantry in the Middle Ages and the rise of a second serfdom after the middle of the fifteenth century is on the whole incontrovertible.’ Frederick Engels, ‘Engels to Marx, 15 December’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 46, Letters 1880–1883 (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 400. The discussion on the ‘mark’ was made in a long footnote in the Origins of the Family, Private Property and State. See idem, ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property and State’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1990), 197–99. See also Karl Marx, PreCapitalist Economic Formations, trans. Jack Cohen (New York: International Publishers, 1965).  9. Indeed, he was a scholar who was very afraid of socialism and/or state socialism rising in the European interwar period, as underlined also by Ömer Lütfi Barkan who reviewed his book, referred to by Braudel in La Méditerranée. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Tahlil ve Tenkitler: G.I. Bratianu, Etudes Byzantines d’histoire économique et sociale, Paris, 1938, p. 279’, Türk Hukuk ve İktisat Tarihi Mecmuası 2 (1939), 189–94. 10. Braudel also referred to the page on which Bratianu cited Pirenne and Sée; see Bratianu, ‘Servage’, 244; Braudel, The Mediterranean, 725; Henri Pirenne, Les villes du moyen âge, essai d’histoire économique et sociale (Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1927), 52; Henri Sée, Esquisse d’une histoire du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Marcel Giard & Cie., 1921), 122; idem, Les origines du capitalisme moderne: Esquisse historique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1926), 175. The latter’s reference book is that of Georg

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

Friedrich Knapp contrasting the estate economy – Gutsherrschaft – of eastern Prussia with the landlordship economy – Grundherrschaft – of western Prussia ; see Georg Friedrich Knapp, Die Landarbeiter in Knechtschaft und Freiheit: Vier Vorträge (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1891). Braudel, The Mediterranean, 725. It will be no surprise for researchers to see, from a more general theoretical perspective, the influence on the work of Henri Sée of Werner Sombart, whose perspective also had an important effect on Braudel’s analysis of capitalism. Sée, Les origines du capitalisme moderne; Wolfgang Mager, ‘La conception du capitalisme chez Braudel et Sombart: Convergences et divergences’, Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques (Journée d’études Werner Sombart) 3(5) (1988), 63–72; Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, vol. I–II (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1927); Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus: Das Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, vol. I (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1927). Alfred Philippson, ‘Thessalien’, Geographische Zeitschrift 3(6) (1897), 305–15; idem, Thessalien und Epirus, Reisen und Forschungen im nördlichen Griechenland (Berlin: W.H. Kühl, 1897). ‘[The] book of Mr. Richard Busch-Zantner offers us little more than a fabric of considerations, sometimes quite confused … The terminology is uncertain; and, according to an unfortunate tradition, the word feudalism is used, indifferently, sometimes in its true sense, sometimes as the equivalent, abusive, of a seigneurial regime. The bibliography, which is very careful, will be of service; some suggestions will no doubt have to be retained; but they will have no real use until, once, they have been subjected to the test of the concrete.’ Marc Bloch, ‘Europe du sud-est’, Mélanges d’histoire sociale 1 (1942), 120 (in this chapter, translations from French to English are my own). Braudel, La Méditerranée, 640. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 724. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘La “Méditerrannée” de Fernand Braudel vue d’Istamboul’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 9(2) (1954), 200. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Le servage existait-il en Turquie?’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 11(1) (1956), 60. For the Turkish version of this article, see Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Türkiye’de Servaj Var Mıydı?’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. I (1956; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980); idem, ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Toprak İs¸çiliğinin Organizasyonu S¸ekilleri I’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. I (1939–1940; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980); idem, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Çiftçi Sınıfların Hukuki Statüsü’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. I (1937; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980). Halil İnalcık, ‘Servile Labor in the Ottoman Empire’, in The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds: The East European Pattern, ed. Abraham Ascher, Béla K. Kiraly and Tibor Halasi-Kun (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn College, 1979), 25–43. Gilles Veinstein, ‘On the Çiftlik Debate’, in Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, ed. Çağlar Keyder and Faruk Tabak (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 35–53. See also Christos Hadziiossif’s chapter in this volume. Traian Stoianovich, ‘L’économie balkanique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, principalement d’après les archives consulaires françaises’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris, 1952), 231–85. An article that summarized the results of the research undertaken during the Ph.D. was published in 1953: idem, ‘Land Tenure and Related Sectors of the Balkan Economy, 1600–1800’, The Journal of Economic History 13(4) (1953), 398–411. Stoianovich, ‘Land Tenure’, 402; idem, ‘L’économie balkanique’, 241–42. Ibid., 409–10. Ibid., 410.

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25. Branislav Djurdjev, ‘Prilog pitanju razvitka i karaktera tursko-osmanskog feudalizma – timarsko-spahiskog uredjenja’, Godišnjak I (1949), 101–67. 26. Stoianovich, ‘Land Tenure’, 402. 27. Deena Ruth Sadat, ‘Urban Notables in the Ottoman Empire: The Ayan’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1969); idem, ‘Rumeli Ayanlari: The Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of Modern History 44(3) (1972), 346–63. 28. Sadat, ‘Rumeli Ayanlari’, 348. 29. In contrast to Bratianu, who stressed the impact of the central state fiscal system on second serfdom, Sadat put emphasis therefore on the impact of the decentralization or ‘privatization’ of the fiscal system. For the use of the term ‘privatization’ in the context of tax farming, see Ariel Salzmann, ‘An Ancien Régime Revisited: “Privatisation” and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire’, Politics and Society 21(4) (1993), 393–423. 30. Sadat, ‘Rumeli Ayanlari’, 353. 31. Ibid., 353–54. However, she also underlined that bondage to the soil led, in the Balkans, to some peasants escaping to the mountains for a semi-pastoral life, while others joined bandit bands (klephts and/or haiduks). 32. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 33. Ibid., 103. 34. Çağlar Keyder, ‘The Dissolution of the Asiatic Mode of Production’, Economy and Society 5(2) (1976), 178–96, 182. For this passage Keyder did not have any direct references in the text. From the bibliographic list found at the end of the article, we can cite as eventual sources Braudel’s The Mediterranean, Stoianovich’s 1953 article on land tenure, or Barkan’s 1956 article on servage. Keyder did not, however, contrast the approach of the latter with that of the others. 35. Huri İslamoǧlu and Çağlar Keyder, ‘Agenda for Ottoman History’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 1(1) (1977), 31–55, 52. 36. Barkan, ‘Le servage’. For a more detailed analysis of Barkan on the ‘métayers-serfs’ (ortakçı-kul) or servile labour found in the Ottoman countryside in the sixteenth century, see Barkan, ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda’ and ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Çiftçi’, both in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi. 37. Stoianovich, ‘L’économie balkanique’, 241. Reference to Barkan is: Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Les formes de l’organisation du travail agricole dans l’Empire ottoman aux XVe et XVIe siècles’ (Conference at the Centre de Recherches Historiques, Paris, 20 February 1952). 38. Barkan, ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda’ and ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Çiftçi’, both in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi; idem, ‘Timar’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. 1 (1979; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980), 834–38; idem, ‘Feodal Düzen ve Osmanlı Timarı’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. 1 (1973; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980), 881–82. 39. For example, Bistra A. Cvetkova, Les institutions ottomans en Europe (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1978); Vera P. Moutafchieva, Agrarian Relations in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th Centuries (New York: East European Monographs, 1988); Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade, and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 40. Barkan, ‘Le servage’, 60. See also Barkan, ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 662–77; idem, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Çiftçi’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 738–43, 754–66; idem, ‘Timar’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 834–38; idem, ‘Feodal’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 881–82. While Barkan differentiated between concepts of real and personal serfdom, he referred in his ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda’, 672–73, to Marc Bloch, Liberté et servitude personnelles au moyen-âge, particulièrement en France: Contribution à

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41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

une étude des classes (Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Jurídicos, 1933), and to one of Braudel’s references in his ‘new serfdom’ argument, Henri Sée, Histoire économique de la France, vol. 1 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1939). For critics of Barkan’s ideas on labour relations and of state-centred approaches in Ottoman historiography developed under the influence of Barkan’s works, see Halil Berktay, ‘The Search for the Peasant in Western and Turkish History/Historiography’, in New Approaches to State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 109–84; idem, ‘The “Other” Feudalism: A Critique of 20th Century Turkish Historiography and Its Particularisation of Ottoman Society’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1990); idem, ‘The Feudalism Debate: The Turkish End: Is “Tax-vs.-Rent” Necessarily the Product and Sign of a Modal Difference?’, Journal of Peasant Studies 14(3) (1987), 291–333. According to him, the bondage to the soil of Ottoman peasants could only be compared with that of Roman colons, although the fact that the landowner class was absent in the former case completely differentiates the contexts in which peasants operated. See Barkan, ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 667–71; idem, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Çiftçi’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 738–39. Barkan, ‘XV ve XVIncı Asırlarda’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 674; idem, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Çiftçi’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 755. Fikret Adanır, ‘Tradition and Rural Change in Southeastern Europe during Ottoman Rule’, in The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Daniel Chirot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 140. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Migration and Urban Development’, in her Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 269. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Part II: Crisis and Change’, in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 2, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 436–37. Faroqhi, ‘Migration and Urban Development’, 269. See also Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Under State Control: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Ottoman Craftsmen on Their Way to Istanbul’ and ‘Migration into Eighteenth Century Greater Istanbul as Reflected in the Kadi Registers of Eyüp’, both in her Stories of Ottoman Men and Women (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2002), 267–88, 289–306; idem, Travel and Artisans in the Ottoman Empire: Employment and Mobility in the Early Modern Era (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). İslamoǧlu and Keyder, ‘Agenda for Ottoman History’, 45. Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘Harp Sonu Tarımsal Reform Hareketleri’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. I (1935–36; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980); idem, ‘Balkan Memleketlerinin Zirai Reform Tecrübeleri’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, Toplu Eserler, vol. I (1943; repr., Istanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980). There is no reference to these articles conforming very well to the framework that Keyder and İslamoğlu proposed. In an unpublished manuscript written in French presented to Braudel and found in the library of Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris), Barkan wrote: ‘Indeed, we meet towards the end of the XVIth century, in Turkey, the most complicated forms of usury … the indebted peasant agreed to remain attached to his own land as a sort of servile sharecropper of the loan shark. By this process, subservient sharecropping makes a splash of oil and entire villages, with their inhabitants, begin to become the property of a man of dubious origin, by a simple interplay of economic forces ... This is the beginning of a process that will lead the small independent peasantry, characteristic of the agrarian structure of this empire, to its fatal end of proletarianization and uprooting.’ Ömer Lütfi Barkan, Les Crises économiques et sociales de la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle dans l’Empire ottoman, n.d., 94–95 (Bibliothèque FMSH Cote 4’ L 40, No d’inventaire MSH D 5352).

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51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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For a summarized form of this manuscript, see the article by Ömer Lütfi Barkan, ‘XVI. Asrın İkinci Yarısında Türkiye’nin Geçirdiği İktisadi Buhranların Sosyal-Yapı Üzerindeki Tesisleri’, in İktisadi Kalkınmamızın Sosyal Meseleleri (Istanbul: Ekonomik ve Sosyal Etüdler Konferans Heyeti, 1964), 17–36. During discussions of the paper presented by Barkan on the feudal regime and Ottoman tımar, in the famous seminar on the economic history of Turkey held at Hacettepe University in 1973, Gündüz Ökçün asked Barkan about his point of view regarding an eventual research project ‘that would be indeed very beneficial’, questioning parallel causalities on the establishment of second serfdom in Eastern Europe and the rise of ayans in the Ottoman Empire as a result of an agricultural export boom (a research subject already on the agenda of Stoianovich and Sadat following the Braudel questionnaire). Barkan, after commenting that his early research concerned land reforms in the Balkans and Eastern European countries, highlighted ‘formidable differences’ between large estates found in both geographies and underlined the limited development of a commercial class under state regulations in the Ottoman case, during the sixteenth century. In his response, he neither discussed the second serfdom argument, nor mentioned his ‘degeneration’ argument found in his papers of 1935–36 and 1943. See Barkan, ‘Feodal’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 890–91. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Economic and Social Structure of the Ottoman Empire in Early Modern Times’, in her Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Veinstein, ‘On the Çiftlik Debate’, 49–50. Halil İnalcık, ‘The Çift-Hane System: The Organization of Ottoman Rural Society’, in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145. İnalcık, ‘Servile Labor’, 30–31. ‘Even in the early period, labor was sometimes supplied by reaya agreeing to do extra work outside tımar lands or by runaway peasants or free reaya unregistered in the imperial survey books. Sharecropping was a common mode of labor of reaya origin. However, it became necessary for the “entrepreneurs” to look for labor on reclaimed lands outside the reaya since the state strictly adhered to the çift-hane system to protect its regular source of income. On farms of mevat origin, use of servile labor was a general practice from the earliest times, though under various conditions this kind of labor did not prove to be as effective as sharecroppers.’ Halil İnalcık, ‘The Emergence of Big Farms, Çiftliks: State, Landlords, and Tenants’, in Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, ed. Çağlar Keyder and Faruk Tabak (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 20–21. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, IX–X. Ibid., 51–53. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 112–13, 145–46. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 146. S¸evket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 100. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 100. Sir Hamilton Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1, part I, Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 242. Berktay highlighted the fact that Gibb and Bowen, in addition to Zvi Yehuda Hershlag and Eliyahu Ashtor, conceptualized the tımar system as a feudal system. See Berktay, ‘The “Other” Feudalism’, 34, 37, 42.

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67. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 720–24. Braudel referred especially to Bistra A. Cvetkova, ‘L’évolution du régime feudal turc de la fin du XVIe jusqu’au milieu du XVIIIe siècle’, in Etudes historiques 1: A l’occasion du XIe Congrès international des sciences historiques; Stockholm, août 1960 (Sofia: Academie Bulgare des Sciences, 1960), 171–206. 68. Cvetkova, Les institutions, 145. 69. Ibid., 147. 70. Berktay, ‘The “Other” Feudalism’, 378. 71. Berktay, ‘The Feudalism Debate’, 311. 72. Moutafchieva, Agrarian Relations, 147. Conditions set for the celay-ı vatan survived well in the codes of the seventeenth century and onwards; see Fatma Gül Karagöz, ‘17. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Devleti’nde Tarımsal Üretimin Hukuki Olarak Korunması’, in 1. Türk Hukuk Tarihi Kongresi Bildirileri (21–22 December 2012, Istanbul Üniversitesi), ed. Fethi Gedikli (Istanbul: XII Levha Yayıncılık, 2014), 481–86. Karagöz discusses, however, the conditions of celay-ı vatan from the perspective of the provisioning policies of the central state, following Barkan’s research. 73. Moutafchieva, Agrarian Relations, 148. 74. Ibid., 148. 75. Ibid., 151. 76. Aleksandar Matkovski, ‘La résistance des paysans macédoniens contre l’attachement à la glèbe pendant la domination ottomane’, in Actes du premier congrès international des études balkaniques et sud-est européennes: Sofia, 26 août–1 septembre 1966, vol. III: Histoire (Ve–XVe ss.; XVe–XVIIe ss.) (Sofia: Editions de l’Academie Bulgare des Sciences, 1969), 704. 77. Ibid., 706. 78. Ibid., 706. 79. Bistra A. Cvetkova, ‘Mouvements antiféodaux dans les terres bulgares sous domination ottomane du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles’, in Etudes historiques 2: A l’occasion du XIIe Congrès international des sciences historiques; Vienne, août 1965 (Sofia: Academie Bulgare des Sciences, Institut d’histoire, 1965), 154–55. See also Cvetkova, ‘L’évolution’, 201–3. 80. Between 1838 and 1840 Ion Ionescu studied at the Ecole agricole de Roville; after further studies at the Agricultural School of Auxerre, the Forest School of Sénart, the Sorbonne, Institut de Botanique and finally the Consérvatoire des Arts et Métiers (all in Paris), he returned in 1841 to his native Moldavia to teach agronomy and political economy at the Academy of Sturdza in Iasi. In the 1840s, he collaborated with the reformist boyar class, and in 1848 he became the vice-president of the Property Commission composed of the Moldavian and Wallachian revolutionary landlords and peasants searching for agrarian reform. The revolutionaries failed in their objectives and were then dispersed all over Europe. It was the events of 1848 that occasioned his eight-year stay (1849–57) in the Ottoman lands. Becoming a protégé or a part of the circle of Mustafa Res¸id Pasha (the eminent political figure of the Tanzimat period during which he managed to be appointed grand vizier seven times), he taught as a professor and later as a director at the Agricultural School of Ayamama in Istanbul, became a member of the Ottoman Council of Public Works, and undertook the administration and management of the large estates of Res¸id Pasha situated in Tırhala. After several official missions to the Ottoman provinces, he wrote many articles in the Journal de Constantinople, later collected in books (Excursion agricole dans la plaine de la Dobroudja in 1850; La Thessalie agricole telle qu’elle est et telle qu’elle peut être in 1851). Alp Yücel Kaya, ‘Ion Ionescu de la Brad: 19. Yüzyıl Ortasında Osmanlı Tarım Ekonomisi ve Ekonomi Politik’, Kebikeç 23 (2007), 95–110; Ion Matei, ‘Un agronome roumain dans l’Empire ottoman pendant les années 1849–1859’, Studia et Acta Orientalia 7 (1968), 295–301; Amilcar Vasiliu and Mihail Guboglu, ‘Contributii la cunoas¸tera activitatii lui Ion Ionescu de la Brad din timpul exilului in Turcia’, in Ion Ionescu de la Brad: Aniversarea a 150 de ani de la nas¸tere, volum omagial (Bacau,

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81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92.

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1968), 225–37. For a critical edition of Ion Ionescu’s articles published in the Journal de Constantinople, see Ion Ionescu de la Brad, Ion Ionescu: Un agronome-économiste quarante-huitard dans l’Empire ottoman (1849–1857), ed. Alp Yücel Kaya (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, forthcoming). According to information given in the bylaw of Tırhala, which we will discuss in this chapter, the district of Tırhala in the middle of the nineteenth century was composed of the sub-districts of Tırhala (Gk. Trikala), Yenis¸ehir-i Fener (Gk. Larissa), Çatalca (Gk. Farsala), Alasona (Gk. Elasona), Ermiye (Gk. Almyros), Katrin (Gk. Katerini), Velestin (Gk. Velestino) and Kardice/Ağrafa (Gk. Karditsa/Agrafa), and the townships of Yenice (Gk. Neochori Karditsas), Baba (Gk. Tempi) and Tırnova (Gk. Tyrnavos) (Ottoman Archives in Istanbul (thereafter BOA), İ.MVL 463/20920). The region in which the district of Tırhala was found was known historically as Thessaly, and in geographical terms it ‘is composed of two adjacent plains (the plain of Trikkala in the west and the less fertile plain of Larissa in the east separated by the low Revania hills) surrounded by high mountainous ranges, except for the large protected Pagasiticos Gulf (Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘Patterns of Protoindustrialization in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern Thessaly, ca. 1750–1860’, The Journal of European Economic History 19(3) (1990), 577). In the western part of the district, the cultivation of summer crops was limited, with cultivated crops consisting of wheat, barley, rye, oats and vetch; in the eastern part of the district, the cultivation of wheat and barley was limited and summer crops, such as corn, sesame, cotton, tobacco and chickpeas, predominated (BOA, İ.MVL 463/20920). For a more detailed discussion on sharecropping dynamics and bondage to the soil in Tırhala, see Alp Yücel Kaya, ‘On the Çiftlik Regulation in Tırhala in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Economists, Pashas, Governors, Çiftlik-Holders, Subas¸ıs, and Sharecroppers’, in Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies: Halcyon Days in Crete VIII; A Symposium held in Rethymno, 13–15 January 2012, ed. Elias Kolovos (Rethymnon: Crete University Press, 2015), 333–80. Ion Ionescu, ‘L’association des agents de production’, Journal de Constantinople (hereafter JdC), 9 February 1851. Ion Ionescu, ‘Les avances du propriétaire’, JdC, 24 February 1851. Barkan noted, by referring to Simonede’s article, that in 1881 there were 198 villages and 460 çiftliks in Thessaly; see B. Simonide, ‘La question agraire en Grèce’, Revue d’économie politique 37(6) (1923), 780; and Barkan, ‘Balkan Memleketlerinin’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 417. For a discussion of ‘peonage’ in the çiftliks, see McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, 66, 72. Ionescu, ‘Les avances du propriétaire’, JdC, 24 February 1851; idem, ‘La dette’, JdC, 29 June 1851. Ionescu, ‘La production du métayer’, JdC, 9 March 1851. Sophia Laiou also underlines the tension between çiftlik agriculture and (nomadic) stock-breeding in Tırhala in earlier centuries; see Sophia Laiou, ‘Some Considerations Regarding Çiftlik Formation in the Western Thessaly, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Ottoman Empire, The Balkans, The Greek Lands: Toward a Social and Economic History, ed. Elias Kolovos et al. (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2007), 267, 71. For the importance of animal husbandry in Tırhala, see also Petmezas, ‘Patterns’, 578–79. Ionescu, ‘Le partage des produits’, JdC, 24 March 1851. Ionescu, ‘Le compte de la production’, JdC, 29 May 1851. Ionescu, ‘Compte-rendu de l’administration des domaines de son Altesse Réchid Pacha, depuis le 1er mars 1853 jusqu’au 1er mai 1854’, JdC, 9 June 1854; BOA, HR.MKT 71/3 (11 Cemaziyelevvel 1270). For the Ottoman translation of their contract, see BOA, HR.MKT 84/48 (3 Zilhicce 1270). In this part, I discuss the report of Ion Ionescu presented in 1854 to the governor of Tırhala, Mehmed İsmet Pasha (BOA, HR.MKT 92/5 (6 Safer 1271)), in addition to his

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articles published in the Journal de Constantinople during 1855 under the pseudonym ‘Leonidas’: ‘La Thessalie’, JdC, 8 March 1855; ‘La Thessalie (I) Des terres, et de la manière de les administrer’, JdC, 22 March 1855; ‘La Thessalie (II), Partage des produits entre le propriétaire et les métayers rayas’, JdC, 5 April 1855; ‘La Thessalie (III), Les Soubachlyks’, JdC, 17 May 1855. 93. BOA, HR.MKT 92/5 (6 Safer 1271). Laiou also mentions local çiftlik-holders living in the towns of Tırhala and Yenis¸ehir-i Fener in the earlier centuries; see Laiou, ‘Some Considerations’, 266. For the development of local çiftlik-holders from deruhdecis (local tax farmers) in the Manastır province, see Michael Ursinus, ‘The “Çiftlik Sahibleri” of Manastır as a Local Elite, Late Seventeenth to Early Nineteenth Century’, in Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Antonis Anastasopoulos (Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2005), 247–57, and also McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, 168–70. 94. Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (I)’. For conditions of sharecropping in Tırhala see also Barkan, ‘Harp Sonu’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 52–53; idem, ‘Balkan Memleketlerinin’, in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi, 417–20; Richard I. Lawless, ‘The Economy and Landscapes of Thessaly during Ottoman Rule’, in An Historical Geography of the Balkans, ed. Francis W. Carter (London: Academic Press, 1977), 516; William W. McGrew, Land and Revolution in Modern Greece, 1800–1881: The Transition in the Tenure and Exploitation of Land from Ottoman Rule to Independence (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), 32–35; Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘Rural Macedonia from Ottoman to Greek Rule, 1900–1920: Bridging the Gap’, in Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean, ed. Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kehriotis (Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2010), 374–77; Ahmet Uzun, ‘Tepedelenli Ali Pas¸a ve Mal Varlığı’, Belleten LXV(244) (2001), 1063; B. Simonide, ‘La question agraire’, 778–79; Chryssos Evelpidis, La réforme agraire en Grèce (Athens, 1926), 12–14. 95. According to the documentation given by Palairet, in the nineteenth century harvesters working in the çiftliks were seasonal migrant workers; see Michael Palairet, ‘The Migrant Workers of the Balkans and Their Villages (18th Century–World War 1)’, in Handwerk in Mittel- und Südosteuropa: Mobilitat, Vermittlung und Wandel im Handwerk des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Klaus Roth (Munich: Selbstwerlag der Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1987), 23–46; and Jovan Cvijic´, La péninsule balkanique: géographie humaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1918), 136–37. Petmezas also mentions seasonal labour from littoral villages employed on the plains of Tırhala; see Petmezas, ‘Patterns’, 580–81. 96. Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (I)’. For a discussion on the functions of subas¸ıs in Tırhala and their close relationship with the kocabas¸ıs within the iltizam system, see Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘Christian Communities in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece: Their Fiscal Functions’, in Minorities in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Molly Greene (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005), 106. 97. Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (I)’. 98. For the confiscation of Tepedelenli’s çiftliks, see Uzun, ‘Tepedelenli Ali Pas¸a’, 1070–73 and Hamiyet Sezer, ‘Tepedelenli Ali Pas¸a ve Oğullarının Çiftlik ve Gelirlerine İlis¸kin Yeni Bilgi – Bulgular’, OTAM 18 (2005), 333–57. 99. For the seizure and administration of çiftliks by the Darbhane-i Amire, see Yavuz Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım ve Deg˘is¸im Dönemi: XVIII. Yüzyıldan Tanzimat’a Mali Tarih (Istanbul: Alan Yayınları, 1986), 102–3, 249, 263, 371. 100. For an analysis of the results of auctions for the çiftliks situated in Tırhala, Yanya, Selanik and Rumeli in the 1840s, see Uğur Bahadır Bayraktar, ‘The Political Economy of Çiftliks: The Redistribution of Land and Land Tenure Relations in the Nineteenth Century Provinces of Yanya and Tırhala’ (Master’s thesis, University of Boğaziçi, 2009), 72–97. 101. Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (I)’. 102. Ibid.: ‘Le raya ou fermier vassal’. 103. Ibid.; Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (II)’.

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104. Ibid.; Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (II)’. 105. Ibid.; Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (II)’. 106. Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie (III)’. See also Lawless, ‘The Economy’, 516, 521, 533. 107. Ionescu, ‘Compte-rendu…’, JdC, 9 June 1854. 108. For a discussion of the social and economic dynamics of brigandage in nineteenth-century Greece, see John S. Koliopoulos, ‘Shepherds, Brigands, and Irregulars in Nineteenth Century Greece’, Journal of Hellenic Diaspora 8(4) (1981), 41–53; Fikret Adanır, ‘The Ottoman Peasantries, c. 1360–c. 1860’, in The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 304–8. 109. For the historicity of tension and the inverse and exclusive relationship between land cultivation and animal raising, see Laiou, ‘Some Considerations’, 267, 271; Adanır, ‘Tradition and Rural Change’; Cvijic´, La péninsule balkanique, 133–37. 110. Ionescu, ‘Compte-rendu…’, JdC, 9 June 1854. 111. BOA, I.MVL 463/20920 (27 Cemaziyelevvel 1276) 112. BOA, A.MKT.UM 402/4 (8 Ramazan 1276). 113. Victor Slavescu, Corespondenta Intre Ion Ionescu de la Brad s¸i Ion Ghica, 1846–1874 (Bucharest: Imprimeria Naţionala˘, 1943), 157–58. Ion Ionescu returned to his country, Moldavia, in June 1857, after receiving official permission from the governors of Moldavia and Wallachia, as other refugees had done in 1848 (JdC, 1 August 1857). 114. BOA, A.MKT.UM 306/3 (10 Cemaziyelahir 1274); İ.MVL 463/20920/lef 9 (27 Cemaziyelevvel 1276). 115. BOA, İ.MVL 463/20920/lef 5. 116. BOA, İ.MVL 463/20920/lef 8. 117. For a copy, which includes articles and postscripts but excludes article 26, to be distributed in booklet form, see BOA, C.ML 32/1452 (1278). 118. BOA, İ.MVL 463/20920/lef 3. 119. A kara kile of the district is equivalent to seven kara kiles of Istanbul; see Leonidas, ‘La Thessalie’. One kile of Istanbul is equivalent to 18–20 okka, depending on the type of cereal, which makes 25 kg on average; see Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüg˘ü, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1971), 281. 120. In the 1850s, there were no local councils of agriculture functioning in the Empire. The Council of Agriculture was created in 1843 as a higher council dependent upon the central administration. In 1844, in order to create an institutional infrastructure for agricultural development, it decided to nominate directors of agriculture to be elected from local notables in each sub-district (kaza) and, in 1845, to create Councils of Public Works consisting of local notables of the provinces; Tevfik Güran, ‘Zirai Politika ve Ziraatte Gelis¸meler, 1839–1876’, in 19. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Tarımı (Istanbul: Eren Yayınevi, 1998), 45–46. Although Councils of Public Works did not continue to function in the 1850s, it was probable that the institutional context of the vanished Councils of Public Works and still functioning Directors of Agriculture gave birth in Tırhala to a Council of Agriculture, consisting of çiftlik-holders and local notables, and functioning not only as an advisory and executive but also as a ‘judicial’ council following local customary regulations. The local Councils of Agriculture that were to discuss ways and conditions of agricultural development were to be created nearly twenty years later, in 1876. Birinci Köy ve Ziraat Kalkınma Kongresi, Türk Ziraat Tarihine Bir Bakıs¸ (Istanbul: Devlet Basımevi, 1938), 200. 121. ‘Bir çiftlikde doğmus¸ ve büyümüs¸ olan yani cedden yerlisinden bulunanlar balada beyan olunduğu vechle nihayet-i derecede müttehim olmadıkça sahib-i çiftlik tarafından tard olunmak caiz olamayacağı misillü bu makuleler kendileri dahi iskan s¸urut ve nizamı iktizasınca hiç bir vakitde terk-i vatan edemeyecek ise de bu kabilden olmayub da ya sahib-i alaka marifetiyle bas¸ka bir mehalden getirilmis¸ veyahud kendüleri gelib bir mahalde çiftçiliğe girmis¸ ise bunlar hakkında gerek sahib-i alaka canibinden çıkarılmak ve gerek

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kendüleri istedikleri zamanda gidebilmek maddeleri karin-i mesag olması.’ See BOA, İ.MVL 463/20920/lef 8. 122. For desertion from the çiftliks in the Balkans, see also Cvijic´, La péninsule balkanique, 136. 123. Ion Ionescu mentioned the Abbot brothers of Thessaloniki and Jacques Alléon as the financial intermediaries of Res¸id Pasha; see Ionescu, ‘Compte-rendu…’, JdC, 9 June 1854; Slavescu, Corespondenta, 138–39. Nonetheless, Mkrdich Cezayirliyan, one of the most important financiers of the 1850s, was not only a creditor but also a protégé of Res¸id Pasha; see Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı, ‘The Sharp Rise and the Sudden Fall of an Ottoman Entrepreneur: The Case of Mkrdich Cezayirliyan’, in Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and G. Veinstein (Leuven: Peteers, 2008), 286–87, 289, 296. 124. John C. Alexander, Toward a History of Post-Byzantine Greece: The Ottoman Kanunnames for the Greek Lands circa 1500–circa 1650 (Athens: J.C. Alexander, 1985), 475–76, 478–79: Resm-i ag˘nam or sheep impost in the Trikkala province in 1516 was one akçe and was collected per three animals. After 1520, one akçe was prescribed per two animals. Resm-i otlak ve kıs¸lak or resm-i kıs¸lak ve yaylak was an ‘impost collected as a rental on the seasonal grazing of sheep and goats in highland or lowland pastures or within the greater boundaries of a particular village. The kanuns specify that this impost was collected only from non-resident shepherds of a particular village or in the case of the vlachs, from those of another kaza. In Trikkala, Larisa… 25 akçe were collected per flock’. 125. Süleyman Sudi, Osmanlı Vergi Düzeni: Defter-i Muktesid, ed. Mehmet Ali Ünal (Isparta, 1996), 135–36, 166. 126. For the contested character of the Land Law of 1858, see Huri İslamoğlu, ‘Property as a Contested Domain: A Re-evaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858’, in her Ottoman History as World History (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2007). 127. See Articles 1431–40 of the Mecelle on sharecropping (muzara’a): Ahmet Akgündüz, İslam ve Osmanlı Hukuku Külliyatı: Özel Hukuk-II; Miras, Borçlar, Es¸ya, Ticaret ve Devletler Hususi Hukuku, vol. 3 (Istanbul: Osmanlı Aras¸tırmaları Vakfı, 2012), 967–68. 128. For successive çiftlik regulations of Bosna in 1842, 1849 and 1859, see Tevfik Güran and Ahmet Uzun, ‘Bosna-Hersek’te Toprak Rejimi: Eshab-ı Alaka ve Çiftçiler Arasındaki İlis¸kiler (1840–1875)’, Belleten LXX(259) (2006), 807–902; Halil İnalcık, ‘Bosna’da Tanzimat’ın Tatbikına Ait Vesikalar’, Tarih Vesikaları 1(5) (1942), 374–89; Cevdet Pas¸a, Tezakir 21–39, ed. Cavid Baysun (Ankara: TTK, 1991), 3–9. For çiftlik regulations of Yanya in 1848, see BOA, İ.MVL 115/2777 (9 Rebiülahir 1264); İ.MVL 463/20920/ lef 6 (28 Rebiülahir 1274); İ.MVL 463/20920 (1278); S¸D 304/5 (29 Cemaziyelahir 1302). For that of Vidin in 1850, see Halil İnalcık, Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi (1942; repr., Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1992), 83–107; BOA, İ.DH 255/15687 (12 Ramazan 1268). For that of Canik in 1855, see Canay S¸ahin, ‘Ondokuzuncu Yüzyıl’da Samsun’da Çiftlik Sahibi Hazinedarzadeler ile Kiracı-Köylüler Arasındaki Arazi ve Vergi İhtilafı Üzerine Bazı Gözlemler ve Sorular’, Kebikeç 24 (2007), 75–88; İbrahim Serbestoğlu, ‘Tanzimat Döneminde Canik Sancağı’nda Arazi ve Vergi Anlas¸mazlığı’, in Samsun Sempozyumu, 13–16 Ekim 2011, vol. III, ed. Mahmut Aydın et al. (Samsun: Ceylan Ofset, 2012), 771–83. For that of Nis¸ and Leskofça in 1859, see M. Hüdai S¸entürk, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Bulgar Meselesi: 1850–1875 (Ankara: TTK, 1992), 133–38; Yonca Köksal and Davut Erkan, Sadrazam Kıbrıslı Mehmet Emin Pas¸a’nın Rumeli Teftis¸i (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2007), 252–56, 463–86; Yonca Köksal, ‘19. Yüzyılda Kuzeybatı Bulgaristan Sessiz Toprak Reformu’, Toplumsal Tarih 170 (2008), 24–30; Cevdet Pas¸a, Tezakir 13–20, ed. Cavid Baysun (Ankara: TTK, 1991), 101–10. For that of Karaferye in 1865, see BOA, İ.MVL 537/24159 (6 Recep 1282); C.ML 32/1494 (1282); C.DH 15/726 (18 Cemaziyelahir 1282). For that of Parga in 1875, see BOA, S¸D 2087/52 (10 Zilkade 1292); Huri İslamoğlu, ‘Property as a Contested Domain’, 204–208; idem, ‘Words that Rule: From Bureaucratic “Commissions” to Governing

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“Boards”’, in Ottoman History as World History, 252–54; Cevdet Pas¸a, Tezakir 40– Tetimme, ed. Cavid Baysun (Ankara: TTK, 1991), 140–45. For a discussion on the cases of Canik, Vidin, Bosna and Tırhala, see E. Atilla Aytekin, ‘Land, Rural Classes and Law: Agrarian Conflict and State Regulation in the Ottoman Empire’ (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York, 2006), 12–99. For a general overview of the agrarian question during the nineteenth century in Balkan geography, see Barkan, ‘Harp Sonu’ and ‘Balkan Memleketlerinin’, both in Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi. 129. BOA, S¸D 304/5 (29 Cemaziyelahir 1302). 130. İnalcık, Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi, 96; BOA, İ.DH 255/15687 (12 Ramazan 1268). 131. See Article 13 of the bylaw, S¸entürk, Osmanlı Devleti’nde, 138. 132. BOA, C.ML 32/1494 (1282). 133. See Article 10 of the bylaw, BOA, S¸D 2087/52 (10 Zilkade 1292). 134. See Articles 4 and 5 of the bylaw of Nis¸ and Articles 3 and 4 of the bylaw of Leskofça in S¸entürk, Osmanlı Devleti’nde, 134, 136–37. 135. See Article 12 of the bylaw in Güran and Uzun, ‘Bosna-Hersek’te’, 880–81. 136. See Articles 8 and 12 of the bylaw in Güran and Uzun, ‘Bosna-Hersek’te’, 899–900. 137. See Articles 11 and 19, BOA, S¸D 2087/52 (10 Zilkade 1292). 138. Cevdet Pas¸a, Tezakir 40–Tetimme, 140–45. 139. The formula esirleri gibi – ‘as if they were their slaves’ – is used frequently in nineteenthcentury Balkan geography; see İnalcık, Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi, 10, 98; Güran and Uzun, ‘Bosna-Hersek’te’, 882. 140. Halil İnalcık, ‘Application of Tanzimat and Its Social Effects’, Archivum Ottomanicum 5 (1973), 105; and idem, ‘Tanzimat’ın Uygulanması ve Sosyal Tepkileri’, Belleten XXVIII(112) (1964), 651. 141. BOA, C.ML 2189 (1266). 142. BOA, A.MKT.UM 105/53 (10 Zilkade 1268). 143. BOA, A.MKT.MVL 87/81 (7 S¸evval 1273). 144. McGowan, in his discussion on the relationship between man and land in the Ottoman regime in the sixteenth century, underlines quite similar ‘regulations bearing on the adjudication of cases where two different sipahis have some kind of claim on the same person, usually because the latter has relocated from one timar to another’: according to the law of the province of Bosna (1565), ‘if a sipahi’s reaya does not live on the land where he is registered but in another district and is not registered in that (other) village, if he has no place to cultivate, he shall give to the sipahi of that other place six akches as a chimney tax. If he does have a place to cultivate, he will give a tithe to the master of the land (sahib-i arz); the rest of the reaya taxes he will give to his own sipahi … . However when he had lived there for over ten years and has settled down there, the master of the land will take all the prescribed taxes and dues and he will give no taxes to his old sipahi – even if he is registered on holdings at both places … . If a reaya is registered in two villages, he will be definitely confirmed at the time of the survey in that village where he is registered and has lived ten years. He will not give taxes to his old sipahi. Place of residence will be the ruling factor, not priority in time. If he had taken land outside a village and has been registered in that way, he will give sher’i dues [those regarded as being sanctioned by Muslim religious law books] and customary taxes to the master of the land but reaya taxes to his own sipahi’. See McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, 53–54. 145. BOA, A.MKT.UM 290/24 (29 Zilhicce 1273); A.MKT.UM 290/45 (29 Zilhicce 1273). For a discussion of these documents in the Bosnian context, see Güran and Uzun, ‘Bosna-Hersek’te’, 881. Such an administrative and fiscal rationale has a long and conflictual history in the pre-Tanzimat period; for the relationship between çiftliks and the taxation system in the eighteenth century, see Bruce McGowan, ‘The Study of Land and Agriculture in the Ottoman Provinces within the Context of an Expanding World Economy in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 2(1)

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(1981), 60–62; and Bistra A. Cvetkova, ‘Problèmes du régime ottoman dans les Balkans du seizième au dix-huitième siècle’, in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed. Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 181. 146. BOA, A.MKT.UM 526/10 (15 Cemaziyelahir 1278). On the appeal, the Meclis-i Vala did not however approve the decision of the local council, although it referred to Article 26 of the Tırhala bylaw. Because the sharecropper families had already been repatriated to Tikves¸ following the decision of the local council, the Meclis asked only for an investigation on the çiftlik-holder’s mistreatment of the sharecroppers. 147. BOA, MVL 403/48 (12 Cemaziyelahir 1279); MVL 413/12 (11 S¸evval 1279). 148. BOA, A.MKT.DV 126/93 (12 Muharrem 1275). For the social tension reigning in İvranya under the rule of Süleyman Bey’s father, Hüseyin Pasha, see Cengiz Kırlı, ‘Tyranny Illustrated: From Petition to Rebellion in Ottoman Vranje’, New Perspectives on Turkey 53 (2015), 3–36. 149. For the offices held by Mustafa Res¸id Pasha, see Bayram Kodaman and Ahmet Turan Alkan, ‘Tanzimat’ın Öncüsü Mustafa Res¸id Pas¸a’, in 150. Yılında Tanzimat, ed. Hakkı Dursun Yıldız (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1992), 7. 150. BOA, C.ML 2189 (1266). 151. BOA, S¸D 1905/21 (25 S¸evval 1317); DH.MKT 2290/106 (25 S¸evval 1317); BEO 1514/113476 (8 Rebiülevvel 1318); DH.MKT 2384/49 (8 Rebiülahir 1318); TFR.I.S¸KT 108/10743 (29 Muharrem 1325); TFR.SL 148/14788 (15 Cemaziyelevvel 1325); DH.MKT 2837/86 (20 Cemaziyelevvel 1327); S¸D 2065/3 (5 Cemaziyelahir 1327); BEO 3588/269065 (12 Cemaziyelahir 1327); DH.MKT 2866/82 (16 Cemaziyelahir 1327); S¸D 1945/3/1327; DH.ID 106/10/1330; BEO 4053/303938 (4 Recep 1330). 152. See ‘XVIII. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Anadolusu’nda Tarım Üretiminde Yeni Boyutlar: Muzara’a ve Muraba’a Sözles¸meleri’, in Özer Ergenç, Osmanlı Tarihi Yazıları: S¸ehir, Toplum, Devlet (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2013), 255–56; and Stoianovich, ‘Land Tenure’, 400. 153. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce (London: Book Club Associates, 1983), 271–72. 154. Ahmet O. Akarlı, ‘Growth and Retardation in Ottoman Macedonia, 1880–1910’, in The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950, ed. S¸evket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson (London: Routledge, 2000), 109–33. 155. Tom Brass, Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates (London: Frank Cass, 1999); idem, Labour Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century: Unfreedom, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Tom Brass, in a chapter of the later book, analysed labour relations, especially the reintroduction and reproduction of the gangmaster system in British agriculture, both in the mid nineteenth century and in the 2000s: ‘In an important sense, given the increasing global competition between agribusiness enterprises, the gangmaster system in Britain is not merely an historical anomaly (= ‘medieval working practices’), nor even a necessary aspect of the accumulation process, but a sine qua non of capitalist reproduction in rural areas. The similarity between the two conjunctures giving rise to the gangmaster system is striking. Like the era following the repeal of the Corn Laws, the 1980s was a period characterized by increasing economic competition on a global basis. At each conjuncture, therefore, the gangmaster represented for its respective commercial agrarian enterprise a specifically capitalist method of keeping labor costs low and simultaneously maintaining control over the workforce’. Labour Regime Change, 233.

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 . Thessalien und Epirus, Reisen und Forschungen im nördlichen Griechenland. Berlin: W.H. Kühl, 1897. Pirenne, Henri. Les villes du moyen âge, essai d’histoire économique et sociale. Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1927. Rosdolsky, Roman. ‘On the Nature of Peasant Serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe’. Journal of Central European Affairs 12 (1952), 128–39. Sadat, Deena Ruth. ‘Urban Notables in the Ottoman Empire: The Ayan’. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1969.  . ‘Rumeli Ayanlari: The Eighteenth Century’. The Journal of Modern History 44(3) (1972), 346–63. S¸ahin, Canay. ‘Ondokuzuncu Yüzyıl’da Samsun’da Çiftlik Sahibi Hazinedarzadeler ile KiracıKöylüler Arasındaki Arazi ve Vergi İhtilafı Üzerine Bazı Gözlemler ve Sorular’. Kebikeç 24 (2007), 75–88. Salzmann, Ariel. ‘An Ancien Régime Revisited: “Privatisation” and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire’. Politics and Society 21(4) (1993), 393–423. Sée, Henri. Esquisse d’une histoire du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Paris: Marcel Giard & Cie., 1921.  . Les origines du capitalisme moderne: Esquisse historique. Paris: Armand Colin, 1926.  . Histoire économique de la France, vol. 1. Paris: Armand Colin, 1939. S¸entürk, M. Hüdai. Osmanlı Devleti’nde Bulgar Meselesi: 1850–1875. Ankara: TTK, 1992. Serbestoğlu, İbrahim. ‘Tanzimat Döneminde Canik Sancağı’nda Arazi ve Vergi Anlas¸mazlığı’, in  Samsun Sempozyumu, 13–16 Ekim 2011, vol. III, edited by Mahmut Aydın et al., 771–83. Samsun: Ceylan Ofset, 2012. Sezer, Hamiyet. ‘Tepedelenli Ali Pas¸a ve Oğullarının Çiftlik ve Gelirlerine İlis¸kin Yeni Bilgi – Bulgular’. OTAM 18 (2005), 333–57. Simonide, B. ‘La question agraire en Grèce’. Revue d’économie politique 37(6) (1923), 769–811. Slavescu, Victor. Corespondenta Intre Ion Ionescu de la Brad s¸i Ion Ghica, 1846–1874. Bucharest: Imprimeria Naţionala˘, 1943. Sombart, Werner. Der moderne Kapitalismus: Das Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, vol. 1. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1927.  . Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, vol. I–II. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1927. Stoianovich, Traian. ‘L’économie balkanique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, principalement d’après les archives consulaires françaises’. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris, 1952.  . ‘Land Tenure and Related Sectors of the Balkan Economy, 1600–1800’. The Journal of Economic History 13(4) (1953), 389–411. Sudi, Süleyman. Osmanlı Vergi Düzeni: Defter-i Muktesid, edited by Mehmet Ali Ünal. Isparta, 1996. Ursinus, Michael. ‘The “Çiftlik Sahibleri” of Manastır as a Local Elite, Late Seventeenth to Early Nineteenth Century’, in Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire, edited by Antonis Anastasopoulos, 247–57. Rethymno: Crete University Press, 2005. Uzun, Ahmet. ‘Tepedelenli Ali Pas¸a ve Mal Varlığı’. Beletten LXV(244) (2001), 1035–77. Vasiliu, Amilcar, and Mihail Guboglu. ‘Contributii la cunoas¸tera activitatii lui Ion Ionescu de la Brad din timpul exilului in Turcia’, in Ion Ionescu de La Brad: Aniversarea a 150 de ani de la nas¸tere, volum omagial, 225–37. Bacau, 1968. Veinstein, Gilles. ‘On the Çiftlik Debate’, in Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, edited by Çağlar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, 35–53. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Chapter 2

The ‘Invisible’ Army Greek Labourers

of

Christos Hadziiossif

Undocumented Labourers in Twenty-First Century Greece In April 2013 public opinion in Greece was shocked by a bloody incident that occurred near the small town of Nea Manolada in western Peloponnese. An armed gang hired by a local farmer fired indiscriminately into a crowd of some two hundred labourers, injuring more than thirty people. The attackers sought to terrorize the labourers, who had gone on strike to reclaim wage arrears corresponding to several weeks’ work. Suddenly, Greece and the rest of the world discovered the reverse side of what had been presented as a success story. In the area of Nea Manolada, some 1,200 hectares are occupied by strawberry plantations. The greatest share of the produce is exported to European markets, where it competes with strawberries from several other Mediterranean countries. This is a sophisticated trade involving highly capitalized enterprises, that is, retail chains, wholesale traders of agricultural produce, and logistics enterprises transporting the agricultural produce by road and by air. The traders are in a position to dictate the price to several hundred farmers who are competing against each other in their own country as well as against farmers in other Mediterranean states. Moreover, producers are struggling against rising costs in terms of building materials, energy and fertilizers. Only one component of their production cost is under their own control: wages. According to newspaper reports, labourers in Nea Manolada earned 23 to 25 euros per day, whereas in

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the competing strawberry farms in Turkey the wages are thought to be considerably lower. The 23 euros paid to the labourers of Nea Manolada for seven hours of hard work is substantially less than the actual average wage in crisis-stricken Greece. Thus, the conditions prevailing in Nea Manolada reflect the particular structures of the local labour market. On the demand side are scores of smallholders, most of them grouped around two producers’ associations entrusted with the common commercialization of the harvest of the individual farms. Alongside the smallholders, however, there are also a few relatively big farmers. The men who opened fire on 17 April 2013 had been hired by one large farmer who, according to newspaper reports, owed his workers 245,000 euros. This farmer ran a vertically integrated enterprise including six warehouses in the central wholesale market of Athens, from which he supplied the supermarket chains of the capital with fresh vegetables. In Nea Manolada he rented sixty hectares of land from smallholders, paying a total rent of 180,000 euros per year. According to the same newspaper reports, there is at least one other large farmer in the region, cultivating 150 hectares with the help of some five hundred labourers. Thus, the available data show that there is a clear hierarchy among the employers, with a nucleus of a few large farmers, and a swarm of smallholders around them. According to some estimates, the big farmers and smallholders together employ nearly five thousand labourers. These labourers are desperate enough to accept wages that are substantially lower than the average wage on the national labour market. Indeed, the majority of them are immigrants from Bangladesh, stranded in Greece on their way to the promised heaven of Britain. Having been helped into Greece by people smugglers, as a consequence they cannot obtain a residence or working permit. Moreover, under existing EU rules they do not have the right to leave the country through which they first entered EU territory for another member state. They are either granted asylum there, or expelled to their country of origin. The decision on their fate is reached after a protracted administrative procedure, and in the meantime the Bangladeshis, like the Afghans and the Iraqis, roam around the port of Patras seeking an opportunity to embark clandestinely on a ferryboat serving the route to Italy. Seasonal jobs in the nearby farms help them while they are waiting and hoping. Without valid documents they have no bargaining power in the face of the farmers, and they accept the wage rates offered without negotiation. The labour cost for the farmers is further reduced since the undocumented labourers cannot claim social security benefits. The upper limit of the net wages depends on the cost calculations of the farmers, whereas the lower limit depends on their estimate of what the subsistence minimum of these workers actually is or should be.

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These people are lodged in makeshift huts situated at the periphery of the town. They pay a monthly rent equal to two days’ pay for a small room shared with half a dozen others. It seems that there is a gradation in the quality of the lodgings corresponding to an unofficial hierarchy among the labourers. What seems to be a ranking along ethnic lines in fact shows that the treatment of the workers corresponds to their residential status. At the top of the hierarchy are the mostly local Greek superintendents, wardens of warehouses, lorry drivers and so on. After the attack of April 2013, terrorized Bangladeshis deserted the farms and Bulgarian Roma came in. Bulgarians are EU citizens and in this capacity they enjoy more rights – a fact that allowed them to stage a strike on the first of the following month, May, to reclaim their pay for the last eight days of work. ‘If the arrears increase further, they will be unable to pay us’, the strikers argued, showing the fragile financial situation of many small farmers.1 These incidents revealed to the Greek public the hidden army of ‘illegal’ foreign labourers in what was presented by the prevailing discourse on the Greek economy as a model sector. However, Nea Manolada is not a unique case. Smaller contingents of foreign labourers engaged in various types of cultivation are to be found in many regions of the country. The current economic depression and the skyrocketing rate of joblessness do not seem to impinge upon the employment of foreign workers in agriculture. From this point of view, Nea Manolada shows the future face of Greek agriculture. State paternalism, which traditionally sought to protect petty landowners and to preserve social peace, is no longer the official policy. According to a former Greek minister, the agriculture of the future will be the domain of entrepreneurial farmers. The introduction of a heavy property tax on farm land, combined with the curtailment of agricultural credit due to the liquidation of the stateowned Agricultural Bank, which used to provide rural populations with low-interest loans, is already forcing the latter to abandon farming or to lease their lands to big farmers employing cheap foreign labour.

A Historiographical Illusion: The ‘Invisible’ Labourers of Nineteenth-Century Greece The recent clashes in Nea Manolada recall another hidden army of Greek labourers, who worked on the farms of the same region more than a hundred years ago. They were not hidden from the eyes of their contemporaries, who were well aware of their presence, as is documented in several testimonies dating from that time. The labourers of the

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nineteenth and the early twentieth century have been invisible only to the historians of the last quarter of the previous century, writing after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974.2 These authors had entertained the myth that Greek agriculture was dominated by a multitude of small family farms. Greek peasants were supposed to own their land, which they tilled with the help of family members. The distribution of the so-called ‘national estates’ – former Ottoman properties – in 1871 is considered to have consolidated the egalitarian structure of agrarian ownership. The petty landowners managed to survive economically due to the cultivation of commercial crops, especially currants, which generated sufficient income and became the main staple produce of nineteenth-century Greece. They were also supported by the remittances of expatriates, which helped to sustain otherwise unviable agricultural enterprises. The sociologist Constantinos Tsoucalas has been the main exponent of this theory, which still underlies most models of Greek society as it has existed over the past two hundred years.3 The prevailing view of Greek agriculture admits only one exception to the rule of the small peasant farm: the great estates of Thessaly, a province incorporated into the Greek state in 1881. But even there the deviation from the dominant model was thought to be limited, because the great estates were divided into many small family farms cultivated by sharecroppers. In any case, so the story continues, after the agrarian reform of 1923 all the large estates were broken up into small land plots and ceded in full ownership to individual peasant families, thus further consolidating the egalitarian distribution of ownership in the countryside. If one accepts the prevailing view, then, there is no reason to doubt that property conditions in Manolada, as the village was called before the settlement of Asia Minor refugees next to it, were similar to those existing in the rest of the country. Moreover, the district lay in the province of Eleia, in the heart of the currant plantations zone that stretched at that time from Corinth in the northeast to Messinia in the southwestern Peloponnese and, according to the dominant explanatory model of Greek agriculture, currant cultivation was the cornerstone upon which the egalitarian structures in the countryside were built. I would like to argue that the prevailing picture – of nineteenthcentury Greek agriculture as dominated by small landowners exploiting their land with a workforce solely comprising family members – is inaccurate. Nor does its corollary hold, that class conflicts were absent from the nineteenth-century Greek countryside. In fact, farming in many regions was done by large numbers of hired labourers whose relations with landowners shaped the form that political and social conflict took in

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nineteenth-century Greece. I start this chapter by pointing to the factors that have hindered historians from acknowledging the existence and the actions of these agricultural workers. I proceed with a presentation of the available evidence about the existence of big currant plantations, which needed considerable numbers of hired workers for their exploitation. I next demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between large and small landholdings and its implication for the social relationships in the countryside. Finally, I discuss the forms of collective protest adopted by the different groupings in the agrarian society, and their implications for the Greek political history of the twentieth century.

Some Explanations for Historians’ Silence on Wage Labour in the Countryside There are manifold reasons for the intellectual blindness of historians towards the salaried workers active on the currant plantations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greece. First of all, there is the fact that since 1974 Greek historians have focused on the urban sector in their quest for the forces that determine social change. Banking, industry, shipping and trade, both in Greece and in the merchant colonies of the Greek diaspora, have monopolized their interest. Their tacit assumption has been that the long march of Greek society towards modernity started in the cities, whereas peasant society was backward, only reluctantly following the lead of the urban sector towards progress. From this perspective, the labour movement has been seen as representing an exclusively urban phenomenon. Thus, historians have painstakingly counted the small platoons of the first industrial workers in modern Greece and narrated their struggles, ignoring at the same time the plight of the battalions of agricultural wage earners, several thousand strong. Since the labour movement in the towns remained weak and the assumed egalitarian structures in the countryside were considered unable to generate serious social antagonisms, historians concluded that there had been no class conflicts in Greece until the beginning of the twentieth century and the growth of an urban working class. Unfortunately, the rare historians of the agrarian sector have not helped to refute this theory. I have had the opportunity to show the shortcomings of their approach in an earlier article.4 The assertion that smallholdings were predominant in nineteenth-century Greece is based on very scanty statistical evidence. The only relevant data to be found in the book by Kostas Vergopoulos, the first among the new Greek social

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scientists to support the thesis of small-sized family exploitations, concerns the regional distribution and the total surface area of the estates that were expropriated after 1917.5 In fact, historians of the agricultural sector are projecting onto the past the property distribution that resulted from the reform of 1917/1923. The initial aim of the reform was to resolve the social question in Thessaly by means of the expropriation of estates over 100 hectares, and the distribution of the land among the landless peasants. It was also hoped that the reform would increase the productivity of the grain-producing farms and in this way diminish the dependence of the country on imported foodstuffs. After 1923 the reform also allowed the settlement of 600,000 Asia Minor refugees in northern Greece and helped to consolidate the Greek presence in the region. These measures only marginally concerned the currant-producing regions of the Peloponnese.6 There is also the possibility that the historians’ view has been influenced by the numerous rhetorical references to the egalitarian character of Greek society and the equal distribution of property to be found in the documents of the nineteenth century. If so, they have underestimated the apologetic character of this discourse, which stressed the absence of great inequalities and celebrated an upward social mobility that supposedly enabled a peasant’s son to rise to high positions in the state apparatus.7 Another possible explanation for historians’ preference for the egalitarian model is that they have neglected the technical aspects of the production process in agriculture. It is characteristic of this approach that productivity in the agricultural sector is estimated exclusively in relation to the land and never in relation to the labour input. Consequently, all such studies fail to take into account the obvious fact that landholdings of the same size required a different quantity of labour depending on the nature of the produce cultivated on them. A notable exception to the general historiographic trend of the last decades of the twentieth century is the work of Thanassis Kalafatis on the agrarian economy in the province of Aigion. Kalafatis shows the existence of great plantations and the seasonal movement of thousands of labourers, but he fails to elaborate on those findings, as his main objective was the credit activities of the National Bank of Greece in that province.8 In his Ph.D. dissertation, Alex Franghiadis has also demonstrated that in the district of Amaliada, not very far from Manolada, the ktimaties, the landowning merchants and members of the liberal professions, consolidated currant farms of several hundred stremmata (one stremma = 0.10 hectares) by repurchases in the aftermath of the distribution of the national estates.9

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Evidence for a Sharper Social Stratification The first indication that social stratification in the countryside was more pronounced than is usually accepted is to be found in the terminology used in the documents of the time to denote the various social groups involved in the agricultural production process. The terms most often employed in notary deeds as well as in the population censuses are ergatis, yeorgos and ktimatias – worker, peasant and landowner. The meaning of ergatis or ergatikos is clear enough: this is the worker who, in the precise situation referred to in the documents, tills another’s land on which he has no real rights. The difference between ktimatias and yeorgos is less clear for the reader of our times. However, the use of these terms in the official statistics of the active population of Greece indicates that in the nineteenth century the difference in status corresponded to an easily discernible difference in occupation, despite the fact that for both groups agricultural revenue constituted the principal source of income. The confusion becomes greater when we come across the composite term yeorgoktimatias. Nevertheless, once one becomes accustomed to such documents (newspaper articles, legal and literary texts, etc.), one gains the impression that the term ktimatias carried greater social prestige than the word yeorgos. Yeorgoktimatias may be read as a mark of courtesy towards a simple yeorgos rather than merely denoting a clearly defined intermediary category. The emphyteusis agreements relative to the cultivation of currants offer a tentative answer to this question. As a rule, in legal documents the landowner is called a ktimatias, the cultivator usually yeorgos, and less often yeorgoktimatias, whereas he is virtually never referred to as ktimatias. Thus, we can conclude that, normally, a ktimatias was a landowner who did not perform manual work on his farm, which he exploited by employing sharecroppers and/or by hiring workers (ergates). Characteristically enough, in one such agreement from the year 1841 one of the contracting parties is called ‘ktimatias and without profession’, and in another contract from the year 1845 the landowner who made a deal with a simple yeorgos residing in a village is called a katoikoktimatias of Pyrgos, that is, a landowner residing in that town. The same ktimatias is qualified in another agreement as a lawyer.10 Indeed, most of the greater landed properties belonged to well-to-do urban dwellers such as merchants, lawyers, physicians and public servants, for whom agriculture was an important source of revenue, but was not their main occupation. Urban landowners invested in currant plantations as their produce was the only crop that could generate a satisfactory monetary revenue.

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At the same time, the moneyed town dwellers were the only ones who could manage the considerable expenses incurred by the labour-intensive culture of currants. It was estimated that to harvest an average cereal farm of six hectares, twenty man-days of labour were needed. On a plantation of currants, the same amount of labour was needed to cultivate a piece of land of less than half a hectare. According to the first systematic treatise on currant cultivation, written by Manouil Chairetis of Patras, thirty-five man-days were needed to dig a plantation of one hectare and fifty man-days to harvest it.11 This means that an average family relying on its own workforce could hardly manage to cultivate more than one hectare of currants. Intensive work was required not only during harvest time, but equally during winter and spring for pruning the plants and tilling the earth. There was also an additional difficulty for the family holding, which was always short of cash: on cereal farms the harvesters were usually paid in kind, whereas in the currant-growing areas workers were paid in cash. Thus, wage labour entered the scene through currant cultivation at a lower level, and it had deeper social repercussions than in other forms of agriculture. Therefore, at least on the microeconomic level, it is doubtful whether currant growing has ever had the stabilizing effects on social structure and politics that most historians and social scientists ascribed to it. The contradiction between the dominant discourse and the conditions in nineteenth-century Greece is manifest in Chairetis’s book on currant cultivation. His treatise won the prize of the Committee for the Encouragement of National Industry in 1879, and was published in a series of technical manuals supposedly addressed to a popular public. In fact, however, Chairetis’s recommendations concerned in the first place the owners of great plantations, as family farmers could not apply most of his advice for lack of means. Characteristic in this respect is the section of the book on the digging that had to take place in the winter. Here, Chairetis helps us to visualize the work on a great currant plantation. He advises that we let the workers start digging from the same horizontal line at the head of the corridors separating the columns of the vines, placing at the two external corridors the stronger and more experienced diggers and posting the rest of the workers towards the centre of the line in decreasing order of force and dexterity. The workers would advance with a different velocity reflecting the differences in their capacities and, after some hours, the initial horizontal line would take the shape of a semicircle. By standing at the centre of the line, ‘the owner or his intendant could oversee’, according to Chairetis, ‘the work and the value of his workers’.12

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Recent Research Findings Research carried out during the last decade has confirmed the existence of great landed properties in the currant cultivation area of the Peloponnese, but this information has not yet been put into context. In a recent paper Stathis Koutrouvidis cites three cases of great landowners of currant plantations in the province of Patras.13 The lawyer Nicolaos Sayias consolidated a currant plantation of more than thirty hectares and the merchant Themistocles Gerousis another of eight hectares after the agricultural reform of 1871. However, the consolidation of large plantations had started in that province long before the 1871 agricultural reform. Under earlier schemes for the distribution of national lands, some local notables and military chiefs of the Greek War of Independence had already been able to create large estates. One such case cited by Koutrouvidis was the retired military officer George Leon who, in 1845, owned a great currant plantation with a total surface that varied, according to different estimates, between forty and a hundred hectares.14 Leon allied himself through marriage with the powerful families of local politicians who were themselves owners of great currant plantations. Many more cases of such large plantations are discussed in the doctoral dissertation by Stavroula Verrarou on the province of Trifylia. After a thorough investigation of the notarial records, the archives of the local branch of the National Bank of Greece and the provincial newspapers, she concludes that the expansion of currant cultivation ‘cannot be understood without taking into account the extensive use of wage labour’, and she adds that ‘the view that the cultivation of currants relied exclusively on low-paid family work is, in my opinion, erroneous’.15 Thales Theodorides, a lawyer residing in the town of Pyrgos, owned several dozen hectares of land in the same region. It appears that he bought the land in the year 1841 from peasants who had made use of the provisions of the 1838 law on land distribution to acquire it. In 1846 he gave a peasant from a nearby village one half of a 4.6-hectare property to plant with currants.16 During the following years Theodorides acquired additional land, probably after the reform of 1871. Subsequently, the deputy and landowner Ioannis Messinezis called Thales Theodorides ‘a great landowner’ (megaloktimatias) when he quoted from a brochure by Theodorides during a parliamentary debate in 1883.17 Ioannis Messinezis had himself inherited from his father Leon 6.65 hectares planted with currants. Leon Messinezis had owned a total of 21.3 hectares, as well as several commercial buildings and houses both in Aigion and in Patras, that were divided among his three sons.18

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Another politician and currant plantation owner was Sotirios Sotiropoulos, deputy and minister in several governments between 1864 and 1895. In the narrative of his captivity at the hands of bandits, Sotiropoulos has left us precious testimony of the working conditions on a great currant plantation.19 In August 1866 he was kidnapped by bandits from his fifteen-hectare landed property near the town of Filiatra in the province of Trifylia. Some twelve hectares of the total surface of the estate were planted with currants. The abduction took place in the evening of the day when Sotiropoulos had finished harvesting. The harvest had lasted seventeen days and had mobilized thirty seasonal labourers under the guidance of three permanent employees. The number of people employed reveals the considerable labour input needed to harvest the currants. In fact, the labour needed was even greater than on the Sotiropoulos plantation, because his currant vines were recently planted and had not yet reached their full production capacity. According to his account, the countryside between Filiatra and Kyparissia contained plenty of similar plantations belonging to town dwellers. At a distance of five minutes’ walk from his estate lay the currant plantation of another member of parliament, the deputy Vassileios Dimitrakopoulos.20 However, Dimitrakopoulos was not a native of Trifylia; he had in fact been born in the mountain village of Alonistena and in parliament he represented the province of Mantineia in Arcadia. In other words, he was a typical representative of the mountain people who had bought or squatted on land in the coastal plains and planted it with currants. It seems that Dimitrakopoulos employed labourers from his village of origin. Some of them had permanently settled in the vicinity, creating a new small village called Katsimbali.21 Dimitrakopoulos followed a pattern that was widely practised in the currant-growing regions. The aforementioned Nicolaos Sayias and George Leon, for instance, had invited labourers from the mountain villages of their origins in Kalavryta and Corinth respectively, and established them in the vicinity of their estates, creating new settlements. This practice shows that labour and not land was the scarce production factor in the coastal plains of the Peloponnese until the end of the nineteenth century. Historians are well aware of this situation, but among the different methods adopted by the landowners to solve the problem of labour scarcity they have focused exclusively on the emphyteusis agreements and neglected the informal labour contracts, which admittedly have left no traces in the notarial archives. I will argue that hired labour not only played an important role in the culture of the currants, but that its existence decisively influenced the agricultural policy of the state.

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The Greek State’s Agricultural Policy During the fifty years following the Greek Revolution of 1821, the main question concerning the agrarian sector was the fate of the former Turkish properties. Their inclusion into the state domain represented an interim solution pending a definitive decision about their fate. Under the Bavarian regency and during the rule of the first king (1833–62), some tepid attempts were made to sell the national estates in order to create a class of landowners capable of acting as a political and social stabilizing force. These attempts met with little success, however, because the conditions fixed by the law proved to be unrealistic. Peasants, for example, preferred to occupy portions of the national estates without authorization, instead of bidding for them in public auctions and paying a high price for their land according to the law of 1835. Other laws allowed particular groups of supposedly needy people, like the veterans of the 1821 revolution and the Cretan refugees, to become landowners by ceding to them titles that they could exchange against plots of the national estates. In this case, too, the beneficiaries had to overcome the resistance of the local people who vied for the same plots. The state tacitly recognized the fait accompli by letting people squat upon national land against the payment of a rent. This situation lasted until the uprising against King Otto, who was forced to leave Greece in October 1862. In the following years, social pressure for the privatization of the national estates rose. The demands came from two sides. On one side were some of the veterans of the 1821 revolution, joined by a few young radicals who dreamed of an agrarian law that would distribute the national estates in equal lots to all family heads. On the other side were the well-to-do town dwellers, who had squatted on national land and planted it with currants, fig trees or olive trees. The latter wanted to expand their plantations and transform their tenancy into full ownership that would allow them to have easier access to bank credit. There were heated debates on this subject in the National Assembly between 1862 and 1864, but no decision was reached. However, article 102 of the new constitution requested that the distribution of the national estates should be decided by a special law ‘as soon as possible’. A similar provision had been included in article 105 of the 1844 constitution. One of the contentious points in the debates that took place in the National Assembly was the size of the lots of land to be ceded to the peasants. The concern of the notables and the rich urbanites, the social group to which the majority of representatives in the National Assembly belonged, was that if the plots distributed to the peasants were big enough to secure their subsistence, then they would not be able to find peasants

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willing to work in their plantations in return for a wage. However, due to the radical spirit reigning in the country after the departure of King Otto, the notables could not impose their views. A new attempt to pass a law settling the question of the national estates failed in 1865. On this occasion, the debate focused on the price that had to be paid by those who had transformed the national estates into plantations in order to obtain full ownership of their estates. The question of the national estates was eventually settled in 1871, the parliament passing two separate laws for each category of persons claiming the national estates. According to Law CCXCVI/1871, all planters of currants, vineyards and olive, fig and mulberry trees could claim full ownership of their plantations without size limitations and irrespective of their legal status, that is, whether they had planted with or without official authorization. The price to be paid for the concession, in eighteen annual instalments, was calculated on the value of the barren land, and it was substantially lower than the market price for plantations. As a result, the planters, acquiring the full ownership of their estates, would pay less to the Treasury than the sum of taxes and rent that they had had to give as simple tenants in the past.22 Law CLXXI/1871 was promulgated one day later, on 25 March, and provided for the distribution of barren land only. Peasants were allowed to claim ownership of the plots of the national estates that they were already cultivating, up to the size of eight hectares. If after this first round of distribution there were still national estates unaccounted for in the territory of the village, inhabitants of other villages and townsmen had the right to apply for ownership, on the same conditions as the villagers. Planters of national estates were excluded from the distribution of barren land. The provisions of these twin laws, and the parliamentary debate that preceded their approval, demonstrate that those who had the majority in parliament sought to consolidate the larger commercial plantations rather than strengthen the position of the smallholders. The limiting of peasant holdings of barren land to eight hectares was not inspired by egalitarian principles, but aimed at securing the necessary workforce for the larger plantations. Family plots of less than eight hectares (the initial proposal of the government had put the limit at only six hectares) made the peasants dependent on complementary earnings for their survival. They were, therefore, forced to accept employment as wage earners on the plantations of the ktimaties. According to the opposition newspaper Avgi, the reform of 1871 ‘is not about national land, it is about national plantations. It is not about the distribution of not yet allocated land, it is about the legitimatization through selling of already robbed public land that had been squatted on. It is about how to preclude anybody

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from acquiring any piece of land in the future. Nobody will acquire anything now. It is not about equal distribution of land to the people, it is about safeguarding those who have already grabbed land from losing the slightest part of it’.23 In the novel Thanos Vlekas published in 1855 by Pavlos Calligas, a lawyer and businessman and future governor of the National Bank of Greece, a character says: ‘I do not object to the whole land being distributed to the peasants, but a significant portion should be left free for the establishment of great landowners’.24 Eventually, the reform of 1871 fulfilled this old wish of the Greek bourgeoisie. The features of the 1871 reform thus prevent us from speaking indiscriminately of the distribution of the national estates, and render the use of average figures for the land ceded rather meaningless. Indeed, the available empirical evidence suggests that the reform sharpened inequalities in rural society. Self-interest certainly played a great role in the decision of the deputies in favour of the great currant plantations. Sotiropoulos, for instance, a planter of currants himself, introduced the reform laws in his capacity as finance minister in the Alexandros Koumoundouros government in 1871. He had held the same post during the unsuccessful attempt of 1865. His double capacity as lawmaker and plantation owner exposed him to criticism from the opposition, which dubbed him ‘plantation eater’ (phyteiophagos).25 However, politicians like Sotiropoulos were moved not only by self-interest, but also by the genuine belief that only rich investors external to the peasant society could introduce the necessary improvements into cultivation practices and modernize agricultural production. This did not hinder the supporters of the reform, like the newspaper Ethnofylax, the mouthpiece of one of the wealthiest Greeks of that time, the politician Thrasyvoulos Zaimis, from claiming that ‘so-called great landed property does not exist in Greece. Luckily, small landed property is very widespread and this happy feature is characteristic of the Greek society’.26 The privatization of the national estates was not an isolated measure, but was part of a comprehensive plan to reorder the Greek economy and society. The other parts of this plan were a tax reform and the settlement of the issue of the public debt that would offer Greece access to international money markets. The article of the constitution of 1864 that requested the distribution of the national estates had already prescribed the settlement of the public debt as well. Due to the political instability and the rapid succession of governments in the 1860s and 1870s, Koumoundouros and Sotiropoulos were only able to implement parts of this programme in a piecemeal fashion. For instance, the tax reform advocated by Sotiropoulos and Koumoundouros since 1861 never became law. On the contrary, in 1878 Koumoundouros’s

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government reached a deal with the bondholders of the older Greek loans, a development that allowed it to float a new loan on the foreign money markets. In 1871 Koumoundouros and Sotiropoulos hoped that the privatization of the national estates would increase state revenue in the short term by the payment of the annuities of the price fixed for the land, and in the long term by a significant rise in agricultural production and hence of tax receipts. They also expected that the distribution of barren land to peasants would ease the social tensions in the countryside. The reasons for the upheaval of that time have not been researched. However, there is a reliable indicator for the turmoil in the countryside: bandits and people fleeing justice. According to an official report of the year 1870, there were at the time at least 267 bandits roaming continental Greece and the Peloponnese, and 2,187 people fleeing justice and committing minor criminal offences in order to survive.27 The surge in bandit activity created serious international complications after the kidnapping and slaying of British tourists by bandits in that year. As a consequence of the mounting international pressure on the Greek government to quell banditry, immediately after parliament had passed the two laws on the national estates, the government introduced a bill against banditry that prescribed very harsh measures against robbers and their supporters among the peasant society. In the 1880s these policy objectives were taken over by the Charilaos Tricoupis governments and pursued in a more aggressive manner than before. In order to attract investors to agriculture, the government of Tricoupis changed the mode of taxation of the grain cultures. The new system advantaged the bigger landowners against the smallholders, and its principal aim was to favour the rich diaspora Greeks who had bought large Turkish estates in Thessaly, which was still an Ottoman province but, according to the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, was due to be ceded by the Ottoman Empire to Greece. Tricoupis claimed that his tax reform, replacing the tithe by a tax on plough-oxen, was inspired by the tax system introduced in Algeria by the French. However, the fact that Tricoupis copied a colonial example, whereas his opponents such as Sotiropoulos sought to introduce to Greek agriculture the tax system that was in use in most Western European countries, illustrates the difference between the two conceptions of economic development.28 Egalitarian arguments, still in use during the 1860s and 1870s, never appealed to Tricoupis; he considered that his backward country could only progress with the help of foreign capital and a strong centralized government. In agriculture, only rich capitalists exploiting great estates could pull the entire sector forward.

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Tricoupis’s ideas were clearly stated during the parliamentary debate on the donation of twenty-four thousand hectares (241,260,938 stremmata) of national estates to the crown prince Konstantinos in 1887. More than half of the surface area of the estate consisted of forests, the rest being arable land. The estate also included three adjoining fish farms. The exploitation of the land, the fisheries and the forest produced 78,000 drachmas of revenue per year. The opposition contested the government’s figures and asserted that the total surface of the estate exceeded thirty thousand hectares. The figures are taken from the extensive newspaper coverage of the parliamentary debate.29 Law MCCCCXXXVIII/1887, by which the donation was legalized, mentioned the borders of the estate but not its total surface area. In any case, the donation amounted to a reversal of the agricultural reform of 1871, as within the boundaries of the estate – which was thirty-five kilometres long and stretched, according to the description of the donation act, ‘from the mountains of Eleia above the village of Ali Gelepi to the sea’ – lay twelve villages with a total of 2,350 inhabitants. Manolada was one of those settlements, and it was after this village that the huge estate was named. With the donation, the villagers automatically became sharecroppers of the crown prince on a significant part of the lands they were cultivating. A newspaper of the main opposition party even feared that the peasants would become serfs of the crown prince.30

Working Relations on the Great Plantations We can thus conclude that great landed properties were by no means an exception in the currant production area of the Peloponnese. They were in fact so numerous that it is impossible for anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with the nineteenth-century documents not to have encountered them. Banking archives, notarial records and newspapers are full of references to the great currant plantations. Moreover, the existence of the great plantations was an intended result of state policy and not the consequence of an abuse of the law. The acknowledgement of the existence of the great plantations then raises the question of the way in which they were exploited. Historians have stressed the importance of the emphyteusis agreements for the expansion of the culture of currants, and have suggested that this system exempted the plantation owners from having recourse to hired labour. But this holds only for the initial phase of the plantation, because when, after the first five years, the currant vines started producing, the estate was divided into two equal parts between the peasants, who originally planted the vines,

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and the landowner. From this time on, the latter had to find labourers to till his portion. The peasants, who with the partition of the estate became owners of small plots, were generally willing to work for a wage on the plantation of the landowner in order to increase their otherwise insufficient income. The purpose of the emphyteusis agreements for the landowners was not only to transform barren land into productive plantations at a low cost, but also to permanently bind to their estate the labour force needed for its exploitation. The case of the aforementioned George Leon illustrates the functioning of the emphyteusis system. In 1846 he made an agreement with a group of peasants from a faraway mountain village to plant currant vines on an estate of twelve hectares in the region of Patras. In order to settle the peasants in place, Leon ceded to them small pieces of land to build their houses. In 1850, when the vines started producing, and according to the initial agreement, Leon retrieved one half of the estate, that is, six hectares, and ceded the other half to the peasants after dividing it into plots varying in size between 0.15 and 1.15 hectares.31 The small size of the plots made the peasants dependent on the wage they could earn on the bigger plantation. Since this workforce of dependent peasants was not sufficient to accomplish the necessary tasks on the plantations, the landowners engaged additional seasonal workers who moved from the mountain villages to the plains. Moreover, some wealthy landowners planted their estates themselves with the help of migrant workers. The agreements between the landowners and the hired labourers were informal and have therefore left no traces in the notarial archives studied by historians. However, there are other sources that reveal the presence of great numbers of salaried workers on the plantations, such as provincial newspapers, travelogues and the proceedings of parliamentary debates, all of which contain valuable information about the size of the salaried labour and its consequences for social relations in the Peloponnese. Even before the land reform of 1871, various estimates put the number of seasonal workers who migrated from the mountain villages to the currant plantations in the plains at several thousand. In 1863, for example, the seasonal workers who came to the province of Eleia, to which the district of Manolada belongs, to harvest the currants there, were estimated at ten thousand.32 The number of permanent residents in the province at that time was around fifty thousand, meaning that for some weeks in the summer there was one migrant worker for every five permanent residents. Roughly the same ratio – three thousand migrant workers to seventeen thousand permanent residents – could be found in the province of Aigion. According to the author of this estimate, the economic historian Kalafatis, some workers came from very distant places, such as

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the Danubian provinces of the Ottoman Empire.33 In the same period, the highest concentration of wageworkers in Greece, in the shipyards of the island of Syros, never exceeded 1,500 people divided among several shops. In the Peloponnese, the movement of seasonal workers survived for some years after the end of the boom in currant production in the early 1890s. In 1894, during a debate in parliament, A. Petralias, the deputy of Eleia, invited the government to give priority to the improvement of the road from Pyrgos to Kalavryta ‘because every day several thousand people coming from the mountain districts of the Peloponnese, i.e. from Mantineia, Kynouria, Kalavryta, and Gortynia, travel on it going to the plains of Eleia to cultivate their land properties or in search of wage work. During the winter the movement of those several thousand people is interrupted [due to the bad conditions of the road]’.34 Even if we accept that the numbers in this testimony are somewhat inflated, the fact is that the seasonal workers employed in the currant farms were counted in the hundreds and thousands. The great majority of these migrant workers were smallholders from the central Peloponnese, who profited from the different time schedules of the cereals and the currant crops and earned extra income by working temporarily on the plantations.

Working Relations and Social Antagonisms These battalions of hired workers have left practically no direct testimonies of their activities. The information about them originates from documents produced by and for the ktimaties. A common feature of these documents is the feeling of menace emanating from the workers, either the temporary migrants from the highlands or nearby small planters. In 1866, the abduction of Sotiropoulos, a member of parliament and ktimatias, made all the other landowners in the zone from Filiatra in the south to Patras in the north feel so uneasy among their harvesters that ‘they abandoned their crops to the whim of the workers and fled to the cities’.35 The great concentration of migrant young males near the villages and small towns was a permanent cause of anxiety among the landowners. In Alissos, a village of 250 families in the vicinity of Patras, there were a thousand resident migrant workers there in the winter as well as in the summer. Invoking the ‘conflicting interests’ of these populations, the Patras newspaper Fanos called for a reinforcement of the local police.36 On the other hand, the influx of seasonal labourers created an additional demand for basic goods, from which the local retailers benefited. However, at the basis of the perception of the workers as a potential threat to the landowners lay conflicting interests around the

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level of wages. Wages were the main cost item in currant production. In all available estimates, labour accounts for 70 per cent of the total cost, including depreciations and interest payments.37 The expenses for fertilizers and other material inputs accounted for about 5 per cent of the total cost. Thus, the greatest part of the sums borrowed by the plantation owners from the National Bank of Greece or from private lenders ended up in the pockets of the labourers and via them in the chests of the local grocers and usurers. Thus, with the money earned in the plains, the labourers contributed to the expansion of the monetary economy in the economically less developed mountain areas. The capitalistic character of their ventures made the plantation owners vulnerable to the price fluctuations of their product on foreign markets. A fall in their earnings or a rise in the taxes on currants left them unable to pay the wages of the workers and to meet the interest on their bank loans. A restriction in bank lending had equally dramatic consequences. The newspapers of Patras, Pyrgos and other towns of the currant-producing areas are filled with announcements of auctions of currant plantations put on sale by banks trying to retrieve the sums they had loaned to the landowner. In contrast, the smallholders were in a better position to cope with a price fall by reducing their production costs, that is, by restraining their own consumption. In 1883, the price of currants suffered a relative fall from the high levels of the previous years. At the same time, the National Bank of Greece drastically curtailed its loans in a climate of restrictive monetary policy. Not surprisingly, the landowners reacted negatively to the government’s plans to raise the export tax on currants. According to them, even a small increase in the tax would stop the expansion of the crop, as it would remain profitable only for those farmers ‘who can cultivate currants with their own manual work’. In the same debate, another member of parliament warned that the re-evaluation of the drachma by 12 per cent due to the introduction of a new currency standard would result in an increase in production costs by the same percentage, because the farmers would be obliged to pay the peasants in new drachmas. When another deputy observed that the pay increase ‘benefited the people’, the politician landowner replied, saying ‘we have to be careful that in this way we don’t destroy the ktimaties’, thus underlining the conflicting interests of the great landowners and the peasant wage earners.38 In July of the following year, the plantation owners in the province of Patras were alarmed at the news that the municipality of Dymi, some eleven miles to the south, had authorized the collection of acorns in the large local forest to start on 1 August, instead of the 15th. The landowners feared that as the collection of acorns would overlap with the currant

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harvest period, wages would necessarily rise.39 In 1885 it was reported that ‘the question of wages is being settled in favour of the ktimaties’.40 However, wages remained at a higher level than in 1883, that is, four to five drachmas instead of three.41 All the available evidence shows that despite the hybrid status of the labourers, namely as both property owners and wage earners, the ktimaties perceived them exclusively as wage earners and not as fellow propertied men. Certainly, there was a cultural estrangement between the well-todo urban ktimaties and the smallholders that contributed to the sense of menace coming from the labourers. However, the conflicting interests of great landowners and seasonal labourers did not lead to an open conflict. There were no strike actions on the plantations. Nevertheless, the opposition of the labourers to the ktimaties was real and manifested itself in several aspects of social life. A permanent feature of this latent opposition was the struggle for control of the land. Plantation owners and peasants contested the boundaries of each other’s property and fought endless judicial battles against each other. Besides the open contestation of the property of the great landowner, which was a perilous and expensive procedure, peasants resorted to silent encroachments on the plantations and to acts of sabotage. One common practice of the peasants was to let their livestock enter the plantations of the urban landowners. After the end of the harvest in September 1891, the Patras newspaper Peloponnisos appealed to the municipality to protect the plantations from the incursions of peasants’ livestock, because ‘the peasants systematically destroy the estates of the non-residents who live in the towns, believing that in this manner the estates will become theirs with little money’.42 Moreover, there was much litigation stemming from the non-fulfilment of the emphyteusis and loan agreements.

Taming the Peasantry Hence, control of the judiciary was of paramount importance for the preservation of property rights in the countryside. However, the repeated complaints from politicians, essayists and journalists of the nineteenth century about the bad state of the judiciary remind us that the struggle for land took place in an institutional framework that was still in the making. The ktimaties, as lawmakers, ministers and judges, played a crucial role in shaping the bourgeois order in nineteenth-century Greece. We lack a comprehensive study about the professions and social status of the members of the Greek parliament. Nevertheless, recent local studies confirm the general statements of the nineteenth-century sources about

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the high percentage of ktimaties among the deputies in parliament. Under the pretext that the largest section of the deputies was financially independent due to the revenue raised from their estates, some people proposed that the state stop paying them a monthly allowance. This proposal was aimed at forcing the less affluent members out of parliament, since they were considered to be politically less reliable. In 1883, some twenty years after this proposal was made, a Patras newspaper rejoiced that more than 200 out of a total of 245 members of parliament were still ‘if not rich, certainly well-to-do property owners’.43 A consequence of this situation was that in the summer months the deputies would leave Athens for the provinces in order to supervise the harvest on their properties.44 According to Pavlos Calligas, during the formative years of the Greek state the main challenge for the new order consisted in imposing the principle of legality over the principle of equity.45 In order to function, capitalism and the constitutional political system, which the Greek ruling social coalition had opted for, required respect of the rules independently of the pain caused to the weaker members of society. By overthrowing the Ottoman yoke, the Greeks gained political freedom, but at the same time they lost the protective cocoon of the local community, which was deprived of its fiscal competence and its customary judicial powers. Under the Ottomans, the members of the village community were collectively responsible for the payment of taxes, whereas the new citizens became individually responsible for their debts to the state. At the same time, the judges in the new kingdom tended, more often than their Ottoman counterparts, to jail debtors both to the Treasury and to private moneylenders. Moreover, acts of violence that would previously be reprimanded by the communal authorities became criminal offences under the new penal code, calling for severe punishment. The most complicated mechanical device in Greece at the moment of the establishment of the new kingdom was probably the guillotine, built by the Bavarian soldiers of the artillery corps in Nauplion in October 1833.46 From the very beginning, the Greek judicial authorities made intensive use of the guillotine, which was transported by ship or by ‘twelve national mules’ to execution sites all over the kingdom. These developments shocked the great majority of people, who remained attached to the habitus of preserving the social equilibrium through flexible arrangements within the community. Death by guillotine and not by bullet was considered to be the ultimate dishonour. The chieftain of the bandits who kidnapped Sotiropoulos said that they had been forced ‘to become bandits and to roam the mountains in order to escape from the guillotine and to die like men’.47 The social disapproval of the new penal system manifested

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itself in the difficulties encountered by the authorities in finding willing executioners until the late nineteenth century.48 The harsher the penal system became, the more intolerable it was, as it coincided with a sharper perception of the economic inequalities caused by the expansion of the monetary sector of the economy. It is no mere coincidence that, during the first decades after independence, the Peloponnese, the region with the most developed commercial agriculture in the country, was the scene of serious peasant riots.49 The immediate causes of the riots varied, but among the demands put forward by the leaders there was always some reference to the high taxes and how they were perceived. These shortlived riots can be seen as the peaks of a wider shared sentiment of discontent, where bandits and fugitives from justice represented the everyday expression of the difficulties encountered by the acculturation process of the peasant society. Therefore, they did not cease to haunt the countryside, even after the expansion of the cultivation of currants and the democratization of the political system had stabilized the regime. Repression was not the only means by which the ruling social coalition achieved the integration of the peasantry into the new order. The market economy, universal male suffrage and the education system were equally instrumental in securing bourgeois hegemony over peasant society. The expansion of the market and the monetization of the economy were the principal factors that undermined the subsistence economy and its moral values. In Edmond About’s satiric novel Le Roi des Montagnes, first published in 1857, the bandits’ chief is presented as being fully integrated into the international economy, making financial deals with his banker in London.50 Another indication that even the enemies of the bourgeois order were aware of the economic mechanisms and sought to exploit them is the fact, reported by Sotiropoulos in the account of his captivity,51 that his kidnappers asked the ransom to be paid in gold coins, whereas silver coins and banknotes were the usual means of payment in Greece in 1866. Universal male suffrage also helped bind peasants to the bourgeois order. Nineteenth-century authors as well as present-day historians have very often criticized political patronage as a practice that perverted the functioning of democratic institutions. Certainly, many voters asked for individual favours, and most members of parliament conceded, hoping to win their vote in the next elections. However, historians tend to overestimate the influence of such exchanges on the course of political life. More decisive was the role of informal collective bargaining between voters and members of parliament, that is, the very democratic process itself. The peasant majority of the electorate used its voting rights to defend its interests against policies that were contrary to them. Taxation

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was at the heart of political disputes during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and peasants used their political weight to thwart plans for tax increases on agricultural revenue by the government. Nineteenthcentury authors criticized universal suffrage and parliament not for their real or imaginary faults, but because they worked in a sense contrary to the interests of the ruling social coalition. In 1904 Panajotis Decasos, then a young agrarian expert and a future conservative politician, vented his frustration at the political influence of the peasants in a study on Greek agriculture dedicated to the king of Greece: ‘Certain authors hold the political and social conditions that resulted from the liberal constitution as responsible for the shortcomings of the legislation concerning agriculture. Because this circumstance makes the representatives dependent on the less educated public that abuses its power by voting only for the representatives who satisfy its unreasonable demands’.52 Decasos had the occasion to observe the ‘deleterious’ effects of the ‘unreasonable demands of the less educated public’ during the heated political debates that had taken place during the previous twelve years on the necessary measures to prop up the price of currants. In 1892, wine production in France having recovered from the ravages of phylloxera, the French government re-established import duties on the currants imported from Greece, in this way depriving the Peloponnesian planters of an important market. The ensuing fall in the price of currants set off a chain reaction affecting the whole of the Greek economy. In this process, the country’s trade deficit widened and the national currency depreciated. In the currant-producing provinces, money revenues fell dramatically and credit was severely restricted. In the first months of 1893, many of the top names of the currant trade in Patras defaulted, disrupting the domestic credit chain that started with the big exporters and went down via the secondary traders and moneylenders to the planters and their labourers.53 The National Bank of Greece started curtailing its outstanding loans to landowners and farmers as early as 1892. By the end of June 1894, the total sum lent to landowners amounted to less than 15 per cent of the loans extended by the bank before the crisis.54 Many planters were thus short of cash and encountered difficulties in paying wage earners to dig their land. In order to generate cash, they sold their crop below cost, precipitating an even further downward spiral in the price of currants. The tax receipts of the state suffered as a consequence of the price fall of the main export crop. Eventually, in December 1893, the Greek state declared default on its foreign debt, a measure that caused the price of foreign exchange to rise, in this way aggravating the already existing economic and social crisis.

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Divisions Unveiled The crisis revealed the multiple cleavages within the society of the currant-producing provinces. The opposition of the salaried workers to the landowners was only one of these cleavages, and certainly not the most important; antagonisms within the landowners’ group had greater consequences. The size of the plantation, the productivity of the land and the regional differences in the quality of produce were the main factors that influenced the adherence of the landowners to one or another of the competing groups. Ideology was the cause of even finer distinctions within landowners’ groups of the same size category. Generally, in the documents of that time, these various oppositions are presented in a veiled form. Certainly, the public discourse of politicians and journalists generally occulted the true nature of social relations in the currant-producing agricultural sector and beyond. ‘In the past the cultivation was performed by money capital, this year it was accomplished exclusively by the arms of the producers.’55 This passage from a report on the currantproducing provinces published in Akropolis, the Greek newspaper with the highest circulation at the end of the nineteenth century, is characteristic of the reluctance of many observers at the time to explicitly acknowledge the contribution of the salaried agricultural workers. In the same spirit, the fact that the leaders of the producers’ associations were important landowners was very often passed over by the press. On the contrary, the reports stressed their qualities as lawyers, physicians, politicians and so on. The same newspapers assigned to the salaried workers a subaltern position in their descriptions of the big public demonstrations taking place in Patras: The heads of the various associations appeared on the balcony of the house of Mr. Georgakopoulos taking place on both sides of the president of the Currants’ Union, the lawyer Mr Sayias. The spectacle is imposing. On the long marble balcony are standing the richest and the most distinguished members of the society of Patras. The gentlemen. Sayias, Frangopoulos, Tsatsonis, Papanikolopoulos, the orator of the popular meeting of the previous day. The heads of the society of Patras standing on the great balcony, and beneath them, in the piazza, were standing the landowners, the merchants, the workers, the liberal professions brought together by the consciousness of common distress … Especially, the subaltern class came in great numbers. This represents a huge popular approval … .56

The great majority of salaried workers in the currant plantations were themselves landowners and it is not surprising that many of them

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reacted to the crisis in this way. The hybrid social situation of the great majority of labourers was acknowledged by the first Greek socialists as an obstacle to the diffusion of their worldview among the crisis-stricken populations. We know the difficulties encountered by the first socialists in Athens, when they tried to draw a line that divided the exploiters from the exploited working people. According to the initial strict definition adopted in 1890 by the group behind the review The Socialist, the ‘exploited’ working people were the wage earners. Two years later, the group expanded the definition to include small landowners and petty tradesmen.57 Indeed, the organization was able to make inroads into the heterogeneous society of Patras and the surrounding countryside. The registers of subscribers to The Socialist for the years 1892–93 include names from many villages and small towns in the northwestern Peloponnese.58 Some of them, like the villages of Barbasena and Lambeti, were in 1894 to be the centre of strong movements that refused to pay taxes and were insubordinate to the authorities. Certainly, the socialists were more active in great towns like Patras and Pyrgos, but people in these towns were in permanent intercourse with the peasants of the surrounding countryside. The economic situation in the urban context was equally alarming as in the countryside, since the manufacturers and merchants were confronted with the consequences of falling demand from the villages. Moreover, the depreciation of the drachma pushed up the prices of many imported necessity goods at the same time as wages were falling. In Patras, the largest town in the region, several new associations appeared that defined themselves as socialist. The statutes of the Socialist Club of the Province of Patras were approved in 1894. The society, which succeeded an earlier Socialist Brotherhood, was connected to the group around Stavros Kallergis, the publisher of the newspaper The Socialist in Athens.59 Alongside these organizations, some Christian Socialist groups also appeared. The ideology of all these groupings was vague, allowing them to attract people from a large spectrum of social categories. However, most of their members belonged to the liberal professions or were artisans. The government of Charilaos Tricoupis, who would be hailed by historiography as the great liberal reformer of the nineteenth century, responded to the turmoil in the countryside and to the socialist stirrings with an iron fist policy, putting the until then autonomous local police forces under a unified military command.60 At the same time, members of the ruling social coalition refused to admit the very existence of a socialist movement, and sought refuge in apologetic discourses about the social reality in the country. Theodoros Diliyannis, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, delivered perhaps the most eloquent paean to

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the supposed upward mobility in Greek society when speaking before parliament in January 1893. According to him, a major quality of the Greek people was the determination with which the penniless labourer struggles during his entire life to gain a small wage and suffers the outmost privations in order to accumulate a small surplus with which he plants a vineyard, builds a cottage and after a while he buys a field and becomes a landowner. He marries and looks after the education of his children, saves to give a dowry to his daughters allowing them to espouse men who follow more noble trades than he did, and he is not surprised, if by chance, his son is elected deputy to the parliament.61

It is thus not surprising that, when in March 1895 the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy asked a Greek visitor, ‘How is socialism doing in Greece?’, the latter repeated the usual clichés of the Greek bourgeoisie and the apologists of the status quo: We do not have socialism in Greece, there are simply some people who want to introduce it, imitating the developments in other countries and not because the conditions in the country are asking for it. The labouring classes in our country are better off than the other social classes, because the wage is sufficient, 4 to 5 drachmas, and there is work for the labourer’s whole family, and not just him and his wife. Besides this, the Greek peasant, the artisan and particularly the wage earner, are sober in their diet and they are not familiar with luxury.62

Despite his assurances, Efthymios Karakalos, in his capacity as a judge at the high court of Patras, was in a position to know the critical economic situation in his jurisdictional district as well as the activities of the first socialists. Moreover, he had been to Russia nine months earlier, with the mission to promote the consumption of currants in the empire of the Tsars. He had been mandated by a religious fraternity of Patras and, despite the fact that some leading merchants and political personalities of the region also backed his mission, he represented the interests of owners of small- and medium-sized plantations. His assertion that labourers were better off than the rest of society reflected the typical grievances nursed by landowners against wage earners. At the same time, small landowners were pitted against great plantation owners and merchants, who pleaded in favour of the obligatory withdrawal of a part of the crop with the hope in this way to restore the balance between supply and demand. For this group, a rise in the price of currants would overcompensate for the loss suffered by a withdrawal of a part of their production.

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Towards State Intervention in the Economy On the contrary, for small planters and especially for those enterprises that relied exclusively on the work of family members of the landowner, the quantities withdrawn would be a net loss. The policy of withdrawal – the parakratima – also met with the opposition of the majority of planters in the provinces of Aigion and Messinia. The best-quality currants were grown in the former province, as well as in Corinth, and their producers were confident that they could sell them at a premium despite the overproduction crisis. The planters of Messinia benefited from the great productivity of their land and, despite the low quality of their produce, they too could sell it at a profit. The twelve years that followed the outbreak of the crisis were thus punctuated by repeated open-air meetings attracting big crowds to the central places of the main towns of the currant-producing area. The meetings followed a standard format: after listening to the harangues of the representatives of the newly founded planters’ association and of local politicians, the crowd approved a petition addressed to the Athens parliament. In Patras and Pyrgos the petitioners asked for the intervention of the state to support the price of currants by imposing an additional tax in kind. These quantities were withdrawn from the export market and the state was allowed to sell them only to national industries to be processed into alcohol. The revenue from these transactions would help to create a fund for agricultural credit. On the contrary, the meetings in Aigion and Kalamata asked parliament to reject the proposals of the parakratima. They used free market arguments, claiming that the low price for currants made it easier to introduce them into new markets such as Russia. In the long run, the exports to new markets would restore the equilibrium between supply and demand. The parakratima, on the other hand, would bring about only temporary relief and would undermine the efforts to introduce the fruit into new markets. The organizers of the meetings rented special trains to transport several hundred people to Athens in order to submit their petitions to king and parliament. The newspapers liked to present the dissensions as a clash of diverging local interests, but in fact the frontline ran not between different provinces but between the great landowners and the family farmers. Only incidentally would a person such as the Member of Parliament for the province of Trifylia, Efstathios Kokevis, mention that ‘the petty producers do not accept the measure of withdrawal’.63 Confessing his perplexity concerning the policy of withdrawal, the prime minister Theodoros Diliyannis stated in parliament in June 1895: ‘I have in my portfolio a multitude of motions, petitions, discourses and pleas to the government

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to hurry to enforce the parakratima, but I confess that I have also many opinions against the parakratima’.64 The choice between the conflicting interests was thus a politically risky decision. However, the proponents of the parakratima were more effective in their mobilization. They benefited not only from the backing of the great landowners and exporters in the provinces of Achaia and Eleia, but also from the distillers in the Athens-Piraeus area. Not surprisingly, the great newspapers of the capital, such as Akropolis, supported their views. Yet the opponents of the withdrawal were not completely beaten, and upon his return from Russia, Euthymios Karakalos was elected by the Patras constituency to represent it in parliament as an independent member. The bitterness of the political strife explains why, from February 1894 until July of the following year, about ten different bills imposing the withdrawal of the excess production were introduced in parliament, but none of them was voted into law, because, under pressure from the people, the government refused each time to explicitly support the bill, and it consequently failed to win the necessary majority of votes. Eventually, the withdrawal was adopted in July 1895. The Currant Bank was founded by law in 1899 to finance landowners. However, despite the fact that the percentage of the produce withdrawn was raised from 15 to 20 per cent, the problems for the capitalist plantations persisted. On the contrary, small landowners could save on their own salaries and could accept lower prices than the large planters. Many of them found it still profitable to extend their plantations. In 1904, according to an estimate, ten thousand additional hectares were planted with currants compared to before the outbreak of the crisis.65 Regardless of the accuracy of these numbers, the expansion of the crops even under the low-price regime is a fact. The Currant Bank could not bring the necessary relief because prices remained low, and as a result the only effect of its loans was to aggravate the indebtedness of the landowners. In many cases, especially in Eleia, the debts of landowners exceeded the value of their land. Soon the management of the bank would be tarnished by numerous financial scandals, the greatest of which concerned the embezzlement of funds committed by the very president of the Board of Directors, a prominent Patras merchant. In the summer of 1904 the bank had accumulated losses equal to 83 per cent of its capital, having encountered great difficulties in recovering the loans extended to landowners.66 Eventually, in 1905, the Currant Bank was replaced by the Privileged Company for the Encouragement of the Production and Commercialization of Currants, a private venture founded by Greek and foreign capitalists. The resilience of the smallholders and the persistently high levels of production forced the Privileged Company to subsidize the voluntary

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uprooting of plantations. At least five thousand hectares had been uprooted by 1909, but the agricultural census of 1911 showed only a minor reduction of the total area planted with currants in comparison with the maximum that had been reached in the year 1887, that is, 56,423 against 57,852 hectares. This was the reason why the Privileged Society planned to raise the total area of the plantations subsidized under the eradication scheme to 12,500 hectares.67 In this crisis the seasonal labourers confronted the owners of the great plantations not as occasional salaried workers, but rather as competing landowners. It is true that the available data show that the expansion of cultivation took place mainly in the periphery of the currant-producing area, but even the core of that zone underwent a change in the property distribution that favoured small planters. This process accelerated after World War I and was completed only in the second half of the twentieth century. In a move signalling the new social and economic conditions, after the death of her husband in 1920, the widow of Nicolaos Sayias sold the totality of his thirty-hectare plantation, including his country mansion.68 With the wisdom of hindsight, one can say that the outbreak of the crisis in 1892 was not a serious threat to the political and social regime, since it survived the turbulence. It has been asserted that the class struggle did not reach Greek agriculture in this phase. The currants crisis pitted only certain professional groups against each other, such as the currant producers versus the trading middlemen or versus the usurers. For this reason, we do not observe actions inspired from the proletariat that reveal a class struggle. Only in the urban environment did isolated incidents of terrorism take place, the only ones committed under the influence of anarchist ideas.69

Assertions of this kind reflect the basic stereotypes in use in Greek historiography, which I have attempted to refute above. They certainly underestimate the nervousness and anxiety that befell the ruling social coalition at the turn of the twentieth century. Without taking this feeling of insecurity into account, we cannot explain the move of the Tricoupis government to put the autonomous police departments of the great towns under the orders of army officers. Nor can we explain the government’s haste, at the same time, to revise the procedures for the execution of the death penalty.70 The implacable application of law and order would certainly have led to a social explosion if the following governments had not taken care to mitigate the effects of the free market economy on peasant society. Thus, in 1894 the government advised the courts to treat with leniency the demands of debtors to suspend the forcible selling of their

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farms, a policy that de facto or de jure remained in force for more than ten years.71 During the same troubled years, the authorities tolerated, even if they did not favour, emigration to the United States by people who were in trouble with the law. These measures of leniency ushered in the phase of state interventionism in the economic process. The introduction of the parakratima in 1895, the establishment of the public Currant Bank in 1899, the granting to the private Privileged Society of the right to regulate the currant market in 1905, and the eradication of private plantations against indemnity a few years later were major steps on the road towards Polanyi’s ‘Great Transformation’ in Greece. These measures were not part of an enlightened policy conceived at the top of society, but were concessions made by successive governments under pressure from the bottom. During the three decades that elapsed after the constitutional change of 1864, the various social classes assimilated the use of the institutional leverages that the constitution had put at their disposal. In fact, the huge public gatherings in the marketplaces of the Peloponnese, the petitions addressed to the parliament in Athens, as well as the shifting of electoral allegiances, were part of the collective political bargaining taking place between the capital and the countryside. It was precisely the effective use by peasants and the urban petty bourgeoisie of the political means put at their disposal by the constitution that explains the tenor of the antiparliamentary discourse adopted by many economically powerful members of society, as well as by intellectuals who stood alongside them, such as Decasos. The state’s enhanced role in the economy was granted a proper institutional framework with the new constitution of 1911 and the organic laws that implemented it. Among other matters, these laws reordered the trade union landscape, introduced agricultural cooperatives and created the Ministry of National Economy as the coordinating body of state interventionism. The state of 1911 was not yet the welfare state of the post-World War II period: its primary concern was for the small independent producers and trades whose survival was being threatened by the market and technological progress. For these people, the state acted as the insurer of last resort.72 Wage labour, on the contrary, had to wait until 1936 for the application of a comprehensive social security system. Thus, I find the thesis convincing that the principal aim of Law 281/1914 on trade unions was to regulate, and not to liberate, the activities of organized labour.73 State interventionism was the rational – that is, peaceful and consensual – way to accommodate conflicting social interests. However, from the same cradle emerged a different strain of attitudes and policies based on violence against political and class adversaries as well as state

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intervention. The first emergence of the new breed of violence was in 1916, when the paramilitary corps of the epistratoi (people enlisted for military service) attacked the political artisans of the post-1911 institutional change and their followers across Greece, intimidating, molesting, injuring or even killing them, and destroying their property. The epistratoi movement has thus far been little studied, and the sole available treatise on the subject simply reproduces newspaper coverage of their activities, with little or no analysis.74 However, the available evidence shows that two mass movements of the turbulent 1890s were fused in the epistratoi. The first was the protest movement of the currant planters’ associations. The president of the epistratoi was Ioannis Sayias, son of the lawyer Nicolaos Sayias who in his capacity as president of the planters’ association of Patras organized the largest mass mobilizations of the 1890s.75 Among the leaders of the epistratoi were also several members of another mass movement of the 1890s, an urban one. This movement was led by the Center of the Independents of Athens, which in 1895 coalesced around the petty bourgeois protests in the capital and presented its own candidates for the general elections of that year. The same persons or their close relatives (K. Esslin, N. Canaris, D. Totomis) were also represented on the governing board of the epistratoi.76 The smallholders of Attica, who voted for the candidates of the Center of the Independents in 1895, were also represented in the epistratoi. With the emergence of this violent movement, the break between the majority of smallholders and artisans and shopkeepers on one side, and wage earners on the other, became apparent. The divide between the two social categories grew wider during the interwar period when the decline of the currant trade led to the fragmentation of the unprofitable large plantations and to the substitution of other crops for currants. As a result, the smallholders lost their hybrid social character as propertied wage earners and became mere property owners, and they generally acted as such. Ideological options, personal ties and local patriotism modulated the political behaviour of the smallholders in different situations, but the basis for class alliances with the urban poor remained tenuous. Only under special circumstances, like the dramatic deterioration in economic conditions during the Axis occupation of Greece in 1941–44, did the radicalism of the smallholders flare up. Christos Hadziiossif is Professor Emeritus of the University of Crete and distinguished member of the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH); he was Director at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/ FORTH during 2010–16. He specializes in the economic and social

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history of Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of historiography. His publications include the monographs in Greek The Old Moon: Industry in Greece, 1830–1940 (Themelio, 1993); Synasos: History of a Place without History (Crete University Press, 2005); and The Unification of Europe: Germany and the Return of Nationalism (Vivliorama, 2017). He is the general editor of the collective work History of Greece in the Twentieth Century, 8 vols (Vivliorama, 2002–2009) [in Greek]. He is also co-editor (with G. Mavrogordatos) of the edited volume Venizelism and Bourgeois Modernization (Crete University Press, 1998) [in Greek]. He has published extensively in French, German, English, Turkish and Bulgarian in academic journals and edited volumes.

Notes  1. See the Athens newspapers Kathimerini, 18, 19, 20 April and 2 May 2013; Ethnos, 21 April 2013; Avgi, 21 and 28 April 2013.  2. Kostas Vergopoulos, To agrotiko zitima stin Ellada: I koinoniki ensomatosi tis georgias (Athens: Exantas, 1975); Constantinos Tsoucalas, Exartisi Kai Anaparagogi: O koinonikos rolos ton ekpaideftikon michanismon stin Ellada (1830–1922) (Athens: Themelio, 1977); Georges Dertilis, ‘Terre, paysans et pouvoir économique (Grèce, XVIIIe-XXe siècle)’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 47, no. 2 (1992), 273–314; Georges Dertilis,’Terre, paysans et pouvoir politique (Grèce XVIIIe-XXe siècle), Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 48, no. 1 (1993), 85–107; William W. McGrew, Land and Revolution in Modern Greece, 1800–1881 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985).  3. Constantinos Tsoucalas, Exartisi Kai Anaparagogi: O koinonikos rolos ton ekpaideftikon michanismon stin Ellada (1830–1922) (Athens: Themelio, 1977).  4. Christos Hadziiossif, ‘Class Structure and Class Antagonism in Late Nineteenth-Century Greece’, in Greek Society in the Making, 1863–1913: Realities, Symbols and Visions, ed. Philip Carabott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 3–17.  5. Kostas Vergopoulos, To agrotiko zitima stin Ellada: I koinoniki ensomatosi tis georgias (Athens: Exantas, 1975), 175–78.  6. Socrates D. Petmezas, Prolegomena stin Istoria tis Ellinikis Agrotikis Oikonomias tou Mesopolemou (Athens: Alexandreia, 2012), 76–105, 149–54, 165–82.  7. Christos Hadziiossif, I giraia selini: I viomichania stin Ellada, 1830–1940 (Athens: Themelio, 1993), 370–81.  8. Thanassis Kalafatis, Agrotiki pisti kai oikonomikos metaschimatismos sti V. Peloponniso: Aigialeia teli 19ou aiona, 3 vols. (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 1991).  9. Alex Franghiadis, ‘Peasant Agriculture and Export Trade: Currant Viticulture in Southern Greece, 1830–1993’ (Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, 1990). 10. Kalafatis, Agrotiki pisti, vol. 2, 370–73. 11. Manouil Th. Chairetis, Kalliergeia tis Stafidampelou (Athens: Zappeios Vivliothiki, Typografeio Andreou Koromila, 1883), 380–81. 12. Ibid., 70. 13. Stathis Koutrouvidis, ‘Sygkentrosi gis kai ependytikes praktikes ston dimo Dymis to deftero miso tou 19ou aiona’, Ta Historica 52 (2010), 27–50.

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14. Ibid., 34–39. 15. Stavroula Verrarou, ‘Apo ton ktimatia ston agroti: Oikonomikoi kai koinonikoi metaschimatismoi stin eparchia Trifylias to 19o aiona’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Crete, 2013), 259, 261. 16. Kalafatis, Agrotiki pisti, vol. 2, 370–77. 17. Athanasios Bochotis, I rizospastiki dexia: Antikoinovouleftismos, syntiritismos kai anoloklirotos fasismos stin Ellada, 1864–1911 (Athens: Vivliorama, 2003), 286. 18. Kalafatis, Agrotiki pisti, vol. 2, 270–74. 19. Sotirios Sotiropoulos, Triakonta ex imeron aichmalosia kai symviosis meta liston (Athens: Fragklinos, 1866). 20. Ibid., 34–36. 21. Ibid., 36. 22. Avgi, 21 January 1871; Mellon, 26 January 1871. 23. Avgi, 21 January 1871. 24. Avgi, 21 January 1871. 25. Ethnofylax, 15 January 1871. 26. Ethnofylax, 21 December 1870. 27. Palingenesia, 25 September 1870. 28. Sotirios Sotiropoulos, Agorefsis tou vouleftou S. Sotiropoulou kata tin synedriasin tis 31 Martiou 1880 (Athens, 1880). 29. Palingenesia, 18 May 1887; Ora, 22 May 1887; Aion, 20 May 1887. 30. Proïa, 28 May 1887. 31. Koutrouvidis, ‘Sygkentrosi gis’, 36–37. 32. Efimeris tis Synelefseos (Proceedings of the National Assembly), vol. 3, session of 20 May 1863, 10. 33. Kalafatis, Agrotiki pisti, vol. 1, 134. 34. Efimeris ton Syzitiseon tis Voulis (Proceedings of the Parliamentary Debates), session of 22 November 1894, 161. 35. Sotiropoulos, Triakonta ex imeron, 94. 36. Fanos, 19 December 1880. 37. Kalafatis, Agrotiki pisti, vol. 1, 221–22. 38. Bochotis, I rizospastiki dexia, 286. 39. Fanos, 15 July 1884. 40. Forologoumenos, 27 September 1885. 41. Fanos, 2 March 1885. 42. Peloponnisos, 22 September 1891; see also Forologoumenos, 13 June 1880 and 28 February 1886. 43. Palingenesia, 28 April 1864; Metarrythmisis, 27 September 1883. 44. Palingenesia, 2 August 1874. 45. Pavlos Calligas, Meletai nomikai, politikai, oikonomologikai, filologikai klp. kai logoi en ti ethnosynelefsei kai ti vouli, vol. 1 (Athens: Typografeio Anesti Konstantinidou, 1899), 483–505. 46. General State Archives, Archives of the Reign of King Otto, Ministry of the Army, correspondence exchanged with the Ministry of Justice in October 1833 (classification still in progress). 47. Sotiropoulos, Triakonta ex imeron, 14–15. 48. Palingenesia, 5 August 1874. 49. Kaiti Aroni-Tsichli, Agrotikes Exegerseis stin Palia Ellada, 1833–1881 (Athens: Ekdoseis Papazisi, 2011). 50. Edmond About, Le roi des montagnes (Paris: Hachette, 1861 fifth edition), 212.

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51. Sotirios Sotiropoulos, Triakonta ex imeron, 32. 52. Panajotis A. Decasos, Die Landwirtschaft im heutigen Griechenland (Berlin, 1904), 31. 53. See the list of the major bankruptcies in Patras in the early months of 1893 in Kaiti AroniTsichli, To Stafidiko Zitima kai oi Koinonikoi Agones: Peloponnisos, 1893–1905 (Athens: Ekdoseis Papazisi, 1999), 117. 54. According to the data given by Ioannis Valaoritis, Ethniki Trapeza tis Ellados, Vol. 1: Istoria tis Ethnikis Trapezis tis Ellados 1842–1902 (Athens: Typografeion Anesti Konstantinidou, 1902), 257. 55. Akropolis, 11 July 1894. 56. Akropolis, 30 June 1895. 57. Kostis Karpozilos, ‘Stavros Kallergis: Vios eleftheros viotikon frontidon’, in Archeio Stavrou Kallergi: Psifides apo ton schediasmo tis sosialistikis politeias, ed. Kostis Karpozilos (Athens: Mouseio Benaki, 2013), 19–20. 58. Kostis Karpozilos ed. Archeio Stavrou Kallergi: Psifides apo ton schediasmo tis sosialistikis politeias (Athens: Mouseio Benaki, 2013), 90–93. 59. Ibid., 71. 60. Law ´VXTH´ (MMLXIX) peri metavolis tou systimatos tis astynomikis dioikiseos, 5 August 1892. 61. Theodoros P. Diliyannis, Logos pros tin Voulin kata tin genikin syzitisin epi tou proüpologismou tou kratous en tais Synedriasesi tis 14 kai tis 15 Ianouariou tou 1893 (Athens: Typois Anastasiou Trimi, 1893), 109–10. 62. Efthymios Karakalos, Imerologion periodeias en Rossia pros diadosin tis korinthiakis stafidos (Athens: Typografeion Anesti Konstantinidou, 1895), 241–42. 63. Efimeris ton Syzitiseon tis Voulis, session of 12 June 1895, 204. 64. Efimeris ton Syzitiseon tis Voulis, session of 21 June 1895, 437. 65. Michail Lamprynidis, Meletai kai arthra peri tis korinthiakis stafidos, 1894–1905 (Athens: Typois P.D. Sakellariou, 1905), 4. 66. Ibid., 45. 67. Hyacinthe Lefeuvre-Méaulle, La Grèce économique et financière en 1915 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1916), 26; Socrates D. Petmezas, I elliniki agrotiki oikonomia kata ton 19o aiona. I perifereiaki diastasi (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2003), 243. 68. Koutrouvidis, ‘Sygkentrosi gis’, 41. 69. Kaiti Aroni-Tsichli, To Stafidiko Zitima, 338. 70. Law ´VNTH´ (MMLIX), peri ekteleseos tis thanatikis poinis, 5 August 1892. 71. Lamprynidis, Meletai kai arthra, 62–63. 72. Christos Hadziiossif, ‘The State as Insurer of Last Resort’, in Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Cities, 1900–1923, ed. Andreas Lyberatos (Herakleion: Crete University Press, 2013), 101–14. 73. Stavros Moudopoulos, ‘O nomos 281/1914 gia ta epangelmatika somateia kai i epidrasi tou stin exelixi tou syndikalistikou kinimatos’, in Venizelismos kai Astikos Eksynchronismos, ed. Giorgos Th. Mavrogordatos and Christos Hadziiossif (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 1988), 225–53. 74. Giorgos Th. Mavrogordatos, Ethnikos Dichasmos kai maziki organosi: Oi epistratoi tou 1916 (Athens: Alexandreia, 1996). 75. Ibid., 90; Kostas N. Triantafyllou, Istorikon Lexikon ton Patron, vol. 2 (Patras: Petrou Chr. Kouli, 1995), 1811. 76. Bochotis, I rizospastiki dexia, 363–65; Mavrogordatos, Ethnikos Dichasmos, 63.

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Bibliography About, Edmond. Le roi des montagnes. Paris: Hachette, 1861. Aroni-Tsichli, Kaiti. To Stafidiko Zitima kai oi Koinonikoi Agones: Peloponnisos, 1893–1905. Athens: Ekdoseis Papazisi, 1999.  . Agrotikes Exegerseis stin Palia Ellada, 1833–1881. Athens: Ekdoseis Papazisi, 2011. Bochotis, Athanasios. I rizospastiki dexia: Antikoinovouleftismos, syntiritismos kai anoloklirotos fasismos stin Ellada, 1864–1911. Athens: Vivliorama, 2003. Calligas, Pavlos. Meletai nomikai, politikai, oikonomologikai, filologikai klp. kai logoi en ti ethnosynelefsei kai ti vouli, vol. 1. Athens: Typografeio Anesti Konstantinidou, 1899. Chairetis, Manouil Th. Kalliergeia tis Stafidampelou. Athens: Zappeios Vivliothiki, Typografeio Andreou Koromila, 1883. Decasos, Panajotis A. Die Landwirtschaft im heutigen Griechenland. Berlin, 1904. Dertilis, Georges. ‘Terre, paysans et pouvoir économique (Grèce, XVIIIe-XXe siècle)’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 47, no. 2 (1992), 273–314.  . ’Terre, paysans et pouvoir politique (Grèce XVIIIe-XXe siècle)’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 48, no. 1 (1993), 85–107. Diliyannis, Theodoros P. Logos pros tin Voulin kata tin genikin syzitisin epi tou proüpologismou tou kratous en tais Synedriasesi tis 14 kai tis 15 Ianouariou tou 1893. Athens: Typois Anastasiou Trimi, 1893. Franghiadis, Alex. ‘Peasant Agriculture and Export Trade: Currant Viticulture in Southern Greece, 1830–1993’. Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, 1990. Hadziiossif, Christos. I giraia selini: I viomichania stin Ellada, 1830–1940. Athens: Themelio, 1993.  . ‘Class Structure and Class Antagonism in Late Nineteenth-Century Greece’, in Greek Society in the Making, 1863–1913: Realities, Symbols and Visions, edited by Philip Carabott, 3–17. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997.  . ‘The State as Insurer of Last Resort’, in Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Cities, 1900–1923, edited by Andreas Lyberatos, 101–14. Herakleion: Crete University Press, 2013. Kalafatis, Thanassis. Agrotiki pisti kai oikonomikos metaschimatismos sti V. Peloponniso: Aigialeia teli 19ou aiona, 3 vols. Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 1991. Karakalos, Efthymios. Imerologion periodeias en Rossia pros diadosin tis korinthiakis stafidos. Athens: Typografeion Anesti Konstantinidou, 1895. Karpozilos, Kostis (ed.). Archeio Stavrou Kallergi: Psifides apo ton schediasmo tis sosialistikis politeias. Athens: Mouseio Benaki, 2013. Karpozilos, Kostis. ‘Stavros Kallergis: Vios eleftheros viotikon frontidon’, in Archeio Stavrou Kallergi: Psifides apo ton schediasmo tis sosialistikis politeias, edited by Kostis Karpozilos, 1–51. Athens: Mouseio Benaki, 2013. Koutrouvidis, Stathis. ‘Sygkentrosi gis kai ependytikes praktikes ston dimo Dymis to deftero miso tou 19ou aiona’. Ta Historica 52 (2010), 27–50. Lamprynidis, Michail. Meletai kai arthra peri tis korinthiakis stafidos, 1894–1905. Athens: Typois P.D. Sakellariou, 1905. Lefeuvre-Méaulle, Hyacinthe. La Grèce économique et financière en 1915. Paris: F. Alcan, 1916. McGrew William W., Land and Revolution in Modern Greece, 1800–1881. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985. Mavrogordatos, Giorgos Th. Ethnikos Dichasmos kai maziki organosi: Oi epistratoi tou 1916. Athens: Alexandreia, 1996. Moudopoulos, Stavros. ‘O nomos 281/1914 gia ta epangelmatika somateia kai i epidrasi tou stin exelixi tou syndikalistikou kinimatos’, in Venizelismos kai Astikos Eksynchronismos, edited by Giorgos Th. Mavrogordatos and Christos Hadziiossif, 225–53. Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 1988.

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Petmezas, Socrates D. I elliniki agrotiki oikonomia kata ton 19o aiona. I perifereiaki diastasi. Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2003.  . Prolegomena stin Istoria tis Ellinikis Agrotikis Oikonomias tou Mesopolemou. Athens: Alexandreia, 2012. Sotiropoulos, Sotirios. Triakonta ex imeron aichmalosia kai symviosis meta liston. Athens: Fragklinos, 1866.  . Agorefsis tou vouleftou S. Sotiropoulou kata tin synedriasin tis 31 Martiou 1880. Athens, 1880. Triantafyllou, Kostas N. Istorikon Lexikon ton Patron, vol. 2. Patras: Petrou Chr. Kouli, 1995. Tsoucalas, Constantinos. Exartisi Kai Anaparagogi: O koinonikos rolos ton ekpaideftikon michanismon stin Ellada (1830–1922). Athens: Themelio, 1977. Valaoritis, Ioannis. Ethniki Trapeza tis Ellados, Vol. 1: Istoria tis Ethnikis Trapezis tis Ellados 1842–1902. Athens: Typografeion Anesti Konstantinidou, 1902. Vergopoulos, Kostas. To agrotiko zitima stin Ellada: I koinoniki ensomatosi tis georgias. Athens: Exantas, 1975. Verrarou, Stavroula. ‘Apo ton ktimatia ston agroti: Oikonomikoi kai koinonikoi metaschimatismoi stin eparchia Trifylias to 19o aiona’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Crete, 2013.

Chapter 3

‘No Work for Anyone in This Country of Misery’ Famine and Labour Relations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anatolia

Semih Çelik

Labour history, in the course of its evolution, has gone through many transformations in parallel with wider socio-political changes and the emergence of various historiographical trends. The worker, the main actor of historical change, traditionally perceived as the male urban factory worker, has been ‘rescued’ from the confines of the factory. Stories of workers have been extended to include their families and larger networks, in spaces beyond the workplace, thus rendering the local tavern or the coffeehouse as centres of labour relations and labour action and, therefore, sites of historical change. In the process of the shift from ‘narrow’ to ‘broad’ labour history, or from the history of the working class to that of the worker, the object of historical inquiry has varied considerably. Recently, the worker has been reformulated within ‘global labour history’, whereby the ‘modern’ construction of the wageearning worker has been criticized and labour relations have started to be recognized as more complex phenomena. On the other hand, in the mid nineteenth century the study of the environment as a historical actor commenced, even though it progressed more slowly in comparison to labour history, placing components of the environment and its structures as the main driver behind historical change, giving agency from the smallest germs and micro-organisms to longue durée changes in climate.1

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Both fields of history have developed strong historiographical trends and have even affected other historiographies; however, they have until recently lacked contact. During the 1990s, both fields opened themselves up to the effects of different disciplines, such as social history. Still, labour historians, the majority of whom referred to Karl Marx as the forefather of the field, seem to have lacked interest in Marx’s comments on nature and labour relations. According to Marx, nature was within the body of the human being, just as it was outside it, and labour relations throughout the history of humanity had been defined and redefined by the positioning of labour and worker vis-à-vis nature. Alienation of labour, during the process of the establishment of capitalism and the emergence of private property ownership, had resulted in the actual and symbolic detachment of labour from nature.2 Both labour and environmental historians seem to have put more emphasis on the second part of Marx’s argument, considering the ‘real’ worker as detached from both human and non-human nature, or nature as non-human and detached from the reality of the worker, and disregarded the fact that nature was a constructed reality, rather than a given fact. The same ‘commitment’ to alienation is also true for environmental historians. As Gunther Peck, an environmental and labour historian, puts it, ‘there remains little “nature” in labour history and few working-class subjects in environmental history’.3 Still, alienation was only one relationship vis-à-vis nature, and even in industrialized and alienated urban contexts, human and non-human nature remained visible, at least, in the shape of failures of public health.4 One of the main reasons for such neglect on both sides can be said to be due to the modern construction of labour as urban, and the environment as rural. Until recently, the worker was considered as the ‘modern’ wage earner, who did not own the means of production and had nothing but his labour to sell. This core definition of the worker necessitated the labour historian to focus on urban space, and to neglect rural contexts as ‘premodern’ areas where production – meaning agricultural production only – was based on premodern modes and labour relations.5 The environment, on the other hand, was the determinant for the village or small towns where agriculture was predominant; the inhabitants indeed had an attitude of complacency towards the environment, meaning that rural society was open to the effects of natural forces. They were therefore not alienated from nature, and thus did not represent any class structure, their society functioning on democratic and egalitarian norms, unlike urban society which was based on class conflict.6 Still, recent studies have contradicted the nature of both urban and rural dichotomies in terms of labour, since, as Charles Tilly argued, nearly 94 per cent of the European

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working class was rural in 1500 and the figure was about 90 per cent even in 1800,7 presenting more complex aspects than the modern historian had imagined. The effects of the physical environment have also been realized by labour historians, although they are mostly limited to rural labour relations.8 Both labour and environmental historians have pointed out the need to bridge the gap between the two fields. William Cronon has emphasized that even though environmental history had started collaborating with other historiographical trends, despite the danger of downgrading each field, the relationship with labour history has always been sought. Similarly, the challenges posed to labour history by historians of gender, religion, ethnicity and, lately, of linguistics, have opened up space for different approaches to social classes and class formation that might include the environment in the picture.9 Giving up stories based on alienation has been the first step towards establishing a connection between the two separate historical fields; alienation of labour from nature, of city from village, and of nature from culture was historicized and not seen as an ultimate state: rather, the historical connection between these dichotomies was reconstructed. Richard White argued that even though people felt alienated from both labour and nature, the separation of the two was not real. Furthermore, it was only through labour that human beings learned about nature and, therefore, the tendency to consider all productive work as the destruction of nature must be given up.10 As Kathryn Morse put it, human labour ‘was as much about culture as about connections to nature’. It was in the dialectical relationship between nature and culture that the meanings of labour were produced.11 Therefore, by putting labour into nature, White, Morse and others have extended the concept of work outside the factory or workshop, as in the efforts of ‘global labour history’, to point out the complexities of work and workers in different phases of history. Although such attempts at establishing a relationship between labour and the environment were important, none offered a common basis to further improve that relationship, and were confined to abstract notions of the interconnectedness of labour and the environment. Based on David Harvey’s theory of the reproduction of ecosystems through commodity flows, where space was defined by capital accumulation and environmental change, Peck developed the concept of ‘geographies of labour’ as a common ground on which environmental and labour historians can work together.12 Leaving behind the presumed ‘alienation’ of the worker from nature, Peck offers a connection between the spatial, material and cultural aspects of nature and labour. Seeing labour as a fluid category rather than a fixed one, his approach aims at investigating the dialectic

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relationship between different modes of labour, including wage labour, unpaid domestic labour and artisanal and manual labour, and their relationship with the environment. The movement of commodities and goods, as products of labour and nature, is the main dynamic behind geographies of labour, which can be understood as the space in which nature gains different meanings.13 Therefore, by not confining labour and worker only to production processes, and by including consumption, the concept offers space for discussion of the relationship between work as production and reproduction of physical nature, worker as both reproducer and consumer of nature, and commodities and goods as products – meaning nature reproduced in different forms – and as materials of consumption, meaning that nature gains different significances. On the one hand, Peck’s ‘geographies of labour’ provides a suitable ground for discussing labour relations and nature. However, the manner in which it overestimates the movement of commodities and labour as the main driver characterizing the relationship between nature and labour raises a question: what if the system of the flow of goods and labour breaks down? How would working-class politics, labour relations and labour action, which are the basic concepts of labour history, be affected by disruptions in production and consumption processes? To find an answer to such questions, famines, as socio-ecological crises, can shed light on such moments in history where production and consumption processes, and flows of goods, commodities and labour were interrupted and distorted. So far, historians of famine have not considered the effect of famines on labour relations. Apart from how many workers died during famines and how famines caused labour shortages, the qualitative and longer-term effects of such catastrophes have been ignored in the face of their quantitative consequences, and the relationship between labour and nature has been largely disregarded.14 Even if one accepts the superficial definition of famine as the increase in prices following the failure of agricultural production, it is easy to imagine the effects on agricultural labourers and urban artisans. Accordingly, as all the production and consumption processes would be strongly affected by famine, so too would the meaning of labour and nature be realigned. In that sense, famines can be said to not only transform the demographic profile of villages, towns and cities, but also to generate different meanings of labour and a different stance vis-à-vis the environment on the side of the worker. This chapter is an attempt to bridge the gap between environmental considerations and workers/artisans, within the Ottoman context,15 by taking the example of a socio-ecological crisis that hitherto has been perceived as of minor importance by Ottoman historians, yet had huge

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consequences for society and social relations in general. By using the ‘geographies of labour’ approach from a different perspective, this chapter problematizes the role of the famine of 1845–48 in the changes within labour relations and the labour profile of the period. It will be argued that famines as crises which triggered revolutions can be seen as times when the effects of ‘environment’ have been most keenly felt (or, more correctly, documented), especially in urban contexts, and created important changes in both urban and rural labour relations. In fact, the case of famine blurs the dichotomy between the categories of urban and rural, and the social relations embedded in both spaces. By fostering spatial fluidity and changing perceptions of labour, it will be argued that the famine of 1845–48 in Ottoman Anatolia changed both the labour profile and labour relations. Although the ‘modernization’ of labour relations was understood as a result of the establishment of labour discipline and the organization of time through top-down implementation of government policies,16 events like famines were equally important in determining modes of production and relations of exchange. Famines have not only forced labourers to migrate, but also mobilized them to think more about the relations between property, charity and labour, together with the problematic environment that surrounds them.17 The sources referred to here are mainly products of a novel idea of empire and state formation whereby a population was invented on paper, whose productivity was supposed to be regulated by the state, for the sake of the state itself. Fixing labour potential to lists and categories, and the environment to a scientific object that is totally controllable, the Ottoman administration tried to ‘imagine’ a prosperous and peaceful empire. In that picture the Ottoman central administration conducted surveys and produced registers depicting the prosperity and productivity of both the producers and the environment. The temettuat registers of 1845, which were the result of a partially successful second attempt at a survey, thus needed to be conducted not only to understand the tax potential of the population in terms of the newly introduced ‘income tax’ (temettu’), but also to ‘fix’ the population into different occupational and spatial categories. Unfortunately, due to the lack of sources, the possibility of discussing women and children is severely limited. Women, either as wives/mothers of workers or as workers themselves, appear in the documents only when they migrated or when they submitted petitions. This chapter attempts to give an overview of dynamic labour relations during the middle of the nineteenth century in Ottoman Anatolia, with a particular focus on the effects of the 1845–48 famine. After a short glance at the Ottoman perception of labour and nature during

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the middle of the century, the chapter discusses how the famine affected workers in Ottoman Anatolia.

Ottoman Perceptions of Labour and Nature The period covered by this chapter was one of drastic change in terms of Ottoman understanding of labour and the environment. Both labour and environmental factors began to be considered as ‘sources of prosperity and richness’ for the empire as an imagined community, later to be transformed into a reality on maps, and in surveys and statistics. The first step towards realizing the imagined empire proved feasible only on paper, and the idea of controlling and regulating labour potential and environmental regimes was confined to tables and registers. The reflections of the past two centuries of change on labour and the environment have come to be understood more as ‘exploitation’ in both instances. For the Ottoman mentality of the first half of the nineteenth century, provisions meant calories and energy to bolster labour, and the environment was viewed as a source of commodities to be consumed and traded.18 Reforms of the period, based on the Tanzimat edict and the associated mentality, represented the centralization of regulation of how that exploitation was intended to be realized. Thousands of pages of reports and plans (layiha) written during that period, by both Ottoman subjects and foreigners, tried to find an answer as to how best to profit from different modes of production and which labour relations should be utilized for the best results. One of the first books on ‘scientific’ agriculture was published in 1848, proposing new and more productive agricultural methods by analysing the components of the soil, fertilizers and different technologies of production.19 Similarly, reports on the ‘prosperity’ of the empire – which was the first objective of the Tanzimat – blamed the ‘laziness’ of workers and agricultural labourers who, instead of producing more, preferred to wait for goods from other parts of the country and from abroad.20 For the actors of the Ottoman administration, the whole empire could sometimes be considered as a field and all the subjects peasants, or sometimes as a workshop and all the subjects artisans and workers. Certain reports proposed using ‘natural resources’, such as rivers, swamps or forests and land, in a more effective manner, so that the Ottoman peasant, capable of any agricultural work, could produce more on the vaunted Ottoman soil, which was held to be sufficiently fertile if worked in a scientific fashion to satisfy all the needs of the empire.21 This ideology of empire did not remain limited to official documents, and an attempt was made to popularize it through newspaper articles and

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the publication of layihas as pamphlets. The official newspaper Takvim-i Vekayi and the ‘semi-private’ Ceride-i Havadis were full of articles that celebrated the prosperity of the empire and its abundance of production. They also took up the duty of educating society in line with the new technologies and techniques of production.22 Not only was ideology transformed during this period, but the imperial structure was realigned in accordance with such developments as well. Councils of reconstruction (meclis-i imariye) and councils of agriculture (meclis-i ziraat) were established in provinces to overcome any problems that would disrupt production and distribution processes. Reporters or ‘experts’ were sent to provinces to comment on the state of production, and an effort was made to record labour potential in registers, the most systematic of which was carried out in 1845, namely the temettuat registers.23 The formation of a council of educational reform in 1844 and the opening of colleges of trade and agriculture in the following decade aimed at training ‘specialists’ who were aware of the ‘risks’ inherent in relations of exchange and production. Before the formation of the Agricultural Bank (Ziraat Bankası), a credit system for farmers was established to support them, especially in times of environmental crises.24 Nonetheless, attempts at controlling both the environment and labour failed, as, in reality, both were too fluid to fit into tables, registers and maps.25 The characteristics of production in the Ottoman Balkans, in western and northwestern Anatolia, during this period reflected changes in relations of exchange, which seemed to have transformed labour relations, as European merchants sought new and more profitable markets and cheaper labour. Labour started losing its preindustrial character and a proto-industrial mode of production became predominant through the establishment of putting-out networks, especially in the manufacturing sector, where the production of textiles and manufactures was transferred to domestic labour, with the participation of women and the whole household.26 Similarly, even though the environment was thought to be dominated by science, nature itself was totally out of control, as witnessed by the fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century Anatolian cities were hit by medium or major famines more or less every three or four years. Therefore, attempts at ‘taking over the peasants’ biological lives’ by a despotic bureaucracy were not successful, as a consequence both of environmental and economic crises, and of the resistance from local populations and labourers.27 The famine of 1845–48 in Anatolia came about in a context whereby relations of exchange and production were in constant flux. On the one hand, the Ottoman administration sought to be the sole actor in control of all things; on the other, it was so ignorant about developments in

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the empire that it had to learn about the existence of a famine from the British ambassador. When the famine hit most parts of Anatolia and Asia Minor, the chief actors of the empire were convinced that ‘abundance beyond imagination’ existed throughout the country, as Ceride-i Havadis was writing in June 1845.28

Anatolian Workers during and after the Famine Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the populations of Anatolia were visited by famine at least every three to four years, mostly with similar reasons and consequences.29 The famine of 1845–48 was caused primarily by unusual climatic conditions, which resulted in dry weather for the whole year, extremely cold in winter and hot in summer. Nearly all accounts describing the weather of the year 1845 refer to it as ‘unseen for a long time’.30 As the harvest season drew to a close, complaints and warnings about a possible failure were sounded through petitions and reports sent from the provinces. The seriousness of the drought was not fully realized by the Ottoman administration until the British ambassador wrote a detailed correspondence about the sufferings of the famine-stricken population, who were migrating to Bursa in droves. According to the ambassador, Stratford Canning, at least six thousand perished on the way from Ankara to Bursa, and there were ten deaths per day due to sickness derived from eating herbs and bones.31 Members of the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances (Meclis-i Vala) were shocked on hearing the news through the translation of the ambassador’s correspondence. Members of the council were so taken by surprise that they felt they should distrust the report; however, they could not: ‘Even though the mentioned intelligence was considered to be exaggerated to some extent, it is not possible that it is totally without a basis’. According to the members of the council, the expression of the ‘personal opinion’ of the British ambassador on the subject could be considered as ‘legitimate’ (kabil-i haktan) and could not be countered (bir s¸ey denemez ise de); however, it was not acceptable that the administrators of the empire should learn about the conditions of their subjects through non-Muslim agents of the empire (gafletle saltanat-ı seniyyenin ecnebi memurları vasıtasıyla istila-i ahval-i ahali ve tebaa etmesi layık olmadıg˘ına binaen) and, therefore, the ignorance of the Muslim administrators was to be addressed immediately in order to provide necessary support to the needy.32 As a result of drought and hoarding, and the ignorance of the Ottoman administrators, the price of flour and bread rocketed, especially in central Anatolia. According to the narh registers

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of Ankara, bread had doubled to 40 para by the end of 1845, and in the middle of the next year it was around 30 para. However, these prices were only nominal; real prices were as high as 80–90 para at the beginning of 1846.33 In comparison to the Irish famine that took place at the same time and resulted in the loss of at least 1.5 million people and the forced exodus of 2 million, or the Agra famine that devastated northern India in 1837–38 and killed about 800,000 people, the famine in Anatolia was a minor one, yet of a sufficiently large dimension, as will be argued, as to affect the decision-making processes of its victims.34 Since the Ottoman state had ignored the existence of famine within its territories, assistance and support was slow in arriving and only reached the affected areas one year after the first harvest failure in 1845. According to the governor of Ankara province, Vasıf Pas¸a, after the harvest of 1845 there was ‘not even a kile of grain left in town’. Other local administrators reported the misery, with deaths in hundreds due to starvation and famine-related diseases, and the fleeing of hundreds of households to towns that were thought to have been less affected by the famine. Petitions from provinces rushed to Istanbul, demanding grain, seeds and the postponement of taxes, or simply expressing misery and requesting help from the state. As the harvest of 1846 proved even worse, central government and local administrations were obliged to intervene, even if unsuccessfully, in most provinces that were hit by the famine. Although historians of famine have celebrated the Ottoman ‘success’ in dealing with famine relief, albeit with some minor problems, they ignored the immense sufferings of the local populations who were forced to sell all their belongings to ease their hunger or those who died on their way to find food, miles away from their village or town.35 Bread riots took place almost everywhere that had been affected by the famine, although explicit references are almost impossible to find in the discourses of Ottoman administrators. As the Ottoman state had neither any famine-relief policy nor policies concerned with providing work,36 the workers affected by the famine were left to their own devices to extricate themselves from the overarching situation of starvation and misery. Consequently, the workers were extremely vulnerable to the effects of environmental changes, and both urban and rural workers shared similar fates. One of the immediate responses to famine was immigration from smaller localities to larger centres. Thus, about six hundred individuals – mostly women and children – migrated from the villages of Ankara to the urban centre. One hundred and sixty-seven individuals from eleven different localities in central Anatolia migrated to Üsküdar/Istanbul, about seventy-five households from Ayas¸/Ankara to Gemlik/Bursa, 145

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households from Aydın to different parts of Anatolia, and more than one thousand households in Kengiri province to different places. It was nearly impossible for the state, in most of these cases, to return these households to their designated towns and villages, thereby contributing to the impoverishment of the towns and cities that received them. The immigrants brought social problems with them, at the same time becoming part of a new and cheaper labour market. Although we have little information regarding the kinds of occupations taken up by the immigrants, the impossibility of the Ottoman administration to return them to their registered localities, as the official language used suggested, demonstrates that the immigrants felt better off in the places to which they migrated. It was considered impossible to send back the immigrants in Gemlik, for instance, since they had resorted to begging and had started practising agriculture in the abandoned fields, against the will of the state.37 It can be said that such chain migration motivated immigrant workers to greater collaboration, both as a means of surviving and of resisting, to some extent, the encroachment of the state in their lives. In that respect, according to the survey conducted among the immigrants in different parts of Bursa, no more than eighty-five households were willing to go back, and even those only upon the precondition that they were given provisions and oxen to continue farming.38 While inhabitants of various villages from all around Anatolia had been driven to find solutions to the misery consequent on the famine through immigration, some villages or towns seem to have chosen – or were forced – to survive in their own localities; yet, due to the length of the famine and the enduring scarcity, even they were forced to flee after a couple of years. The Orthodox Christian inhabitants of a village in Manisa, who were all peasants, submitted a petition in 1850 complaining about a scarcity that had left no provisions to feed themselves and created problems in tax payments. The peasants asked for work in the imperial arsenal due to the impossibility of making a living from agriculture. They must have been deeply optimistic because they had, apparently, started to prepare for the trip to the capital city immediately upon submitting the petition. However, the Ottoman central administration was unwilling to allow them to migrate, as they were concerned with the future of agricultural production, and noted the fact that the peasants did not have any skills to work at the dockyards, since they did not even live by the sea (mahall-i mezkur sevahilde olmayub ahalisinin dahi denizle alakaları olmadıg˘ından).39 In the end, the peasants from Manisa were unsuccessful in their attempts, and as soon as they reached Istanbul they were sent back to their village by ship. However, in the case of the immigrants who successfully stayed in the towns to which they had migrated, it is likely that

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they became involved with occupations different from the ones they had previously had. Although it is not easy to track the career histories of the immigrants, as a couple of examples suggest, labour relations were bound to change as peasants, to some extent, were involved with different modes of production and relations of exchange. A certain Halil and İbrahim, former peasants from the same village in Eskis¸ehir, who took their families to the village of Pazarköy, in Hüdavendigar, had to leave their families in the village and go to another place to earn their living as basketmakers (sepetçi).40 In this respect, the horizontal movement of the famine-stricken populations can be thought to have triggered structural changes within labour relations, not only by causing immediate change in occupations, as in the case of Halil and İbrahim, but also by opening up new opportunities for future labour relations. According to contemporary observers, and in light of the reports of the Ottoman administration, former farmers and peasants shied away from practising agriculture and tried to find other ways to obtain a living. Agricultural lands in many parts of Anatolia were left uncultivated and agricultural labour was scarcer than ever at the end of the 1840s. As Ubicini states, ‘you may often walk for several hours across vast tracts lying fallow, filled with brushwood and rank weeds, whose vigorous vegetation proves the fertility and richness of the soil … We find everywhere the same fertility and neglect … The whole country shows no trace of cultivation’. 41 Tables 3.1 and 3.2 quantify the loss in agricultural labour, including human and non-human labourers, as a result of the famine.42 As Table 3.2 demonstrates, the loss of agricultural labour was not only due to the immigration of households, or death, but also to the lack of oxen to till the fields, and the unwillingness of the population to continue farming under such a capricious climate. The latter was acknowledged by the Ottoman administrators to a certain extent, and such unwillingness was explained by agriculture being labelled a ‘troublesome’ occupation;43 however, compared to Rumelia, Anatolian peasants were depicted as backward and uncivilized due to their unwillingness to ‘exploit the land’.44 While agriculture was on the decline, mulberry groves and silkworm breeding became of more importance in economic terms.45 According to the British ambassador, even though the climate seemed more favourable for agricultural production in 1846, which might still have only partially compensated for the previous year’s loss, merchants were investing in cocoon production and the silk trade, despite the falling prices of silk thread and silk fabric in Europe.46 It is possible to argue that, as silk production in Bursa survived the famine with minor disruptions,47 the need for labour for the growing manufacture of raw silk production and silk

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Table 3.1 Changes in agricultural input in the towns and villages of Kengiri (1845–46).

Keyl of seeds

Agricultural households

Expected harvest

1355 7860 714 3220 884 6910 616 3531 351 1065 639 3469 870 4290 336 1367 211 403 165 211 439 999 239 792 568 721 391 883 698 3019 403 457 73 257 57 892 9009 40346

Pair of oxen

1535 6430 919 3353 667 2424 456 1106 265 703 890 4122 1034 4385 378 1755 210 1010 160 640 370 1013 279 386 510 976 320 958 435 1875 183 542 114 279 61 570 8786 32527

Year 1262/1846 Agricultural households

-178 3 --157 225 71 137 -51 3 70 150 ----1045

Keyl of seeds

Immigrated households

Kengiri Toht Tosya Kargı Ilgaz(?) Kalecik Keskin S¸abanözü Nallu Koru Korupazarı Bucura Koçhisar Milan Çerkes¸ Kurs¸unlu Karacaviran Boğaz Total

Pair of oxen

Name of Town

Year 1261/1845

654 510 533 409 268 358 290 153 64 24 220 178 200 164 226 99 37 37 4424

1571 1098 1951 749 469 786 689 152 45 32 333 337 333 326 554 143 87 275 9930

521 352 667 601 350 28 329 149 59 34 231 162 284 160 203 216 35 49 4430

Table 3.2 Changes in agricultural input in the villages of Nallu/Kengiri (1845–46).

Pair of oxen

Keyl of seeds

Agricultural households

150 140 60 220 200 100 20 1010

Expected harvest

32 29 22 39 41 19 12 210

Year 1262/1846

Agricultural households

Keyl of seeds

Oyumkere Temürcü Cilamlı Faki Musa Özbek Gündoğmus¸ Örgü Total

Pair of oxen

Name of Village

Year 1261/1845

32 26 20 39 41 22 12 211

50 48 30 66 55 52 40 403

10 9 5 12 7 7 5 64

5 3 3 7 7 6 5 45

9 9 5 8 7 7 5 60

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reeling was partially filled by immigrants from the famine-stricken provinces.48 On the other hand, those who had the capital started to turn their fields into silk-reeling workshops, especially in and around Bursa.49 The export boom of silk yarn and mohair in Angora, during the 1840s and 1850s, should be understood not only in the context of increasing European demand and as a result of imperial policies, but also of the changes in labour relations due to famines, which impoverished agricultural labourers and forced them to seek other opportunities. Similarly, why the labour force, which in the 1830s was reluctant to enter the silkreeling factories in Bursa, suddenly moved to that sector in the middle of the 1840s is hard to explain without taking into consideration the effects of the famine on labour relations. On the one hand, famine fostered immigration to larger urban centres and drove shifts from the agricultural sector to the urban/industrial sectors, but on the other, the opposite was also possible. Although most of the immigrants resisted the Ottoman state’s attempts at returning them to their ‘registered’ localities, it was also the case that those who had migrated before the famine were forced to return by their fellow villagers and families. Twenty workers originally from a village in Kastamonu, working in Istanbul as wax makers, laundry workers and casual workers, were asked to return to their villages by the local leaders and inhabitants since their businesses were not profitable for the locals and the fields were uncultivated, the vineyards were about to dry out and the families of the workers were in miserable conditions.50 It is not known whether they went back to Kastamonu or not; yet it can be said that famine resulted in emigration as well, which could have affected labour relations and occupational choices in different directions. However, other examples demonstrate that the men in question might rather have preferred to stay in Istanbul: a horse salesman in Aksaray/Istanbul was already complaining in August 1843 about unemployment in his hometown, Erzincan, and that the villages were deserted; ‘that is how the whole of Anatolia is’, he concluded. Another man, a rower (piyadeci), depicted a similar image of Anatolia in January 1844: ‘To conclude, the poor in Anatolia have nothing left, and things get even worse’. In March 1843, a certain Mustafa Re’is from Değirmendere/Izmit had already voiced an opinion about what the post-famine labour profile of Anatolia would look like. He was heard in a coffeehouse in Üsküdar saying that due to the failure of harvests he did not have any income to pay his taxes. Although he had wanted to continue farming, ‘there was nobody left in the village to continue agriculture, except for women and old men’.51 Therefore the famine of 1845 affected urban occupations too, and one of the most directly affected were the bakers.52 The fluctuation in

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prices of grain and flour and, later on, bread, rendered bakers the centre of attention, both for the state and for the poor. The following two examples of the bakers’ struggle – including workers and shopkeepers – give interesting insights into how famine could affect labour relations and action. The case of the bakers of Ankara, composed of both Muslims and non-Muslims, represents an interesting and relatively detailed example of how the workers, or artisans in general, had to struggle against the corruption of the state. As the famine spread and the price of grain and flour in Ankara dramatically increased, the bakers were ordered to buy flour at the market price, and to sell it for a regulated cheaper price. Furthermore, the chief of the granaries started giving them low-quality grain, mixed with barley, maize and other cereals. The bakers went to the local council to complain about the situation, but were dismissed with threats to retract their business permits. They had to ‘visit’ the council at least four times, and on one occasion they protested and fought in the city square. A similar story was recounted in a petition submitted by bakers and butchers, subsequently joined by greengrocers, in Adana at the end of 1845. The new governor of the city, Arif Pasha, was exploiting his position and asking for bread, meat and vegetables at considerably cheaper prices. The increase in prices due to the famine led them to submit a petition to the local council about their worsening conditions; yet the petition was torn up by the pasha himself and resulted in the dismissal from the council of the artisans who were involved. The bakers in Adana were not as brave as those in Ankara as to take to the streets, and they immediately wrote a petition to Istanbul, in secret.53 It is hard to refer to these two struggles as ‘labour action’; however, it can be claimed that the aim of both was to protect the interests of the members (including owners of factors of production, apprentices, workers, etc.)54 of the mentioned occupational groups, rather than the well-being of society at large. Comparing the role of the guilds, or loose labour organizations involved in famine relief in the pre-Tanzimat famines, it can be said that the establishment of councils of agriculture and of reconstruction left space for the occupational groups to further their own interests, leaving the interests of society at large to those institutions.55 In this sense, not only through petitioning, but also by consciously and actively/physically affirming their rights and interests, the bakers of urban Adana and Ankara were involved in labour action. To use Donald Quataert’s formulation, the war was fought on the level of language and of direct action, similar to the labour actions of the period.56 Both examples demonstrate that ethno-religious identity was not a determinant in labour action in these specific cases, and even collaboration between different occupations was possible in order to overcome

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injustice. Furthermore, by bringing these bakers and workers together, the famine can be said to have contributed to establishing future modes of collaboration and labour action.57 However, the role of women and children, or families of the workers/artisans, in such actions is not visible in the documents. Although the petition of the bakers of Ankara refers to a public gathering at the square, it is not possible to locate women and non-adult members in these occupations, or members of their families.58 Labour migration and labour action were two important strands through which longer-term labour relations were determined. However, to these should be added social knowledge about nature and labour relations in particular, and the functioning of the economy in general. Famines, by motivating each individual worker to re-evaluate meanings they attributed to labour and nature, and their dialectic relationship, were spaces whereby such social knowledge was reproduced. While it is nearly impossible to find individual ideas about the famine, a petition submitted by a plumber (suyolcu) of Ankara in May 1847 provides an insight into how a wage earner, working for the state, perceived the present and future. According to Numan, the suyolcu, famine has left ‘no work for anyone in this country of misery’ and he thought their end was coming soon, as there was no trade and he was in heavy debt. For this reason, he wanted to send his three children to Istanbul to be educated.59

Conclusion From the examples presented here, it seems, as proposed by Peck with the ‘geographies of labour’ approach, that one of the main determinants of labour relations during and after the famine was the horizontal mobilization of labourers, both rural and urban; however, the most important aspect of famine is best encapsulated in the example of the petition made by Numan. Through such a short petition, one can conclude that the importance of famine, specifically for the approach proposed here, is that it generated knowledge about nature and forced the locals to think about the relationship between labour and nature. The correlation made explicit in a petition formulated by an urban inhabitant and wage worker, between an environmental catastrophe and the functioning of the labour market, and labour relations in general, allows one to claim that, more than the mobilization of goods, commodities and labour, the disruption of these gave more motivation to the workers to think about processes of production and consumption and their relationship with nature. It was the impact of the environment on labour relations, which became more visible during the famine, that made Numan decide to send his children

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to study in Istanbul, instead of putting them to work as apprentices in order to contribute to the household economy, later to become wage earners like himself. The process of deciding whether to migrate or not, where and when, or whether to stay or go back, as seen in the above examples, can also be said to have happened through different cognitive processes, which involved an assessment of knowledge about nature. In the middle of the dialectic relationship between nature and labour stood that knowledge, which was carried to different spaces as a result of the famine. Within that context, from the few examples given above, it can be concluded that the effects of famine on the labour profile of Ottoman Anatolia went beyond the short-term consequences as constructed by historians. Similarly, the collective action, either of petitioning, paying visits to local councils or fighting for justice in the square, must have gone through the same process of recognizing the relationship between nature and the future of labour relations by different artisanal groups or workers. The existence of these two petitions at that particular moment in history, characterized by extensive famine, was, on the one hand, due to the sharp increase in the price of raw materials, but must also have been due to the recognized necessity to struggle in the face of the acknowledgement of environmental failure. The bakers of Ankara must have seen, heard of or talked to the immigrants coming from different villages to the city centre, and must have got involved in the above-mentioned dialectic relationship, even though they themselves were not involved with ‘nature’ in terms of directly shaping or reshaping it. Yet, the meaning attached to the process of making flour from grain, dough from flour and bread from dough, the symbolic shaping of nature, must have played a role of particular importance in taking action against the corrupt officials of the local administration. The same corruption, which had been tolerated for years by the bakers of urban Adana, as they explained in the petition, was resisted during the famine, even at risk to the business owners and workers’ own lives. Therefore, the increase in prices cannot tell the whole story. The ‘failure’ of nature, which must have been realized in times of famine, even if one admits the full alienation of labour, must have been acknowledged by the greengrocers, butchers and bakers of the city. The changes that took place in the labour profile of Ottoman Anatolia during the middle of the nineteenth century were mainly caused by the famine of 1845–48. Such a socio-ecological crisis not only upset the functioning of the market structures, causing price fluctuations and scarcity in resources, but also led to a re-evaluation of the relationship between nature and labour that had been constructed in long-term assessment processes in the minds of peasants and workers. Production,

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consumption and exchange, as interrelated and intermingled categories, involved a struggle between workers, traders and other human and non-human agents acting in close relationship with the natural environment. In that sense, famines, as periods when the ‘geographies of labour’ became inverted since the flow of products of nature was interrupted, represent cases where alienation from nature, if it existed, had to be overcome and decisions about labour had to be taken accordingly. As has been elaborated here, labour relations during famine periods not only tell the miserable stories of poor and hungry workers and artisans struggling on their own for survival, but also provide an important point of departure for further collaboration between environmental and labour historians. Semih Çelik has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at Koç University since September 2017, at the ERC-funded UrbanoccupationsOETR project, and is a postdoctoral fellow at Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) for the 2019–20 academic year. His research interests cover a wide range of subjects within the field of environmental history of the Ottoman Empire, including the history of human–animal relationships, agricultural production, and the history of natural history museums in the Ottoman Empire.

Notes  1. The first studies on the long-term effects of environment and climate came from two French historians: Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Allen & Unwin, 1971), originally published as Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (Paris: Flammarion, 1967); Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), originally published as La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949). For an overview of the state of the field, see Alfred W. Crosby, ‘The Past and Present of Environmental History’, The American Historical Review 100(4) (1995), 1185–87; and J.R. McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’, History and Theory 42(4) (2003), 5–43.  2. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Dover Publications, 2007), 111–12.  3. Gunther Peck, ‘The Nature of Labour: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labour History’, Environmental History 11(2) (2006), 213. See also Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945– 1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1–5.  4. Arthur F. McEvoy, ‘Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Help and Safety’, in ‘Snapshots of Discipline: Selected Proceedings from the Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in the History of Technology, Madison, Wisconsin, 30

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 5.  6.  7.  8.  9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

October–3 November 1991’, supplement, Technology and Culture 36(2) (1995), 147–48. While McEvoy focuses on examples from the nineteenth century, Laurie Mercier’s study concentrates on the workplace demands and militant action against the pollution caused by smelting, which damaged the workers’ health in the 1960s in Montana, demonstrating the role of the politics of nature over working-class politics. Laurie Mercier, Anaconda: Labour, Community, and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 181–209. For further implications of the environment in urban space, through the discourse of ‘pollution’, see Joel A. Tarr, ‘Searching for a “Sink” for an Industrial Waste’, in Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History, ed. Char Miller and Hal Rothman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 163–80. Anne B.W. Effland, ‘When Rural Does Not Equal Agricultural’, Agricultural History 74(2) (2000), 489–501. Robert P. Swierenga, ‘Theoretical Perspectives on the New Rural History: From Environmentalism to Modernization’, Agricultural History 56(3) (1982), 496–97. Charles Tilly, ‘Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat’, in Proletarianization and Family History, ed. David Levine (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984), 1–85. Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History, Studies in Global Social History 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 77–78. William Cronon, ‘Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History’, The Journal of American History 77(4) (1990), 1130–31; Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden, ‘Introduction’, in Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History, ed. Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 21–22; Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, The American Historical Review 91(5) (1986), 1053–75. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: MacMillan, 1995), 9 and 61–62. Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 116. See also Arthur F. McEvoy, ‘Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry’, in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a more recent elaboration of the same perspective, see Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Peck, ‘The Nature of Labour’, 214; David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Peck, ‘The Nature of Labour’, 214–16; Matthew K. Klingle, ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’, in ‘Environment and History’, theme issue, History and Theory 42(4) (2003), 95–99. The Great Irish Famine of 1845–50, as an extensively studied subject, is an exception. See David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Disappearance of the Irish Agricultural Labourer, 1841–1912’, Irish Economic and Social History 7 (1980), 66–92. Sherry Vatter and Edmund Burke III argue that a distinction between factory workers and artisans proves to be artificial if one thinks of the place of artisans in labour action throughout the nineteenth century. Sherry Vatter, ‘Militant Journeymen in NineteenthCentury Damascus: Implications for the Middle Eastern History Agenda’, in Workers and Working-Classes in the Middle East Struggles: Histories, Historiographies, ed. Zachary Lockman (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 1–2, 9; Edmund Burke III, ‘The History of Working Classes in the Middle East: Some Methodological Considerations’, in Lockman, Workers and Working-Classes, 310–11.

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16. Touraj Atabaki, ‘Time, Labour-Discipline and Modernization in Turkey and Iran: Some Comparative Remarks’, in The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran, ed. Zachary Lockman. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 1–17. 17. The space allowed for this chapter and the main focus do not permit a thorough analysis of the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the recently developing literature on famines. It is necessary to mention that, compared to European environmental history, the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and Near East has a long way to go. For a detailed analysis of Ottoman and Near Eastern environmental history, see Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7–13; Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15–22. For recent and comprehensive analyses of Ottoman famines, see Mehmet Yavuz Erler, Osmanlı İmparatorlug˘u’nda Kuraklık ve Kıtlık Olayları (Istanbul: Libra, 2010); White, The Climate of Rebellion; Özge Ertem, ‘Sick Man of Asia Minor in an Ailing Empire: Famine, Villagers and Government in Missionary Accounts, 1873–75’, International Review of Turkish Studies 2(1) (2012), 72–94; idem, ‘Eating the Last Seed: Famine, Empire, Survival and Order in Ottoman Anatolia in the Late Nineteenth Century’ (Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, 2012); Yaron Ayalon, Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine and Other Misfortunes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 18. Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 171–72. 19. The book in question, a translation of a four-volume French edition, was more a reinterpretation. Tabib Hayrullah, Fenn-i Ziraatten Beyt-i Dehkani (Istanbul, 1848). 20. İsmet el-Amidi, ‘İmar-ı Bilad-ı Ziraat ve Nehirlerden Yararlanılması Hakkında Layiha’, n.d., Hüsrev Pas¸a 870, Süleymaniye Library of Manuscripts, Istanbul. 21. Istanbul, Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives (Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivleri, hereafter BOA) İ.MVL. 169–5050 (13 Cemaziyelevvel 1266/27 March 1850) contains the report on developing the industry and comments on it. 22. An article in Takvim-i Vekayi, 26 Receb 1261/31 July 1845, ‘heralded’ the fact that it was possible to grow any plant and produce regardless of place around the empire and that the population was capable of all types of agricultural production and practices of trade. Another example demonstrates how the newspaper was used as a means for education: an article, translated from a French newspaper, about how to protect spikes from rain and snow appeared in Takvim-i Vekayi in 1846 and, subsequently, it was ordered by the state that the article should be reprinted as a separate pamphlet. See BOA. İ.DH. 156–8073 (28 Ramazan 1263/9 September 1847). 23. For temettuat registers, see Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydın, eds, The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5 (London: Kegan Paul, 2004). 24. For attempts at reforming agriculture and the development of the agricultural credit system in the first half of the century, see Tevfik Güran, 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar (Istanbul: Eren, 1998). For the following periods, see Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia, 1876–1908’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1973). For the failure of the credit system, which left Anatolian farmers with nothing but huge debt and caused them to leave their land, see E. Atilla Aytekin, ‘Cultivators, Creditors and the State: Rural Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Peasant Studies 35(2) (2008), 292–313. 25. This was not only the case for the Ottoman Empire, as other empires of the period tried to employ technologies of governmentality in order to create a population and landscape that fit the needs defined by the ideology of the imperial elite. However, although seemingly successful, these registers proved to be ‘fantasies of empire’ represented by a

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

two-dimensional space, at times too distant from the reality itself. See Richard Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85–86. Compare with Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 4, 171–72. Ceride-i Havadis, 16 Cemaziyelahir 1261/22 June 1845. Almost no studies on famine during the first half of the nineteenth century within an Ottoman context exist. John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), xii, mentions that the Ottoman lands were affected by the famine of ‘The Year Without Summer’ in 1816–17. Orhan Kılıç, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Meydana Gelen Kıtlıklar’, in Türkler, vol. 10, ed. Hasan Celal Güzel (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2002), 718–19, provides a ‘randomly’ prepared table, in which early nineteenth-century famines are limited only to Balkan territories. For exceptions, see Erler, Kuraklık ve Kıtlık Olayları; Ayalon, Natural Disasters. Ceride-i Havadis referred to the cold as ‘unseen for a long time’, in an article from 15 Safer 1261/23 February 1845. The severity of weather conditions was acknowledged more during the summer. The then vice-judge of Ankara, Sadullah el-Ankaravi, recorded in his calendar that such hot weather had not been seen for about fifty years, and that his neighbour, a candle maker, complained that the candles had all melted down. Gülçin Tunalı Koç, ‘Sadullah Efendi’nin İlm-i Nücûm Kaynaklarından Tanzimat Ankarasına Bir Katkı / A Contribution to the History of Ankara during the Tanzimat Period based on the Astrological Sources by Sadullah Efendi’, Türkiyat Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 3 (2004), 373. For a translation of the correspondence of the British ambassador and the discussions around it, see BOA. I.MVL. 78–1519 (12 Cemaziyelahir 1262/7 June 1846). Ibid., 5: ‘ihbarat-i vakıa mübalag˘alıca gibi görünmüs¸ ise de pek de bî-esas olması mümkün olmayub saye-i s¸evketvaye-i hazret-i s¸ahaneden zir-i destan olan ahali ve tebaanın her maddede hüsn-ü muhafazaları ise lazim-ı zimmet-i himmet-i mulkdariden olduğuna’. For the narh registers, see BOA. MS¸H.S¸SC.d 738 and 740. According to the temettuat registers of Ankara, although we should assume there is a serious undercount in general, the average annual income of urban households was about 345 piastre (gurus¸). Considering that at the time 1 gurus¸ was equal to 40 para, even an average household must have had extreme difficulties in obtaining bread. If labourers (amele), with an average household income of about 160 gurus¸, or servants (hizmetçi), with that of 105 gurus¸, are considered, the level of hunger and economic devastation within Ankara becomes more visible, as they altogether represented about 13 per cent of total households. Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy, and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 193–94; Cormac Ó’Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (Cambridge: Gill & MacMillan, 1997), 41–42 especially for a discussion on the amount of excess deaths. Erler, Kuraklık ve Kıtlık Olayları. At the end of the century, the Ottoman state started employing workers suffering from the famine in road-building projects. Abdulkadir Gül, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Kuraklık ve Kıtlık: Erzurum Vilayeti Örneği, 1892–1893 ve 1906–1908 Yılları’, Uluslararası Sosyal Aras¸tırmalar Dergisi 2(9) (2009), 150. For ‘public works’ in the Great Irish Famine, see Christine Kinealy, The Great Irish Famine Impact: Ideology and Rebellion (London: Palgrave, 2002), 37–49. BOA. İ.MVL. 79–1545 (27 Cemaziyelahir 1262/22 June 1846). These are the examples for which figures could be found in the archives. The actual figures in total are much higher and are revealed once lists and documents about other localities and provinces have been accessed. For Ankara, see BOA. İ.DH. 119–6061 (2 Rebiulahir 1262/30 March 1846); for Gemlik, Üsküdar and Hüdavendigar, see BOA. İ.MVL.

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39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

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79–1545; for Aydın, see BOA. İ. MVL. 6–18 (14 Receb 1262/8 July 1846). In the end, in most of the provinces, it was decided that immigrants should stay where they had migrated, as in the above examples. For immigrants from Erzurum and Mus¸, see BOA. İ.MVL. 30–35 (11 Safer 1265/6 January 1849). There were even migrations to Russia, mostly from Erzurum. BOA. HR.MKT. 33–49 (20 Cemaziyelahir 1266/3 May 1850). BOA. A.MKT.NZD. 2–83 (07 Rebiulevvel 1266/21 January 1850); BOA. A.MKT. NZD. 2–99 (n.d.). BOA. İ.MVL. 79–1545/4, 4. Even though a change from agricultural to non-agricultural sectors can be observed, one has to keep in mind that the two were not totally distinct categories. Anatolian towns were inhabited by workers and artisans of different occupations, who got involved with agriculture at the same time. It can be claimed that famine fostered the differentiation of agricultural and non-agricultural forms of labour. Ubicini gives interesting insights into the decline of agricultural production in the face of raw material production and export during the 1840s and 1850s. See Abdolonyme Ubicini, Letters on Turkey: An Account of the Religious, Political, Social and Commercial Condition of the Ottoman Empire; The Transformed Institutions, Army, Navy, &c. &.c., vol. 1, trans. Lady Easthope (London: J. Murray, 1856), 318–24, 12. For Table 3.1, see BOA. MVL. 8–32 (25 Ramazan 1262/16 September 1846); for Table 3.2, see BOA. A.MKT. 87–57 (1846). BOA. A.MKT. 21–10 (n.d.). BOA. MVL. 243–31 (n.d.). In urban Beirut between 1847 and 1849, 33 per cent of the cases recorded in the local court registers concerned mulberry trees, 70 per cent of the cases related to agricultural properties concerned properties with mulberry trees, and 40 per cent of big money transactions (over 12,000 gurus¸) were about mulberries. Najwa al-Qattan, ‘“Tut Tut ‘a-Beirut”, 1840s: Qadis, Qists and Mulberry Courts’, Turkish Historical Review 4(2) (2013), 181. At around the same time, Mediterranean mountain villages adapted to the ‘straitened circumstances’ by employing themselves with cocoon production, although it was not a traditional craft that was used to get by. J.R. McNeill, Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 123, 172. BOA. İ. MVL. 78–1519. According to the report of the British consul in Bursa, cocoon production fell drastically in 1845 and 1846 as a result of the drought. Yet, considering the increase in the number of silk reels, which nearly doubled each year during the famine, it was a minor disruption in the face of the growth of the industry. For the report of the British consul, see British National Archives, London, FO. 785/4A, 38–43, ‘Agricultural Report for the District of Brussa for the Year 1846–47’. For figures regarding the silk proto-industry, see Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing, 111, 115; M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Aspects of ProtoIndustrialization in the Ottoman Empire, 1800–1914: Patterns of Proto Industrial Textile Production in the Balkan Lands and West Anatolia’ (Master’s thesis, Vienna University, 1999), 85–87. For comments by a contemporary observer who travelled in Bursa and its vicinity during the famine, see Charles MacFarlane, Turkey and Its Destiny: The Results of a Journey Made in 1847 and 1848 to Examine into the State of that Country ([Philadelphia], 1850), 85–95. According to MacFarlane, in 1848 the mulberry groves were in a terrible condition. However, from his accounts, it is possible to conclude that silkworm breeders were better off in comparison to farmers. Ottoman historians usually emphasized the role of wars in the emergence of labour migration. Immigrants, especially from the Crimea during and after the Crimean War, and immigrants from lost territories were thought to have contributed to the growth of urban cities and industries. Even though ‘economic problems’ were considered, the reasons behind labourers’ decisions to migrate are not discussed in their contexts. In

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this sense, the labour migration of the 1840s was largely ignored and, thus, the role of the environment and famine in labour relations. For a general overview of labour migration with a focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, see Christopher Clay, ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth-Century Anatolia’, Middle Eastern Studies 34(4) (1998), 1–32. For a specific account of the 1877–78 Ottoman– Russian war and its effects on migration movements within the context of Salonica, see Dilek Akyalçın-Kaya, ‘Immigration into the Ottoman Territory: The Case of Salonica in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 177–89. Florian Riedler discusses different aspects of labour migration among Armenians and Kurds from Bitlis, Erzurum and Van to Istanbul, partially through a survey register conducted in 1849, without considering the reasons behind the migration. According to the report, most of the Armenians from those cities became porters (hamal). Florian Riedler, ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of 1890s’, in Freitag et al., The City in the Ottoman Empire, 163–66. It can be argued that the need for such a survey arose due to floods of immigrants rushing to the capital city after the famine. It should not be a coincidence that the immigrants listed in the survey were from the mentioned cities, as other reports written more or less at the same time confirm migration movements from Erzurum, Van and Mus¸ due to the famine. Compare with BOA. İ.MVL. 30–35. 49. BOA. İ.MVL. 102–2214 (15 Cemaziyelahir 1264/31 May 1847). 50. BOA. İ.MVL. 68–1289 (21 S¸evval 1261/25 August 1845), 2. For a different interpretation of the same document, see Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman Workers and the State, 1826–1914’, in Lockman, Workers and Working-Classes, 24–25. 51. See Cengiz Kırlı, Sultan ve Kamuoyu: Osmanlı Modernles¸me Sürecinde ‘Havadis Jurnalleri’ (1840–1844) (Istanbul: Türkiye İs¸ Bankası, 2009), 418 [entry 1160], 442–43 [entry 1257] and 389 [entry 1049] respectively. 52. On ‘bakers as scapegoats’ during famines in Iran, see Ranin Kazemi, ‘Of Diet and Profit: On the Question of Subsistence Crises in Nineteenth-Century Iran’, Middle Eastern Studies 52(2) (2016), 350–51. In comparison to the bakers in Iran, bakers in the Ottoman context seem to have had more agency in challenging the injustices and the role that authorities assigned to them. 53. Interestingly, petitions in both cases were written by the artisans/workers themselves and include many details about the incidents through their daily language. The workers in Adana expressed their fear of the new pasha of Adana, and mentioned in the petition that if it was heard by the pasha that they were submitting a petition, they would either be tortured, killed or their property would be taken from them. For Adana, see BOA. İ.MVL. 3–43 (19 Zilhicce 1261/19 December 1845). According to Chalcraft, group complaints by peasants were rarely kept secret on a local level, resulting in punishment of the petitioners by mayors and the local headman with a range of sanctions, including forced labour, coercion and outright dispossession. See John T. Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Petitions in Egypt on the Eve of the Colonial Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37(3) (2005), 307. For the petition submitted in Ankara, see BOA. İ.MVL. 21–48 (1 Rebiulahir 1264/7 March 1848). The contrast between the two petitions tells us about different functions of petitioning. Whereas the bakers, butchers and greengrocers of Adana wanted to keep the petition and petitioning process covert, the bakers in Ankara wanted their complaint to be publicly heard, where petitioning was only one of several ways to protest against state agents overtly. 54. The petition of the bakers of Ankara was signed by twenty-seven men. Even though none had noted their occupational status, thanks to the temettuat registers, it can be learned that the petitioners included business owners, masters (usta), qualified workers (kalfa) and workers (amele).

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55. Compare with John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt 1863–1914 (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), 34–35. For the political role of guilds and artisanal organizations before the Tanzimat, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 143–51. Similarly, Quataert argues that after 1826, when the janissary corps were eliminated, the political power of the workers and guilds was curtailed. Quataert, ‘Ottoman Workers and the State’, 21. It can be said that with the existence of janissaries, workers and guilds collaborated with them to fight for ‘social justice’. After 1826, workers and guilds became less powerful for the common good, and became more supportive of their own interests. For an example of the role of local councils in famine relief, see Elizabeth Thompson, ‘Ottoman Political Reform in the Provinces: The Damascus Advisory Council in 1844–1845’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25(3) (1993), 457–75. 56. Quataert, ‘Ottoman Workers and the State’, 22–23; Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State’, 318. See also M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Petitioning as Political Action: Petitioning Practices of Workers in Ottoman Factories’, in Popular Protest and Political Participation in the Ottoman Empire: Studies in Honor of Suraiya Faroqhi, ed. Eleni Gara, M. Erdem Kabadayı and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2011), 57–74. 57. Such actions, either as labour action or bread riots, had longer-term effects on future social movements. As Ranin Kazemi argues, the food-related riots in Iran throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created social networks and repertoires of resistance that repeated themselves and created political socialization, which even led to the 1979 revolution in the country. Ranin Kazemi, ‘Famine, Food Protest, and Political Participation in Iran, 1850–1905’ (paper presented at the Middle Eastern Studies Association annual meeting, Denver, 20 November 2012). For a more general overview of famines in Iran throughout the nineteenth century, see Kazemi, ‘Of Diet and Profit’. Petitions written by bakers and breadmakers, even five years after the famine, are abundant in the Ottoman archives. BOA. A.MKT. 78–58 (8 Cemaziyelevvel 1243/24 April 1847) and others. 58. It is not hard to guess that in households where the husband/father was the only breadwinner, the wife/mother had to resort to different tactics for survival in cases where the husband died or migrated. The women among the six hundred immigrants, who had fled to urban Ankara from rural surroundings, may well represent that portion of the population. According to the Ottoman administration, their immediate solution was to beg or give away their children as servants to better-off households. 59. BOA. DV. 1–11 (24 Cemaziyelevvel 1263/10 May 1847). Numan appears in the temettuat registers of 1845 as a resident of the Hacı Musa neighbourhood of urban Ankara, with an annual income of 400 gurus¸, all from his wage as a plumber (suyolcu) of the city. BOA. ML.VRD.TMT.d 21. Apparently, he was already familiar with petitioning since he had submitted another petition in 1842, when due to a lack of water in the city he was dismissed by the inhabitants and replaced by another. He complained about his destitution due to that incident and was taken back to work immediately. See BOA. A.MKT. 3–9 (26 Cemaziyelahir 1258/4 August 1842).

Bibliography Akyalçın-Kaya, Dilek. ‘Immigration into the Ottoman Territory: The Case of Salonica in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, edited by Ulrike Freitag et al., 177–89. London: Routledge, 2011. al-Qattan, Najwa. ‘“Tut Tut ‘a-Beirut”, 1840s: Qadis, Qists and Mulberry Courts’. Turkish Historical Review 4(2) (2013), 174–91.

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Atabaki, Touraj. ‘Time, Labour-Discipline and Modernization in Turkey and Iran: Some Comparative Remarks’, in The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran, edited by Zachary Lockman, 1–17. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Ayalon, Yaron. Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine and Other Misfortunes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Aytekin, E. Atilla. ‘Cultivators, Creditors and the State: Rural Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire’. Journal of Peasant Studies 35(2) (2008), 292–313. Braudel, Fernand. La méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Paris: Armand Colin, 1949.  . The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Burke III, Edmund. ‘The History of Working Classes in the Middle East: Some Methodological Considerations’, in Workers and Working-Classes in the Middle East Struggles: Histories, Historiographies, edited by Zachary Lockman, 303–20. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. Chalcraft, John T. The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt 1863–1914. New York: SUNY Press, 2004.  . ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Petitions in Egypt on the Eve of the Colonial Rule’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 37(3) (2005), 303–25. Clay, Christopher. ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth-Century Anatolia’. Middle Eastern Studies 34(4) (1998), 1–32. Cronon, William. ‘Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History’. The Journal of American History 77(4) (1990), 1122–31. Crosby, Alfred W. ‘The Past and Present of Environmental History’. The American Historical Review 100(4) (1995), 1177–89. Effland, Anne B.W. ‘When Rural Does Not Equal Agricultural’. Agricultural History 74(2) (2000), 489–501. Erler, Mehmet Yavuz. Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Kuraklık ve Kıtlık Olayları. Istanbul: Libra, 2010. Ertem, Özge. ‘Eating the Last Seed: Famine, Empire, Survival and Order in Ottoman Anatolia in the Late Nineteenth Century’. Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, 2012.  . ‘Sick Man of Asia Minor in an Ailing Empire: Famine, Villagers and Government in Missionary Accounts, 1873–75’. International Review of Turkish Studies 2(1) (2012), 72–94. Faroqhi, Suraiya. Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Fitzpatrick, David. ‘The Disappearance of the Irish Agricultural Labourer, 1841–1912’. Irish Economic and Social History 7 (1980), 66–92. Gül, Abdulkadir. ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Kuraklık ve Kıtlık: Erzurum Vilayeti Örneği, 1892–1893 ve 1906–1908 Yılları’. Uluslararası Sosyal Aras¸tırmalar Dergisi 2(9) (2009), 144–58. Güran, Tevfik. 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar. Istanbul: Eren, 1998. Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Heerma van Voss, Lex, and Marcel van der Linden, eds. Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Kabadayı, M. Erdem. ‘Aspects of Proto-Industrialization in the Ottoman Empire, 1800–1914: Patterns of Proto Industrial Textile Production in the Balkan Lands and West Anatolia’. Master’s thesis, Vienna University, 1999.  . ‘Petitioning as Political Action: Petitioning Practices of Workers in Ottoman Factories’, in Popular Protest and Political Participation in the Ottoman Empire: Studies in Honor of

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Suraiya Faroqhi, edited by Eleni Gara, M. Erdem Kabadayı and Christoph K. Neumann, 57–74. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2011. Kayoko, Hayashi, and Mahir Aydın, eds. The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers. Islamic Area Studies 5. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. Kazemi, Ranin. ‘Famine, Food Protest, and Political Participation in Iran, 1850–1905’. Paper presented at the Middle Eastern Studies Association annual meeting, Denver, 20 November 2012.  . ‘Of Diet and Profit: On the Question of Subsistence Crises in Nineteenth-Century Iran’. Middle Eastern Studies 52(2) (2016), 335–58. Kılıç, Orhan. ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde Meydana Gelen Kıtlıklar’, in Türkler, vol. 10, edited by Hasan Celal Güzel, 718–30. Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2002. Kinealy, Christine. The Great Irish Famine Impact: Ideology and Rebellion. London: Palgrave, 2002. Kırlı, Cengiz. Sultan ve Kamuoyu: Osmanlı Modernles¸me Sürecinde ‘Havadis Jurnalleri’ (1840– 1844). Istanbul: Türkiye İs¸ Bankası, 2009. Klingle, Matthew K. ‘Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History’, in ‘Environment and History’, theme issue, History and Theory 42(4) (2003), 94–110. Koç, Gülçin Tunalı. ‘Sadullah Efendi’nin İlm-i Nücûm Kaynaklarından Tanzimat Ankarasına Bir Katkı / A Contribution to the History of Ankara during the Tanzimat Period Based on the Astrological Sources by Sadullah Efendi’. Türkiyat Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 3 (2004), 369–92. Le Roy Ladurie, Emanuel. Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil. Paris: Flammarion, 1967.  . Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Allen & Unwin, 1971. MacFarlane, Charles. Turkey and Its Destiny: The Results of a Journey Made in 1847 and 1848 to Examine into the State of That Country. [Philadelphia], 1850. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Dover Publications, 2007. McEvoy, Arthur F. ‘Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry’, in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, edited by Donald Worster, 211–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.  . ‘Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Help and Safety’, in ‘Snapshots of Discipline: Selected Proceedings from the Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in the History of Technology, Madison, Wisconsin, 30 October–3 November 1991’, supplement, Technology and Culture 36(2) (1995), 145–73. McNeill, J.R. Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.  . ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’. History and Theory 42(4) (2003), 5–43. Mercier, Laurie. Anaconda: Labour, Community, and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Mikhail, Alan. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Morse, Kathryn. The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of Klondike Gold Rush. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Ó’Gráda, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge: Gill & MacMillan, 1997. Peck, Gunther. ‘The Nature of Labour: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labour History’. Environmental History 11(2) (2006), 212–38. Post, John D. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

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Quataert, Donald. ‘Ottoman Reform and Agriculture in Anatolia, 1876–1908’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1973.  . Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  . ‘Ottoman Workers and the State, 1826–1914’, in Workers and Working-Classes in the Middle East Struggles: Histories, Historiographies, edited by Zachary Lockman, 21–40. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. Riedler, Florian. ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of 1890s’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, edited by Ulrike Freitag et al., 160–76. London: Routledge, 2011. Rogers, Thomas D. The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Scott, Joan W. ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’. The American Historical Review 91(5) (1986), 1053–75. Sharma, Sanjay. Famine, Philanthropy, and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Swierenga, Robert P. ‘Theoretical Perspectives on the New Rural History: From Environmentalism to Modernization’. Agricultural History 56(3) (1982), 495–502. Tabib Hayrullah. Fenn-i Ziraatten Beyt-i Dehkani. Istanbul, 1848. Tarr, Joel A. ‘Searching for a “Sink” for an Industrial Waste’, in Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History, edited by Char Miller and Hal Rothman, 163–80. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Thomas, Richard. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993. Thompson, Elizabeth. ‘Ottoman Political Reform in the Provinces: The Damascus Advisory Council in 1844–1845’. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25(3) (1993), 457–75. Tilly, Charles. ‘Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat’, in Proletarianization and Family History, edited by David Levine, 1–85. Orlando: Academic Press, 1984. Ubicini, Abdolonyme. Letters on Turkey: An Account of the Religious, Political, Social and Commercial Condition of the Ottoman Empire; The Transformed Institutions, Army, Navy, &c. &.c., vol. 1. Translated by Lady Easthope. London: J. Murray, 1856. van der Linden, Marcel. Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History. Studies in Global Social History 1. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Vatter, Sherry. ‘Militant Journeymen in Nineteenth-Century Damascus: Implications for the Middle Eastern History Agenda’, in Workers and Working-Classes in the Middle East Struggles: Histories, Historiographies, edited by Zachary Lockman, 1–19. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: MacMillan, 1995. White, Sam. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Chapter 4

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside Textile Workers in Three Plovdiv Villages

Fatma Öncel

In the nineteenth century the Ottoman economy underwent a serious transformation: European commercial expansion and internal institutional changes redefined existing economic activities and created new ones. Among them, manufacturing had long been subjected to a ‘decline paradigm’. It has been argued that Ottoman manufacturing lagged behind European economic development either because of the lack of capacity in its internal organization,1 or because of the impossibility of resisting European commercial expansion.2 Free trade agreements, starting with the 1838 Anglo–Ottoman Treaty, were considered to mark the end of Ottoman manufacturing. However, these accounts were later criticized for, firstly, their assumption of the homogeneity of Ottoman economies and, secondly, their pursuit of a linear model of ‘economic prosperity’ through an ideal scheme of factory-based, mechanized Western European industrialization. These critiques highlighted the resistance and revival of Ottoman artisans within different contexts.3 The present study adopts the latter position and examines the working conditions of artisans in Balkan rural upland industries. The analysis focuses on the Plovdiv countryside during the middle of the nineteenth century; in other words, it catches a glimpse of rural industries at their ‘peak’, in order to observe their organization and relations in a period when they functioned well. During this time, the

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production and consumption of Ottoman cotton handicrafts was in decline.4 However, woollen textiles from the upland villages of Plovdiv constitute a significant exception to this pattern. The later demise of Bulgarian rural industries by the 1870s is another important area of study, but it remains outside the scope of this work. In order to analyse the organization of labour and production in mid-nineteenth-century rural textile industries, the concept of protoindustrialization is proposed as a useful approach. The term ‘proto-industrialization’ and its definition have been subject to long discussions since it was coined by Franklin Mendels in the early 1970s.5 In light of these discussions, the present chapter defines proto-industrialization neither as a universal theory nor as a transitory phase preceding full industrial growth. For the purposes of this study, the term proto-industrialization has two meanings. Firstly, it is an analytical tool to illustrate the dynamic relations between the demography, geography, agriculture, stockbreeding, landholding, labour, manufacturing and trade in a region, and to create a meaningful picture from this complex matrix. Secondly, it is the name for a specific type of rural manufacturing taking place in houses and workshops, using simple tools, based on the extensive use of labour (especially household labour), and targeting distant markets and merchants, in varying degrees.6 This study is not the first to propose the use of the proto-industrial model for the Ottoman countryside. As Socrates Petmezas puts it, ‘Çağlar Keyder was the first to consider applying the protoindustrial model to Ottoman history’.7 Nevertheless, Keyder is criticized for following a rigid definition not based on empirical research.8 Michael Palairet, on the other hand, bases his claim of Ottoman proto-industrialization on his research on the Ottoman Balkans. However, he is criticized for being nonspecific as regards both the location of, and the reasons behind, proto-industrialization.9 This present study concentrates on a specific geography and offers a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis using the proto-industrialization approach. ‘Survey registers of real estate, land, animals, and income’ (emlak, arazi, hayvanat ve temettüat tahrir defterleri), or the Income Surveys of 1845, constitute the main source for this study.10 Income surveys were conducted during the first half of the nineteenth century in provinces included in Tanzimat reforms, as a result of the new tax regime designed and implemented at the beginning of the century. This regime proposed the assessment of tax according to the ability to pay, which would eventually require cadastral surveys of property values and income.11 These surveys represented modern administrative practices based on general laws or procedures, in an attempt to eliminate multiple claims over

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land and production by identifying the person liable for tax payments.12 Therefore, a survey was issued to be carried out in 1845; it was to be applied by local authorities and supervised by officers from Istanbul.13 Survey data, collected on a household basis, can be classified into four categories: information related to the person (name, status and profession of the head of the household); tax payments (the amount of vergi-i mahsusa [income tax], head-tax and tithe); movable and immovable properties (land, shop, mill, livestock with amount or numbers); and income (estimated annual income yielded by the household).14 The survey data are not without limitations. Using Ottoman statistics for historical research is problematic since the purposes of these data are usually different from current research purposes.15 In terms of using income surveys, there are further considerations. Their accuracy cannot be checked in the absence of an equivalent dataset, nor can they create time-series data since surveys were never repeated.16 Nevertheless, considering the purpose of this chapter, surveys have great potential for helping to explain rural economies as long as a critical approach towards the source is adopted. In this respect, quantitative results are not used here as absolute values, but are usually transformed into proportional terms enabling comparison between villages and within villages, in order to compare different economic groups. In addition, qualitative information (particularly terms referring to occupations and professional hierarchies) is contextualized considering that terms have adopted different meanings throughout the historical span. Finally, in order to present a consistent and coherent study, the information presented in the surveys is complemented by the few available sources found in the labour organizations of nineteenth-century Ottoman rural manufacturing. These include official correspondence located in Ottoman archives classified within Sadaret and Hariciye classifications regarding commercial activities, as well as consular and travellers’ reports. For the purpose of this study, three registers from the income surveys of the year 1845 have been selected.17 The first survey book includes the registers of Muslim and non-Muslim (reaya) households in Karlova.18 Five hundred and fifty-two Muslim and 942 non-Muslim households were registered in this village.19 The other two books include the registers of only non-Muslim households.20 The second survey book consists of the registers of non-Muslim (reaya) populations in Kalofer, with 851 non-Muslim households.21 The third survey book consists of the registers of non-Muslim (reaya) populations in Sopot, with 693 non-Muslim households.22 This chapter comprises six sections. In the first, the manufacturing processes of the three villages in Plovdiv are explained. Here, the basis

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of Plovdiv proto-industrialization is attributed to physical and human geography, as well as land tenure and agrarian activities. In the next two sections, incomes and the professional composition of textile workers in the villages are analysed in order to show the source of their wealth and the pattern of specialization. Here, it is mainly argued that workers in the Plovdiv countryside earned their living relying heavily on manufacturing. In addition, woollen textiles are emphasized as the main source of prosperity for these villages. The following two sections define working conditions in the workshops and houses, respectively. For the former, new types of rural guilds under proto-industrial relations are discussed. Guild structure was redefined in the mid-nineteenth-century countryside; the old hierarchical scheme became an unequal way of accessing the means of production. For the latter, manufacturing methods within houses are described and the different forms of exploitation of household labour are identified, with special reference to female and child labour. In the final section, the flexibility of the labour force is analysed in terms of multiple professions and migratory workers. It is claimed that this flexibility was due to the effects of manufacturing on social life in and around the countryside.

Rural Life in Transition: The Emergence of Upland Proto-Industries Studies on economic change in the nineteenth century usually focus on towns and cities; the rural sphere did not attract attention, probably due to an assumed stagnation. However, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Balkan countryside was experiencing a period of rapid change and consequent economic transformations. In this section, the physical and human geography, incomes, production and trade are discussed for the three villages under study, in order to explain the emergence of proto-industrialization in the Plovdiv uplands. The physical geography of the Balkan Peninsula had a great impact on the emergence of manufacturing in upland Plovdiv villages. It is a mountainous region divided by river systems. The valleys between the mountain ranges and high settlements were isolated but suitable for remote rural forms of proto-industry.23 Nevertheless, a complete alienation from trade routes was not suitable for rural industries. The locations of the villages of Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot were ideal for the emergence of proto-industries: they were close enough to Istanbul and Central Europe to sustain commercial links, and far enough away from major city centres to be protected from their competition and regulations.24 These three

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villages were located between two mountain ranges (Stara Planina and Sredna Gora), situated at the north of the famous commercial town of Plovdiv.25 Administratively, they were part of the eyalet (province) of Edirne in the mid nineteenth century.26 Human geography is also quite important for explaining the emergence of proto-industrialization. Although there is no consensus regarding accurate numbers, a comparative evaluation of available literature reveals that Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot were heavily populated villages in the mid nineteenth century.27 The income surveys of 1845, although prepared as fiscal records rather than population surveys, provide estimations for population in two ways. Firstly, based on the number of households, there were 2,760 Karlova Muslims, 4,710 Karlova non-Muslims, 4,255 Kalofer non-Muslims and 3,465 Sopot non-Muslims.28 The second method of population estimation using the surveys is the number of head-tax (cizye) payers, which yielded roughly the same results as the household-based estimation for non-Muslim populations.29 This exceptionally dense population was due to population growth in the region during the first decades of the nineteenth century and upland migrations, based on multiple political and economic reasons.30 The income surveys of 1845 had, by their nature, much to say about income.31 The Plovdiv upland villages generated an extraordinary amount of income. The average annual income was 1,015 gurus¸ per household in 1845 (702.9 gurus¸, 949.1 gurus¸, 1,119.9 gurus¸ and 1,210.1 gurus¸ respectively for Karlova Muslims, Karlova non-Muslims, Kalofer and Sopot). The estimated annual income of each village under study was two or three times higher than many contemporary Balkan and Anatolian cities.32 However, this seemingly prosperous condition disappears with an analysis of income differentiation. The majority of households were earning below the average income of their village. The income inequalities, which stemmed from different positions in the proto-industrial network, will be dealt with extensively in this chapter. The breakdown of income types is also quite revealing as regards the composition of economic activities in each village. There was no homogeneous distribution of incomes in terms of their sources (Figure 4.1). Crafts and production constituted the most important economic activity in 1845 for all the villages studied (Map 4.1). Agriculture and stockbreeding incomes, on the contrary, were so low that agricultural pursuits could hardly cover the daily needs of households. Related to this, the inhabitants of these villages were characterized by small landholdings or landlessness.33 Based on the income surveys of 1845, around 45 per cent of them were totally landless. Nearly half of the landowners had less than two dönüms (approximately 1,830 square metres) of land. Lack of

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 179

sufficient agrarian income and land shortage were two important reasons for the emergence of manufacturing in these villages. Trading of manufactured goods in the Plovdiv countryside represented a clear difference from earlier examples of rural manufacturing. These proto-industrial villages were heavily concentrated on a specific type of textile production, namely woollen weaving. Specialization enabled large-scale production and thus competition in distant markets. Plovdiv textiles participated in a lively commercial milieu in the mid nineteenth century. There was a high number of beratlı merchants (i.e. merchants granted official privileges) from Plovdiv who dealt in long-distance trade with Europe, and even with such remote regions as Iran and India.34 Official orders also contributed to the development of Plovdiv woollen textiles. Woollen cloth (aba) was utilized for the military uniforms of the Ottoman army; the regularity of this official demand was one motivation for the later establishment of modern textile mills in Plovdiv.35 This market-oriented manufacturing created significant changes in the working conditions of the producers.

Textile Workers in the Plovdiv Villages: Subsisting on Manufacture in the Countryside The original conceptualization of proto-industrialization defines the activity of manufacturing as a by-occupation of the peasants; in other words, an activity for those seasons without agrarian work.36 This claim, however, is not valid for all types of proto-industries but it was

Figure 4.1 Breakdown of incomes (gurus¸) in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845. Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965. Figure created by the author.

Map 4.1 Source and amount of income. Circle size represents amount of income. Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965. Map created by the author. Base map: © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY-SA.

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Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 181

experienced in certain regions and periods. For instance, in the eighteenth century, peasants in the Plovdiv countryside were engaged in proto-industrial manufacturing only during their spare time.37 However, during the mid-nineteenth century, textile manufacturing became the main occupation in these villages. Through analysing the income survey data in different ways, it becomes clear that workers in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot earned their living by textile manufacturing. The income surveys reveal that approximately half the population of these villages (except Karlova Muslims) was composed of textile producers in the year 1845 (Table 4.1). Textile workers were the highestincome-yielding households as represented in the surveys. These records also show that more than half of the total income of each village was generated by textile workers, except Karlova Muslims (Table 4.2). It can be claimed that textile producers were earning more than the village population in general. Nevertheless, the question of prosperity should be evaluated with respect to different economic classes. Closer attention to different social and economic organizations within the proto-industrial network shows that the prosperity yielded through textiles was enjoyed by the few who had access to the means of production, as will be shown in the following sections. The importance of manufacturing in the lives of textile producers can be explained in two further analyses. Firstly, the breakdown of textile producers’ incomes demonstrates that textile manufacture was the most important economic activity for the textile producers. Textile producers in these villages were earning more than 80 per cent of their incomes from textiles in 1845.38 Textile manufacturing and trade was the primary source of their income. These villages provide a unique example in that Table 4.1 Textile producer households in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845.

Textile producers (no. of households) Total village populations (no. of households) Share of textile producers within total populations

Karlova Muslims

Karlova nonMuslims

Kalofer

Sopot

55

473

420

344

552

942

851

693

9.9%

50.2%

49.3%

49.6%

Notes: The criteria for defining ‘textile producers’ are based on the textile-related revenues stated in the income surveys of 1845, namely revenues from textile shops, revenues from textile tools, revenues from textile craftsmanship and trade. Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965.

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traditional rural activities, such as engaging in agriculture and stockbreeding, did not hold economic significance for them.39 The second way of showing the importance of craft production in rural life is the number of artisans for whom textile manufacturing was the only economic activity. In 1845, almost half the textile producers in the three studied villages subsisted only on textile manufacture; in other words, textile production was their only source of income.40

Prosperity Brought by Wool: Textile Occupations in Comparison Manufacturing in upland Plovdiv villages was highly specialized depending on the degree of its prevalence in a community. This section explains the historical process and patterns for the villages that concentrated on woollen textiles, and it also highlights the relationship between woollen textiles and prosperity. Different textile occupations adopted in these villages were examined in comparison, in order to emphasize their consequences for textile workers. Here, I argue that the type of textile used (wool, goat hair or cotton) defines the degree of economic prosperity in the Plovdiv villages. Compared to goat hair manufacturing or cotton dealing, communities producing woollen textiles yielded significantly higher incomes. The income surveys of 1845 depict a lively picture of the contemporary professional structure of rural life. The surveys list the occupation (or occupations, if there was more than one) for the heads of each household. Moreover, the occupations of family members who earned additional income for the household were also stated (Table 4.3). There Table 4.2 Total annual incomes of textile producers in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845.

Karlova Muslims Total annual income of 35,000 textile producers (gurus¸) Total annual income of total 388,000 village populations (gurus¸) Share of textile producers’ income within total populations’ income

9%

Karlova nonMuslims

Kalofer

Sopot

478,000

531,000

447,000

894,000

953,000

839,000

53.4%

55.7%

53.2%

Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965.

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 183

Table 4.3 Members of textile professions in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845.

Karlova Muslims

Maker of coarse woollen cloth (abacı/aba dolabcı/ abacı) Maker of woollen braid lace (gaytancı) Spinner (çarkçı) Cotton dealer (pamukçu) Goat woollen cloth maker (muytab) Yarn spinner (iplikçi/iplik bükücüsü) Tailor/Sewer (terzi/dikici) Furriery/Kaftan producer (kürkçü/kaftancı) Lining maker (astarcı) Block printer (basmacı) Dyer (boyacı) Total

Karlova nonMuslims

Kalofer

No.

%

No.

%

1

1.8

58

9.2

0

0

251 39.8

7 12.7

156 24.8

No.

Sopot

%

No.

%

251 47.3

21

5.1

33

134

32

73 13.7

69

17

175

14 25.5

0

0

0

0

1

0.2

24 43.6

12

1.9

3

0.6

0

0

0

6

1

1

0.2

47 11.4

9 16.4

48

7.6

10

1.9

10

0

2

0

0

27

4.3

2

0.4

18

4

0

0

37

5.9

1

0.2

7

2

0

0

25

4

0

0

100

24

0

0

10

1.6

15

2.8

7

1.7

55

100

630

100

531

100

414

100

Notes: 1. Total number indicated in this table is higher than the actual total number of textile producer households. In this table, the unit of analysis is not the household but the occupation. There were a number of households with dual occupations. 2. Çarkçılık corresponds to spinning a gaytan braid lace with a wheel. It is translated as ‘spinner’ based on the HISCO. See Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, Ineke Mass and Andrew Miles, HISCO Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 221. 3. Pamukçu is translated as cotton dealer, but not cotton producer. Cotton production was not recorded in the income survey books of these villages. Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965.

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were eleven occupations constituting the textile sector in 1845. Different textile occupations were adopted in villages with different characteristics. In this respect, the concentration on goat hair cloth production (muytablık) and cotton dealing separates Karlova Muslims from other villages. Since they rarely produced woollen textiles, their economic prosperity was not as high as the other villages. On the other hand, goat hair cloth makers and cotton dealers were almost entirely absent in the other more prosperous villages. Woollen textiles, however, constituted the craft of primary importance for the non-Muslim populations in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot. In general, Bulgarian upland proto-industries were heavily characterized by woollen manufacturing.41 Aba and gaytan were the oldest and most wellknown handicraft products in the region.42 As the income surveys reveal for 1845, the production of woollen braid lace (gaytancılık), coarse woollen cloth (abacılık), and spinning (çarkçılık) were the most important textile activities for Karlova non-Muslims, as well as for Kalofer and Sopot. This study claims that gaytancılık and çarkçılık were similar professions because 88 per cent of the people whose occupation was registered as çarkçı (spinner) were producing gaytan. It is evident that the çarkçı-gaytancı combination was the dominant textile branch, compared to abacılık. Kalofer, however, was an exception in this respect; these two activities held equal importance in this village. Aba was a ‘heavy (800 grams per m²) fulled woollen cloth from carded yarn’.43 It was already a commercial product as early as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and Plovdiv played a dominant role in the aba trade.44 By the nineteenth century, Plovdiv and Salonica were two centres where aba of the highest quality was produced.45 The relatively low prices of aba increased the demand for this product, while wool prices were increasing in the domestic markets due to wool exports.46 Besides, the aba of Plovdiv was in demand from distant markets, particularly those of Central Europe.47 The observations of Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui for the year 1841 have particular importance in this sense.48 Throughout his visit, he was able to observe manufacturing in Bulgaria, and he notes that the quality of aba cloth produced in Bulgaria was very high and that the products of Bulgarian textile workers could compete with those of Vienna and London.49 It was no mere accident that gaytan prevailed over aba in the Plovdiv upland villages. Based on territorial specialization in the early nineteenth century, the Plovdiv centre and the Rhodope Mountains hosted aba producers, whereas villagers settled on the Balkan Mountains concentrated on gaytan production.50 Gaytan making rapidly increased, not only because gaytan was a popular accessory for men’s contemporary

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 185

clothing, but also, unlike aba, its production did not require large looms.51 It was easy to produce gaytan in households with small spaces. Besides, gaytan was utilized to connect woollen cloth pieces, which were woven in narrow widths due to the limitations of the peasant loom.52 Technological achievements also contributed to the process of specialization. ‘The introduction of the iron-toothed wheel – the machine used to prepare braid – in the second quarter of the nineteenth century transformed gaitandzhiistvo into one of the most important branches of the textile industry in the Bulgarian lands, and this activity acted as a powerful lever for the economic upsurge of Kalofer, Karlovo, Sopot, and Kazanluk’.53 Textile technology moved rapidly around the continent of Europe. Foot-powered German looms reached Karlova in the early nineteenth century, after being exported by Gabrovo from Brasov in Transylvania.54 Apart from woollen cloth production, other textile professions existed in the mid-nineteenth-century Plovdiv countryside in varying degrees. For instance, yarn spinning and block printing were frequent activities among Sopot artisans. The block printing industry of Sopot began in the 1820s and was applied on the calicos produced in Karlova.55 The number of tailors was usually not very high in Plovdiv villages. Their relative absence could be interpreted as an indicator of the exportoriented manufacturing of woollen yarn and cloth. In small and closed economies producing for the domestic market, tailors should have been the primary consumers of these goods. For instance, in Eski Cuma, a small kaza of Deliorman and Dobruca, where low-quality woollen cloth was produced in households, tailoring was the most widespread occupation and tailors were the main customers of these home-manufactured woollen cloths.56 In the export-oriented Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot proto-industries, however, output was more likely being sold to distant markets than to local tailors.

Artisanal Life in Workshops The Ottoman guild structure, as well as other social and economic institutions, was undergoing a process of transformation during the course of the nineteenth century. Existing debate overwhelmingly concentrates on whether or not the guilds disappeared in this period. A significant number of urban guilds may have experienced a decline during the nineteenth century.57 The 1826 abolishment of the Janissaries, which had protected and supported – particularly urban – guilds, and the free trade agreements starting in 1838, can be counted as possible causes of the

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weakening of the urban guilds.58 On the other hand, changes taking place within nineteenth-century Ottoman rural guilds have not been studied. This study proposes to examine nineteenth-century rural guilds from the point of view of transformation and adaptation. Throughout the nineteenth century, many Ottoman guilds continued, yet in new forms, and it is wrong to assume that they preserved the structure and function of sixteenth-century guilds.59 Hence, I argue that in the mid nineteenth century, Bulgarian textile guilds were able to conserve their presence in the rural sphere, although in a limited way and under the rules of the market. Plovdiv represents a strong challenge to the argument of the demise of the guilds, above all else due to its abacı guild. The abacı guild of Plovdiv was a very old and prominent institution, which had its own written registers (kondiki) spanning the previous three hundred years.60 However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the market premise started to penetrate Plovdiv textiles and threatened the established norms of the guilds. Nevertheless, this does not mean they collapsed; at least, the craft guilds in the Plovdiv countryside did not. They became more cautious in this new context to ensure their survival and took a number of measures to protect the status quo.61 However, these efforts were not enough to prevent the establishment of new employment organizations and commercial relations. For instance, the 1805 declaration of the Plovdiv abacı guild to preserve its non-competitive character imposed severe restrictions on local trade and strict rules for the admission and training of apprentices, yet these measures resulted in the expansion of commercial activities to distant markets and the exploitation of labour from outside the confines of the regular workshop.62 Plovdiv guilds, as long as they had adapted to the new capitalist tendencies, were still relatively influential over the production and trading processes. Proto-industrial activities developed alongside guild membership in many regions; workshop owners became wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs hiring peasant households for manufacturing purposes.63 The most well-known merchants and heads of proto-industries in Plovdiv, such as the Gümüs¸gerdans, were also guild members.64 For Blanqui, the guilds in Bulgaria still had full control over the crafts in the 1840s and, unlike the great manufacturing countries, were able to protect workers from the exploitation of the capitalists.65 It is a matter of debate whether Blanqui could observe all the guilds for each craft, both in the urban and rural sphere in Bulgaria, in order to reach this conclusion.66 Besides, the penetration of capital and the guilds’ resistance to such influence could not have been easily understood through mere glimpses. Nevertheless, his account is still remarkable for underlining the

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 187

fact that guilds had not completely disappeared from Bulgaria by the mid nineteenth century. More importantly, he stresses the tension between the existing guilds and the newly emerging capitalist form of the market. The reports of the British Foreign Office argue for the existence of guilds in the region of Epirus (Western Greek mainland) even in the 1870s, yet in a more liberal form than Blanqui defines. According to these reports, handicraft guilds were in name only; regulations concerning the physical condition of labour had disappeared in favour of a full liberty of action.67 This state of ‘liberty’ can be interpreted as taking place at the expense of the regulatory power of the guilds. However, this observation can definitely not be generalized for the whole Balkan area. Still, it is interesting to see traces of the guilds, although in decline, as late as the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The classification of professional status in the income surveys of 1845 helps to trace the new forms of the guild system in the mid nineteenth century. The professional status of craftsmen in mid-nineteenthcentury Plovdiv represents both continuities and discontinuities within the guild system. Survey books of the Plovdiv villages include the terms kalfa (journeyman) and çırak (apprentice). Nevertheless, the term usta (master) does not exist in these survey books. Proto-industrial textile production in the Plovdiv rural area was not absolutely detached from the workshop setting. Workshops continued to be venues of craft production, although less and less frequently. Among 1,292 textile producer households, only ninety-nine of them were shop owners. Possession of a shop was quite uncommon and, indeed, was a sign of wealth and prosperity. An abacı shop ‘cannot be bought with money’ in Samokov,68 and this was also the case in Plovdiv. Compared to an average textile household, someone with a shop had a considerably higher income.69 Since masters were not separately classified in the survey, I claim that a textile manufacturer was a master if he possessed a shop and if anything to the contrary was not indicated.70 Survey books provide only the name of the craft for most of the shops, or simply state the existence of a shop without listing its function, and the revenue yielded in each shop. Whether it was manufacturing or trade, or both, that was undertaken in a shop was not mentioned. The absence of this information is in fact not a shortcoming of the survey, but a reflection of the type of artisanal production carried out. In small-scale craft production, the venues for the manufacturing and trading of goods were not always separated from each other. Labour organization in the workshops included manufacturers other than the shop owners, or ustas. According to the income surveys of

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Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845, out of 1,292 textile manufacturer households, there were 356 journeymen and fifteen apprentices as heads of households (Table 4.4). This enables us to estimate the number of workers per textile shop. Since there were seventy-eight textile shops, the average number of journeymen per shop was at least around four, and the number of apprentices per shop was probably at least about one.71 This significant number of journeymen and apprentices shows the prosperity of the textile sector in this region. In other words, the capacity for manufacturing in these shops both required and enabled shop owners to hire workers. The income differentiation with respect to professional status is quite important when examining mid-nineteenth-century proto-industries. One significant point about journeymen and apprentices is whether they were earning either less or more than an average textile producer household. For all villages studied here, journeymen and apprentices were earning less than an average textile producer household (Table 4.5). The income gap is wider for apprentices. Journeymen and apprentices, as a natural outcome of their low earnings, had limited access to the means of production in textile manufacturing. They were almost totally deprived of shop ownership. Among 371 journeymen and apprentices, only one person, a certain kaftan producer (kaftancı) journeyman, owned a shop. In the dominant textile sectors, namely aba and gaytan manufacturing, they did not hold any shops. This can be interpreted as a continuity with the traditional guild institution, in which only ustas were entitled to open a shop. Nevertheless, in terms of access to production tools, their situation was better. Thirty-one people among journeymen and apprentices possessed gaytan wheels. Those with productive tools were better off than journeymen or apprentices without any tools. They had an annual Table 4.4 Number of journeymen and apprentices among textile producers in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845.

Karlova Muslims No. Journeymen Apprentices Total no. of textile producers

Karlova nonMuslims %

14 25.5

No.

Kalofer %

No.

102 22.3

Sopot %

No.

%

123

30

0

0

7

1.5

4

1.0

4

1.2

55

100

458

100

410

100

342

100

Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965.

117 34.2

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 189

average income of 1,265 gurus¸, which matches the annual average income of total textile households (see Table 4.5 for a comparison of income levels). This creates a highly significant result: the income levels of the rural textile working classes were not directly bound to the professional status of the workers but to their access to productive tools. Those with productive tools had higher incomes regardless of whether they belonged to a lower professional status (e.g. a journeyman) or not, in the craftsman hierarchy. The traditional guild hierarchy was replaced by new productive relations in terms of the earnings of workers. Alongside these significant changes on the shop floor, workers also experienced new working conditions outside the workshop. It would be wrong to assume that craftsmen were manufacturing only in workshops. There was no solid separation between workshop labour and household labour in the mid nineteenth century. A number of workers in the Plovdiv countryside were producing textile goods both in households and workshops. There were thirty journeymen households and one apprentice household that possessed their own wheels and looms. Since they were working with the tools of the master in the shop, their own tools were probably being utilized in their houses. It can be claimed that their production in shops was carried out for the shopkeeper-master, whereas their production with their own tools at home was for themselves. It was not only these artisans – already working in shops – who were also manufacturing at home. Those village residents without any guild Table 4.5 Average income of journeyman and apprentice households in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845.

Karlova Muslims Gurus¸

Karlova nonMuslims %

Kalofer %

Gurus¸

Gurus¸

Sopot %

Gurus¸

%

Journeymen

529 82.7

790 78.2

1,050 83.1

1,147 88.3

Apprentices

n/a

n/a

525 52.0

952 75.3

521 40.1

Income of average textile producer household

640

100

1,010

100

1,264

100

1,299

100

Notes: The first row in the table records the average income per journeyman household. The second row demonstrates the average income per apprentice household. The third row shows the mean of the incomes of all textile producer households. Therefore, the % columns show the proportion of journeyman and apprentice earnings to those of the average textile producer in the respective village. Sources: BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. 5961, 5962, 5965.

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connections were part of the proto-industrial manufacturing network also through their work at home, which is explained in detail in the next section.

Family Economy and Manufacturing Households The household, as an economic unit, is highly significant in the explanation of the proto-industrial model. It was closely attached to market incentives yet pursued its own rationale as well. It remained a pre-capitalist domain, to a certain extent, even though it was involved in capitalist production relations.72 Nevertheless, while rural industries in Plovdiv were triumphing in the middle of the nineteenth century, market incentives were gradually increasing their level of influence at the expense of this claimed rationale of the family, as well as at the expense of the guild institution. The family workforce was exploited through different means. The income surveys of 1845 have both advantages and shortcomings for studying family economies. On the one hand, as the unit of analysis was the household, we can see the belongings and earnings of the whole family. The total annual estimated income reflects the yields of all family members’ economic activities. On the other hand, the demographic data in the survey are limited; only the head of the household was specified by name. Additional information about other members – regarding their number, gender and age – was usually not indicated. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions which make a serious contribution to the composition of demographic data. First, the surveys of non-Muslim neighbourhoods included the number of head-tax (cizye) payers, that is, the number of adult males. The number of head-tax payers was more or less onethird of the total population.73 According to this, the average number of family members per household was 3.51 for the Plovdiv countryside. It is consistent with ‘the predominance of nuclear family households’ in Southeastern Europe.74 Secondly, if there is a male breadwinner other than the head of the household, his relationship to the family head, the source of his income and the amount of his income were also stated.75 Therefore, we can learn both about family composition (whether it was a nuclear family or not) and the professional composition of the family, in other words, whether all breadwinners had the same profession or not. The income surveys of 1845 also provide valuable information about the details of manufacturing activities within the household. If a household did not declare possession of a shop for the survey but appeared to own production tools (gaytan wheel or aba loom), it was highly possible

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 191

that these tools were located at the house of the respective household. Four-hundred and ninety-one households (38 per cent of textile producers) possessed wheels or looms without shops and, thus, were manufacturing at home. This large amount of manufacturing outside the shop reflects the fact that rural proto-industrialization was relying on household manufacturing at a significant level. These households may actually represent one particular form of manufacturing, one in which producers possessed their own production tools.76 One should also remember that there might have been households with tools provided by putting-out merchants, the ownership of which would not have been registered for a manufacturing household.77 There were twenty merchant households (again, without shops) possessing gaytan wheels, which may well have been run by putting-out merchants. Nevertheless, the available information is not clear about who actually produced goods with tools owned by merchants. Gaytan manufacturing, as the dominant form of Plovdiv textile production, was also quite a common practice in households, especially due to the fact that it required little space. Unlike ownership of a shop, the possession of a wheel was not uncommon. However, unlike shopkeepers, wheel owners did not earn particularly high incomes: the annual average income per household with a gaytan wheel was just slightly higher than the average income for any textile producer household.78 The above-mentioned 491 households possessing tools are composed of 484 households with gaytan wheels, and only seven households with aba looms. This is also a reflection of the decline of aba manufacturing in the mid-nineteenth-century Plovdiv countryside, which may also explain the mass migrations of abacıs to Istanbul. Aba manufacturing required higher investments and costs than gaytan, which was unpractical in the rural proto-industrial context. Nevertheless, those aba producers who survived under these new conditions constituted a wealthy few.79 Female and child labour made up an essential part of proto-industrial economies in the Plovdiv countryside. Ottoman female labour was particularly visible in those manufacturing sectors that had recently emerged, developed or acquired new forms during the nineteenth century.80 In the income surveys of 1845, women and minors were not represented by name since only the head of the household was registered, but their existence was included in the records indirectly through the yields of their labour. Since the survey data reveal the total revenue of the household, one can rightly assume that this revenue includes the output produced by female and minors as well. More importantly, when the head of the household was a migratory worker and absent (which is explained in detail in the next section), households were still

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showing recorded incomes in the surveys. The source of this income can be explained through female and child labour; since most of these households were composed of nuclear families, women and children probably remained the sole labour power yielding this income in the absence of the males. The exploitation of women in the market had certain forms in the textile industries. Division of labour within the process created ‘gendered’ tasks, proceeding alongside the traditional guild-based organization. The labour of women was extensively used by machine owners in the process of gaytan yarn spinning; a comparison of the working conditions of these women with the artisans in the workshops reflects great inequality.81 Their labour was not only invisible, but also over-exploited by the market, through direct or indirect contact with the merchants. As they were not perceived as the real breadwinners, merchants either underpaid or did not pay them at all.82 As the available resources are quite limited on the issue, one can examine other regions in the Balkans in order to gain some idea about the family economy in rural industries. For instance, Foreign Office reports state the existence of labour-intensive textile manufacturing activity in the region of Epirus in the year 1870, where domestic labour played a significant role in production.83 According to one report, female labour was concentrated on reeling, spinning, knitting, weaving and sewing. The account specifies that the surplus of their labour was either bartered or sold in the market. It remains unanswered whether they were participating in the exchange process or, at the very least, enjoying the commodity value of their products. However, in the context of protoindustrial villages where more ‘visible’ workers on the shop floors were deprived of satisfactory earnings, it would be naïve to expect that female workers in households were treated justly.

Labour Flexibility: Multiple Professions and Migratory Workers Proto-industrial textile manufacturing reflected the flexibilities of rural working conditions. More than half of textile manufacturer households were occupied with at least two economic activities.84 Since these villages were concentrated on manufacturing, the economic return of these secondary activities was usually not very significant. Nevertheless, regardless of the revenues, the multiplicity of professions shows that textile manufacturers were also undertaking services for daily needs. For instance, all kabzımals (wholesalers of fruits and vegetables) and çerçis (peddlers)

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 193

in the villages were, at the same time, textile producers. Both professions require manufactured or exported goods, reflecting the outbound commercial networks in which proto-industrial textile producers participated. Plovdiv rural manufacturers assumed additional functions in their societies in the middle of the nineteenth century due to the connections they built through their proto-industrial production and trade relations. Shop-keeping records in the survey also depict the flexible professional composition of the rural economy. Of ninety-nine shops held by textile manufacturers, twenty-one belonged to sectors other than textiles. Again, it shows that textile manufacturers, who were the dominant economic group in the Plovdiv countryside, were also overwhelmingly undertaking other crafts as well as services for the daily needs of the villages. For instance, among these twenty-one shops owned by textile manufacturers, there were nine pubs (meyhane), three grocery stores (bakkal dükkanı) and two bakeries (fırın). Their interest in occupations in the service sector is also an indicator of the monetization of the economy. Secondary occupations also took place in rented shops. In addition to the above-mentioned ninety-nine shops in the Plovdiv countryside, there were twenty-eight shops that were rented out by textile producers. Nevertheless, these rented shops were mostly small ones, such as grocery stores or pubs. A point worth mentioning about the multiplicity of the professions is the relationship to the professional status of the workers. Journeymen and apprentices were generally occupied with a single profession. Only thirty-five of them had dual occupations, the overwhelming majority of which were closely related to their primary occupation (being çarkçı and gaytancı at the same time, for instance). Staying in a single profession was not the result of a satisfactory income. As has been explained previously, journeymen and apprentices generally earned less than textile producers. Therefore, the working conditions necessitating a specialization may provide the answer. It was highly probable that in the context of proto-industries, journeymen and apprentices became full-time workers who devoted their entire labour to their profession. Labour flexibility in rural manufacturing was visible not only in terms of multiple professions, but also through migrating workers. Throughout the nineteenth century, both in towns and the countryside, males usually did not reside at home, but worked in distant locations.85 Among 1,292 textile producer households, the heads of 182 worked in towns away from Plovdiv in 1845. Istanbul takes the lead, with 172 migrant workers recorded as coming from Plovdiv villages; the rest were dispersed throughout different towns and cities on an individual basis. Almost half

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of the migrant labour force of Plovdiv was composed of journeymen and apprentices. Among 371 journeymen and apprentices, ninety-five of them were working away from Plovdiv. This migrant workforce was composed, almost entirely, of a homogeneous group: ninety abacı journeymen from Kalofer were working in Istanbul. The Bulgarian abacı guild in Istanbul was very significant in the mid nineteenth century. A study on non-Muslim Bulgarians in Istanbul states that the abacı guild constituted the largest Bulgarian guild community in Istanbul, with eight thousand members in 1863.86

Conclusion This chapter addresses working conditions in the nineteenth century, within an Ottoman context, through a largely unknown field – rural manufacturing. Based on a study of three villages in the Plovdiv district in 1845, it attempts to clarify some aspects of economic history, both on the macro and micro levels. Conventional standpoints about Ottoman manufacturing are confronted through the depiction of lively examples from the countryside in the middle of the nineteenth century. Successful instances of manufacturing in the mid nineteenth century afford a strong challenge to claims of the decline of Ottoman crafts due to the Ottoman institutions’ lack of resistance to European expansion, or the devastating effects of the Anglo–Ottoman Trade Agreement of 1838. In addition, this chapter, for the first time, offers a detailed portrait of the workers involved in Ottoman rural manufacturing. For this purpose, with the extensive use of income surveys from 1845 and complementary sources, the incomes, occupations, professional status, possessions and demographic characteristics of the worker households have been depicted in a dynamic way. The quantitative and qualitative survey data have enabled us to explain manufacturing trends in the Plovdiv countryside within the framework of proto-industrialization. The combination of survey data with the proto-industrialization thesis has generated a great capacity to explain concurrent labour organizations in the countryside under different working conditions. This chapter explains the formation of proto-industrial villages with reference to their semi-isolated geography, population density, land shortage, lack of agrarian income, and established commercial relations to distant markets. These villages represent a total rupture from traditional agrarian economies. Workers in the Plovdiv countryside were not engaged in agriculture, even at a subsistence level; they did not experience a self-sufficient rural lifestyle.

Rural Manufacturing in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside 195

Workers in the Plovdiv countryside relied heavily on manufacturing for their living and, consequently, their villages were highly prosperous compared to many contemporary urban centres. Nevertheless, the question of prosperity should be evaluated with respect to different classes. The study underlines the income inequalities within the rural manufacturing network. Those producers engaged in commercial relations, with access to the means of production, enjoyed the prosperity yielded by textile production. An analysis of the occupational composition shows that woollen textiles constituted the highest-income-yielding sector. In this regard, ethno-religious biases concerning wealth did not hold true. Non-Muslim inhabitants of Karlova were wealthier than Muslims, not because of their religious affiliation, but because of their concentration on woollen textiles. Nevertheless, the reasons for the dominance of non-Muslims in woollen textiles remain unclear due to a lack of extant information. This chapter underlines the multiplicity in the organization of manufacturing. Workshops and houses represent two important venues reflecting continuity and change in rural manufacturing in the mid nineteenth century. It is argued that the Plovdiv countryside demonstrated the continued existence of rural guilds, yet in a way that had adapted to nineteenth-century market demands. Contrary to the claim that Ottoman guilds had totally disappeared, the Plovdiv guilds’ legacy survived in the villages via the classification of professional statuses. However, the definitions of these statuses significantly changed, and journeymen and apprentices continued to survive, as long as they had access to the means of production. Strict guild regulations regarding production standards seemed to disappear and manufacturing spread out of the workshop and into the home. Spinning wheels entered family life, with the extensive use of female and child labour. However, as the sources used were gender-blind, this chapter was unable to follow the details of female labour in the Plovdiv countryside. Similarly, the repercussions of manufacturing on the daily lives of households remain unknown due to the limitations of the data. Nevertheless, the reflections of manufacturing on the social life of the villages can be followed, in some instances. Textile manufacturers, as a result of their wealth and networks, assumed additional roles within the service sectors. The phenomenon of migrant workers also represents an interesting consequence of rural manufacturing networks. This chapter shows that mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman rural manufacturing signified a wider social and economic reality than hitherto assumed, with numerous connotations. The purpose of this study has been limited to explaining the working conditions of textile workers

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in the countryside, within the constraints of the available resources. Therefore, it is anticipated that it will arouse interest in other aspects of Ottoman rural labour history for which further studies are required. Fatma Öncel specializes in the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire. She earned her Ph.D. in 2018 at the History Department of Boğaziçi University. She received Brill Publishing’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Early-Career Paper Prize in 2016, and has participated in a number of research projects supported by the State Planning Agency of Turkey, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) and Boğaziçi University. She was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in 2019. Currently, she is a research associate of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.

Notes  1. For a number of state-centred accounts, see Ömer Celal Sarç, ‘Tanzimat ve Sanayiimiz’, in Tanzimat: Yüzüncü Yıldönümü Münasebetile (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1940), 423–40; Rıfat Önsoy, Tanzimat Dönemi Osmanlı Sanayii ve Sanayiles¸me Politikası (Ankara: Türkiye İl Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1988). For accounts concentrated on the decline caused by Ottoman institutions, see Traian Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).  2. For arguments on the dependency of Ottoman economies on industrial Europe, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols (New York: Academic Press, 1974/1980/1989).  3. İslamoğlu’s contribution to the discussion is very important as she criticized the passive understanding of periphery; she underlines the internal dynamics of the peripheral regions. See Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, ‘Oriental Despotism in World System Perspective’, in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu-İnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1987), 1–26. Quataert raises an important challenge against modernization theory and world systems theory, both of which created the basis of the decline paradigm. See Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes towards the Notion of “Decline”’, History Compass 1(1) (2003), 1–9. For an early work concentrating on Middle Eastern artisans, see Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy (London: Methuen, 1987). For a pioneering study on livelihoods in Ottoman textile sectors, see Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For an account analysing the success of textile sectors in different Balkan contexts, see Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies, c.1800–1914: Evolution without Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).  4. S¸evket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Ottoman De-Industrialization, 1800–1913: Assessing the Magnitude, Impact and Response’, The Economic History Review 64(S1) (2011), 159–84.

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 5. For the original conceptualization of the term, see Franklin F. Mendels, ‘Proto Industrialization: The First Phase of Industrialization Process’, The Journal of Economic History 32(1) (1972), 241–61. For a significant revision, see Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, eds, Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also D.C. Coleman, ‘Proto-Industrialization: A Concept Too Many’, The Economic History Review 36(3) (1983), 435–48; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London: Routledge, 1994); Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Leslie A. Clarkson, Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of Industrialization? (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Sheilagh Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds, European Proto-Industrialization: An Introductory Handbook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a recent contribution, Donald Quataert, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Industrialization and “Modernity” in a Global Perspective’, in The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650– 2000, ed. Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 577–95.  6. In this respect, the term ‘putting-out’ can also be used.  7. Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘Patterns of Protoindustrialisation in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern Thessaly, c. 1750–1860’, The Journal of European Economic History 19(1) (1990), 575–603.  8. Ibid., 576.  9. Ibid. 10. For detailed information about the income surveys, see Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydın, eds, The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5 (London: Kegan Paul, 2004) and Tevfik Güran, ‘19. Yüzyıl Temettuat Tahrirleri’, in Osmanlı Devleti’nde Bilgi ve İstatistik, ed. Halil İnalcık and S¸evket Pamuk (Ankara: Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 2000), 73–94. The former also provides prominent examples of studies based on income surveys. In this respect, see also Tevfik Güran, 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1998). For a review of literature based upon income surveys, see Said Öztürk, ‘Türkiye’de Temettuat Çalıs¸maları’, Türkiye Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 1 (2003), 287–304. For a study on the city of Plovdiv using income surveys, see Neriman Ersoy, ‘XIX. Yüzyılda Filibe S¸ehri’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Istanbul University, 2003). 11. Stanford J. Shaw, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue System’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6(4) (1975), 421–59. 12. Huri İslamoğlu, ‘Politics of Administering Property: Law and Statistics in the NineteenthCentury Ottoman Empire’, in Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West, ed. Huri İslamoğlu (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 276–319. 13. Tevfik Güran, ‘Introduction: Temettuat Registers as a Resource about Ottoman Social and Economic Life’, in Hayashi and Aydın, The Ottoman State and Societies, 3–14. 14. Ibid., 7–8. 15. Socrates D. Petmezas, ‘Bridging the Gap: Rural Macedonia from Ottoman to Greek Rule, 1900–1920’, in Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean, ed. Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kechriotis (Athens: Alpha Bank, 2010), 355–95. 16. Güran, ‘Introduction’, 10. 17. The survey books are kept in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in Istanbul. 18. The term reaya referred to non-Muslim taxpayers in the nineteenth century. For further information, see Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Ra’iyya’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 404–6. 19. Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivleri (hereafter BOA.) ML. VRD. TMT. d. 5961.

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20. Registers for Muslim populations of Kalofer and Sopot were not available in the archives. Thus, this study refers to non-Muslims whenever Kalofer or Sopot are mentioned. 21. BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. d. 5962. 22. BOA. ML. VRD. TMT. d. 5965. 23. Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2000). 24. Previous studies have also referred to the region between the Stara Planina and Sredna Gora mountain ranges in terms of their favourable conditions for manufacturing. For example, Henry J. Bruman, ‘The Bulgarian Rose Industry’, Economic Geography 12(3) (1936), 273–78; George Hoffman, ‘Transformation of Rural Settlement in Bulgaria’, Geographical Review 54(1) (1964), 45–64; Nikolai Todorov, Lubomir Dinev and Luben Melnichki, Bulgarie: Aperçu Historique et Geographique (Sofia: Sofia Presse, 1969). 25. For further information about the geographical characteristics of these villages, see M. Türker Acaroğlu, Bulgaristan’da Türkçe Yer Adları Kılavuzu (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1988). 26. The administrative scheme frequently changed in the region throughout the nineteenth century. For a detailed account on Plovdiv and its villages in nineteenth-century administration units, see Ersoy, ‘XIX. Yüzyılda Filibe’, 102, 126, 143. 27. Ibid., 39–46; Nikolai Todorov, The Balkan City 1400–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983); Raina Gavrilova, Bulgarian Urban Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999). To compare the smaller number of populations of non-proto-industrial Plovdiv villages with protoindustrial ones, see Güran, 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar, 179–228. 28. This estimation follows the studies on Ottoman Bulgaria that utilize the household data of the income surveys of 1845 claiming that an average household included five persons: Svetla Ianeva, ‘Samokov: An Ottoman Balkan City in the Age of Reform’, in Hayashi and Aydın, The Ottoman State and Societies, 47–76, and Mahir Aydın, ‘Tatarpazarcığı: SocioEconomic Condition of Muslim Urban Residents’, in Hayashi and Aydın, The Ottoman State and Societies, 77–106. 29. The estimated population based on head-tax payers in 1845 is as follows: 4,980 people in Karlova, 4,638 in Kalofer and 3,927 in Sopot. Head-tax payers were all non-Muslim males aged between fifteen and sixty years; see Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). The number of head-tax payers was approximately one-third of the population; see Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade, and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 30. For population growth in that era, see Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 7. Palairet also provided the most important account for explaining the emergence of Balkan protoindustries through upland migration. For example, see Palairet, Balkan Economies, 38–51. See also Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 340; John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Hoffman, ‘Transformation of Rural Settlement in Bulgaria’, 54. 31. As a matter of fact, one should use income data with extreme care; these levels are based on self-claims and naturally there is a very strong bias to understate the actual level of earnings. Nevertheless, this bias does not undermine the income data for relational and comparative purposes. 32. To compare, the average annual income per household was 432 gurus¸ in Samakov, 452 gurus¸ in Tatarpazarcığı, 553 gurus¸ in Balıkesir, 954 gurus¸ in Güzelhisar-ı Aydın and 271 gurus¸ in Erzurum. See Kayako Hayashi, ‘The Ottoman Temettuat Registers: Significant Results from a Failed Venture’, in Hayashi and Aydın, The Ottoman State and Societies, 211–28.

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33. For a detailed analysis of agriculture, stockbreeding and the landholding regime in Karlova, Kalofer and Sopot in 1845, see Fatma Öncel, ‘Explaining the Basics of ProtoIndustrialization in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Bulgaria’, in New Trends in Ottoman Studies: Papers Presented at the 20th CIÉPO Symposium, Rethymno, 27 June–1 July 2012, ed. Marinos Sariyannis et al. (Rethymno: University of Crete – Department of History and Archaeology; Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Institute for Mediterranean Studies, 2014), 99–110. 34. For some examples on the world-scale activities of beratlı Plovdiv merchants, see BOA. HAT. 1445–59407, 29/Z/1249; BOA. C. İKTS. 20–972, 27/B/1250; BOA. C. İKTS. 27–1315, 29/Ca/1256. 35. Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 100. 36. Mendels, ‘Proto Industrialization’, 242. 37. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Declines and Revivals in Textile Production’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 356–75. 38. Share of textile-related incomes in total annual incomes of textile producers in 1845: 82.9 per cent for Karlova Muslims, 87.7 per cent for Karlova non-Muslims, 85.3 per cent for Kalofer and 83.1 per cent for Sopot. 39. Share of agrarian incomes in total annual incomes of textile producers in 1845: 9.2 per cent for Karlova Muslims, 2.5 per cent for Karlova non-Muslims, 4.5 per cent for Kalofer and 12.2 per cent for Sopot. 40. Share of textile producer households subsisting only on textiles within all textile producer households: 20 per cent of Karlova Muslims, 59.8 per cent of Karlova non-Muslims, 31.4 per cent of Kalofer and 40.4 per cent of Sopot. 41. Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 69. 42. Todorov, The Balkan City, 209. 43. Ibid., 70. 44. Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009) and Faroqhi, ‘Declines and Revivals’, 363. 45. Halime Kozlubel Doğru, 1844 Nüfus Sayımına Göre Deliorman ve Dobruca’nın Demografik, Sosyal ve Ekonomik Durumu (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2011). 46. Abdülkadir Bulus¸, ‘Osmanlı Tekstil Sanayii Hereke Fabrikası’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Istanbul University, 2000). 47. İlber Ortaylı, Tanzimat Devrinde Osmanlı Mahalli İdareleri (1840–1880) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000). 48. Blanqui was a French economist who undertook the official duty of reporting the causes of the Nish Revolt (1841) by visiting Ottoman Europe. For further information, see Engin Deniz Tanır, ‘The Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Bulgaria from the Viewpoints of French Travellers’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Middle East Technical University, 2005). 49. Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, Voyage en Bulgarie pendant l’année 1841 (Paris: W. Coquebert, 1845). 50. Todorov, The Balkan City, 210. 51. Doğru, Deliorman ve Dobruca’nın Demografik, Sosyal ve Ekonomik Durumu, 122. 52. Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 70. 53. Todorov, The Balkan City, 210. 54. Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 143. 55. Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 69. 56. Doğru, Deliorman ve Dobruca’nın Demografik, Sosyal ve Ekonomik Durumu, 95. 57. Onur Yıldırım, ‘Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era’, in ‘The Return of the Guilds’, ed. Jan Lucassen et al., supplement, International Review of Social History 53(S16) (2008), 73–93. 58. Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 52.

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59. Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing, 8. 60. Todorov, The Balkan City, 227. 61. Nikolai Todorov, ‘19. cu Yüzyılın İlk Yarısında Bulgaristan Esnaf Tes¸kilatında Bazı Karakter Değis¸meleri’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 27(1–2) (1967–68), 1–36. 62. Todorov, The Balkan City, 226. 63. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 165. 64. Among a number of studies regarding the Gümüs¸gerdans, an industrialist family, for important examples available in English see Todorov, The Balkan City, 238–76, and Neriman Ersoy-Hacısalihoğlu, ‘Textile Trade in Bulgaria in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and the Gümüs¸gerdan Family’, in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi, ed. Vera Costantini and Markus Koller (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 181–200. 65. Blanqui, Voyage en Bulgarie, 234–35. 66. Tanır, ‘The Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Bulgaria’, 131. 67. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Foreign Office Records (hereafter F.O.) 83/337, 1870. ‘Handicrafts here nominally organized in guilds … There is no restrictions with regard to wages, hours of work, terms of contract, or any other particular connected with labor of business … Every man has full liberty to act as he likes in the disposal of his labor and to make the best conditions he can himself’. (I wish to thank M. Erdem Kabadayı for sharing with me the documents he received from the National Archives of the United Kingdom and allowing me to make use of his notes on these documents.) 68. Ianeva, ‘Samokov’, 49. 69. Based on the calculations for this study, the estimated annual income of an average textile household was 1,053 gurus¸, whereas for a household with a shop it was 1,712 gurus¸. 70. In addition, there could also be masters without a shop. 71. This estimation includes only the journeymen and apprentices who headed a household. The number of journeymen and apprentices among family members, if any, is not included since it is unknown. Thus, the result may be higher if there was more than one journeyman/apprentice per household. 72. Hans Medick, ‘The Proto-Industrial Family Economy’, in Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization, 38–73. 73. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, 83. 74. Maria N. Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern (Washington, DC: The American University Press, 1993). 75. This type of income was noted in the total income of the household as, for instance, ‘1,000 gurus¸ from his brother’s aba production’ (kardes¸inin abacılıg˘ından 1000 gurus¸). 76. This form of proto-industrial manufacturing is called Kaufsystem. See Jürgen Schlumbohm, ‘Relations of Production – Productive Forces – Crises in Proto-Industrialization’, in Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization, 94–125. 77. This form of proto-industrial manufacturing is called Verlagsystem. See Schlumbohm, ‘Relations of Production’, 101–102. 78. The annual average income for a household with a gaytan wheel was 1,226.9 gurus¸ and the annual average income for a textile producer household was 1,153.6 gurus¸. 79. The annual average income was 1,771.5 gurus¸ for the seven households with aba looms in their houses. 80. Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800– 1914’, in Women in Middle Eastern History, ed. Nikki R. Keddie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 161–76. 81. Todorov, The Balkan City, 228. 82. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 187. 83. F.O. 83/337, 1870.

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84. Out of 1,292 textile manufacturer households, the heads of 802 households were occupied with at least two economic activities. 85. Quataert, ‘Ottoman Women’, 162. 86. Yeorgios Kiutuçkas, ‘1878’e Kadar İstanbul’daki Bulgar Cemaati’, in 19. Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Gayrimüslimler, ed. Pinelopi Stathis (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2003), 36–51.

Bibliography Acaroğlu, M. Türker. Bulgaristan’da Türkçe Yer Adları Kılavuzu. Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1988. Aydın, Mahir. ‘Tatarpazarcığı: Socio-Economic Condition of Muslim Urban Residents’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydın, 77–106. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain. London: Routledge, 1994. Berg, Maxine, and Pat Hudson. Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Blanqui, Jérôme-Adolphe. Voyage en Bulgarie pendant l’année 1841. Paris: W. Coquebert, 1845. Bruman, Henry J. ‘The Bulgarian Rose Industry’. Economic Geography 12(3) (1936), 273–78. Bulus¸, Abdülkadir. ‘Osmanlı Tekstil Sanayii Hereke Fabrikası’. Ph.D. dissertation, Istanbul University, 2000. Clarkson, Leslie A. Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of Industrialization? Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985. Coleman, D.C. ‘Proto-Industrialization: A Concept Too Many’. The Economic History Review 36(3) (1983), 435–48. Doğru, Halime Kozlubel. 1844 Nüfus Sayımına Göre Deliorman ve Dobruca’nın Demografik, Sosyal ve Ekonomik Durumu. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2011. Ersoy, Neriman. ‘XIX. Yüzyılda Filibe S¸ehri’. Ph.D. dissertation, Istanbul University, 2003. Ersoy-Hacısalihoğlu, Neriman. ‘Textile Trade in Bulgaria in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and the Gümüs¸gerdan Family’, in Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi, edited by Vera Costantini and Markus Koller, 181–200. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Faroqhi, Suraiya. ‘Ra’iyya’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 8, 404–6. Leiden: Brill, 1995.  . ‘Declines and Revivals in Textile Production’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi, 356–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.  . Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Gavrilova, Raina. Bulgarian Urban Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999. Güran, Tevfik. 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar. Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1998.  . ‘19. Yüzyıl Temettuat Tahrirleri’, in Osmanlı Devleti’nde Bilgi ve İstatistik, edited by Halil İnalcık and S¸evket Pamuk, 73–94. Ankara: Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 2000.  . ‘Introduction: Temettuat Registers as a Resource about Ottoman Social and Economic Life’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century

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Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydın, 3–14. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. Hayashi, Kayako. ‘The Ottoman Temettuat Registers: Significant Results from a Failed Venture’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydın, 211–28. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. Hoffman, George. ‘Transformation of Rural Settlement in Bulgaria’. Geographical Review 54(1) (1964), 45–64. Ianeva, Svetla. ‘Samokov: An Ottoman Balkan City in the Age of Reform’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydın, 47–76. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. İslamoğlu, Huri. ‘Politics of Administering Property: Law and Statistics in the NineteenthCentury Ottoman Empire’, in Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West, edited by Huri İslamoğlu, 276–319. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. İslamoğlu-İnan, Huri. ‘Oriental Despotism in World System Perspective’, in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, edited by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1987. Karpat, Kemal. Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Kayoko, Hayashi, and Mahir Aydın. The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers. Islamic Area Studies 5. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. Kiutuçkas, Yeorgios. ‘1878’e Kadar İstanbul’daki Bulgar Cemaati’, in 19. Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Gayrimüslimler, edited by Pinelopi Stathis, 36–51. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2003. Kriedte, Peter, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, eds. Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lampe, John R., and Marvin R. Jackson. Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Mazower, Mark. The Balkans: A Short History. New York: Modern Library, 2000. McGowan, Bruce. Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade, and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Medick, Hans. ‘The Proto-Industrial Family Economy’, in Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, edited by Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, 38–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Mendels, Franklin F. ‘Proto Industrialization: The First Phase of Industrialization Process’. The Journal of Economic History 32(1) (1972), 241–61. Ogilvie, Sheilagh, and Markus Cerman, eds. European Proto-Industrialization: An Introductory Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Öncel, Fatma. ‘Explaining the Basics of Proto-Industrialization in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Bulgaria’, in New Trends in Ottoman Studies: Papers Presented at the 20th CIÉPO Symposium, Rethymno, 27 June–1 July 2012, edited by Marinos Sariyannis et al., 99–110. Rethymno: University of Crete – Department of History and Archaeology; Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Institute for Mediterranean Studies, 2014. Önsoy, Rıfat. Tanzimat Dönemi Osmanlı Sanayii ve Sanayiles¸me Politikası. Ankara: Türkiye İl Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1988. Ortaylı, İlber. Tanzimat Devrinde Osmanlı Mahalli İdareleri (1840–1880). Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000. Owen, Roger. The Middle East in the World Economy. London: Methuen, 1987.

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Öztürk, Said. ‘Türkiye’de Temettuat Çalıs¸maları’. Türkiye Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 1 (2003), 287–304. Palairet, Michael. The Balkan Economies, c.1800–1914: Evolution without Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pamuk, S¸evket, and Jeffrey G. Williamson. ‘Ottoman De-Industrialization, 1800–1913: Assessing the Magnitude, Impact and Response’. The Economic History Review 64(S1) (2011), 159–84. Petmezas, Socrates D. ‘Patterns of Protoindustrialisation in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern Thessaly, c. 1750–1860’. The Journal of European Economic History 19(1) (1990), 575–603.  . ‘Bridging the Gap: Rural Macedonia from Ottoman to Greek Rule, 1900–1920’, in Economy and Society on Both Shores of the Aegean, edited by Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Vangelis Kechriotis, 355–95. Athens: Alpha Bank, 2010. Quataert, Donald. ‘Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800–1914’, in Women in Middle Eastern History, edited by Nikki R. Keddie, 161–76. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.  . Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  . ‘Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes towards the Notion of “Decline”’. History Compass 1(1) (2003), 1–9.  . ‘Proto-Industrialization and Industrialization and “Modernity” in a Global Perspective’, in  The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000, edited by Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, 577–95. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Sarç, Ömer Celal. ‘Tanzimat ve Sanayiimiz’, in Tanzimat: Yüzüncü Yıldönümü Münasebetile, 423–40. Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1940. Schlumbohm, Jürgen. ‘Relations of Production – Productive Forces – Crises in ProtoIndustrialization’, in Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, edited by Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, 94–125. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Shaw, Stanford J. ‘The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Tax Reforms and Revenue System’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 6(4) (1975), 421–59. Stoianovich, Traian. Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. Tanır, Engin Deniz. ‘The Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Bulgaria from the Viewpoints of French Travellers’. Ph.D. dissertation, Middle East Technical University, 2005. Todorov, Nikolai. ‘19. cu Yüzyılın İlk Yarısında Bulgaristan Esnaf Tes¸kilatında Bazı Karakter Değis¸meleri’. İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 27(1–2) (1967–68), 1–36.  . The Balkan City 1400–1900. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983. Todorov, Nikolai, Lubomir Dinev, and Luben Melnichki. Bulgarie: Aperçu Historique et Geographique. Sofia: Sofia Presse, 1969. Todorova, Maria N. Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern. Washington, DC: The American University Press, 1993. van Leeuwen, Marco H.D., Ineke Mass and Andrew Miles. HISCO Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. 3 vols. New York: Academic Press, 1974/1980/1989. Yıldırım, Onur. ‘Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era’, in ‘The Return of the Guilds’, edited by Jan Lucassen et al., supplement, International Review of Social History 53(S16) (2008), 73–93.

Chapter 5

Ethno-religious Division of Labour in Urban Economies of the Ottoman Empire in the Nineteenth Century M. Erdem Kabadayı and Murat Güvenç

Ottoman economic history has unfortunately tended to merit its reputation as a field of academic inquiry that is data-poor but opinion-rich. Undeniably, throughout the twentieth century there have been institutional and political barriers to accessing data sources related to the socioeconomic lives of Ottoman subjects, and consequent historiographical limitations to conducting analyses that transcend the narrow confines of case studies. Starting from the 1990s, however, we have observed a sea change, principally regarding the ever-increasing availability of archival documents and the accelerating digitization of sources at the central archival location, the State Archives of the Prime Ministry of the Republic of Turkey (Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Osmanlı Ars¸ivi; BOA), in Istanbul. Slowly but surely we are now moving from an era that is data-poor to one that is data-rich, yet the new abundance of archival sources has not yet triggered the extensive, well-focused, longitudinal or cross-regional studies in Ottoman historiography for which we may eventually hope. And in this chapter, too, we focus on a single instant, the year 1844/45. The year 1844/45 marks the Ottoman state’s first and – at least in terms of design and ambition – final empire-wide household-based tax survey, within which the occupations of male household breadwinners were registered to a degree of coverage, detail and reliability that was

Ethno-religious Division of Labour 205

hitherto unseen. This tax survey, the temettuat registers, has been available for research since the mid 1990s,1 but has never been the subject of extensive comparative studies going beyond one or a few locations. Although our narrow and selective data extraction strategy, focusing mainly on ethno-religious affiliations and occupational descriptors, does not permit us to conduct an analysis of the historical economic geography, not even for our chosen regions of the Ottoman Empire, we are convinced that the unprecedented size of our sample as well as the dataset we have created enables us to comment more broadly on the role of the ethno-religious affiliations of Ottoman townsmen for the urban economies in the mid nineteenth century. This unprecedented volume of data on the urban occupational structure of the mid nineteenth century creates new methodological challenges. Most notably, the occupational data extracted from the individual occupational descriptors in the temettuat are categorical, not numerical or ordinal, which necessitates developing new techniques in accord with the methodologies of digital history for data modelling and analysis. In this study we employ cluster analysis using entropy and dissimilarity indices and signed chi scores to assess the over- and under-representation of certain ethno-religious groups or occupational categories.

Ethno-religious Division of Labour Argument in Ottoman Historiography The assumption that ethnicity and religion, or, in the absence of a better definition, the ethno-religious affiliations of Ottoman subjects, played significant roles concerning the economic opportunities and occupational choices of Ottomans has been agenda-setting both for the historiography of the Ottoman Empire as well as for its successor states, which defined themselves specifically as nation-states in contrast to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multilingual Ottoman polity. In this study, with some minor modifications, we use the main categories of the millet system, that is, Muslim (M), Orthodox-Christian (OC) (rum),2 Armenian (A),3 Jewish (J) and Roma/Sinti (R/S) (kıptiyan), in the order of their shares in the entire population of the empire by the mid nineteenth century. Although today there is a sizeable literature on the millet system,4 it is still far from being fully explanatory on the topic of the ethno-religious division of labour. There is not even agreement concerning how long and with what functionality such a system existed. Konortas makes a convincing argument that a nineteenth-century administrative practice has been back-projected to earlier periods.5 The

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claim that it was a system which the Ottoman state operated on several layers across the entire empire, over a span of centuries, has still not been substantiated to a generally accepted degree. Therefore, without spatiotemporal specifications it is quite difficult to reach conclusions about the historicity of the millet system. The argument that there was an ethno-religious division of labour in the Ottoman historiography is a by-product of the assumption of a fully fledged, functional and empire-wide millet system. For decades, a crude formulation of the notion that there was an ethnic and religious division of labour has been distorting our understanding of Ottoman economic and social history. This view has its roots in the travelogues and consular reports on the Ottoman Empire, mainly written by Europeans, that have emerged over the centuries. These external observers introduced and then strengthened the unrealistic notion that the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire where mainly tillers of the soil, while non-Muslim communities were engaged in various trades. This abstract and oversimplified account of the religious division of labour even envisaged a further inter-religious and inter-confessional division of labour among non-Muslim communities. It has generally been assumed that the Orthodox Christians constituted the bulk of merchants and traders, Armenians were the artisans, and Jews the moneylenders of the Ottoman Empire. These unrealistic and misleading views were mainly unsystematic by-products of a mindset characteristic of the nineteenth century, a period in which numerous nation-states emerged in the Ottoman territories and elsewhere. The newly emerging nation-states were born without national histories. Driven by the urge to furnish these nations with national histories, ethnicity and religion were units of division used for larger political entities, such as the Ottoman Empire, and as forced homogenizers for the successor states. Particularly in the Balkans during the second half of the nineteenth century, these constructs of ethnicity as exclusionary unifiers were operative for making as well as writing history. Although the term ‘ethnic division of labour’ had not yet been coined, this perspective can be found in Ottoman economic historiography as early as 1917.6 Kırlı also provides a brief discussion of the development and effects of the concept of the ethnic division of labour in Ottoman history writing, and successfully challenges the notion’s validity based on an Ottoman survey of esnaf in Istanbul from the turn of the nineteenth century. This undated register from the Ottoman State Archives in Istanbul (Bas¸muhasebe-DBS¸M, 42648) lists 1,859 commercial shops, workshops and gardens in various locations around the Golden Horn (particularly Eyüp and Hasköy regions) and the west side of the Bosporus, giving names and titles of artisans, shopkeepers and

Ethno-religious Division of Labour 207

employees in these locations and of boatmen and porters working at these piers, as well as water-carriers and freelance carpenters in these districts. In his detailed study based on this survey, Kırlı claims that regional allegiances were crucially important in determining the immigration patterns of artisans into Istanbul and these patterns were equally important in determining the ethno-religious characteristics of shop ownership, occupational specialization and labour relations in Istanbul.7 Kırlı’s work from 2001, although limited to Istanbul shop ownership, still stands out in the literature as the work with the largest scope and dataset to test the ethno-religious division of labour argument. In our previous work, we also worked on testing the role of ethnicity and religion in the working lives of Ottoman subjects. Our attempts focused on only one factory and did not yield any arguments generalizable for the rest of the empire.8 Several other publications have also suffered from similar scale and scope limitations.9 Unfortunately, therefore, Quataert’s claim from 2004 concerning textile production remains untested for other sectors and larger territories of the Ottoman Empire: it is an inaccurate stereotype to speak of an ethnic or religious division of labor. In the past, writers freely but inaccurately spoke about the inherent, nearly genetically-encoded propensity of certain groups for certain kinds of labor. In this so-called ethnic division of labor, Muslims were seen to be good soldiers and perhaps farmers while Christians of the different ethnicities were understood to be skilled artisans. Such gross characterizations belied the fascinating reality of the Ottoman workforce and, of interest here, the textile workers. While certain ethnic or religious groups did dominate certain forms of labor in particular regions, they did not do so for any industry in the empire as a whole.10

In the present chapter, drawing on data of an unprecedented level of representativeness and geographical coverage, we thus seek to assess the validity of the conventional assumptions regarding the role of religion and ethnicity for the occupational choices of urban Ottoman subjects in the mid nineteenth century.

Sources and the Dataset For the purposes of this exercise we are extracting occupational data from one the most suitable sources for the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. We begin by noting the nature and limitations of the dataset and the scope of our analysis.11 Secondly, we elaborate the way in which we have extracted the occupational data from it. Thirdly and lastly, we

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explain the method and tools with which we have coded the individual occupational descriptors and ethno-religious affiliations emerging from our source material. Our data are extracted from a tax survey (temettuat) that was virtually empire-wide, undertaken in 1844/45.12 Although our source is unparalleled, our data do have limitations. First and foremost, the temettuat only registers the occupations of male breadwinners, and is entirely silent about the occupations and work of females and the household division of labour.13 Secondly, the temettuat does not include Istanbul: this deficiency is due to the fact that Istanbul was exempted from the direct and individual income tax, which the Ottoman administration wanted, and yet failed, to introduce as one of the financial backbones of the midnineteenth-century administrative reforms, the Tanzimat.14 In general, Istanbul has an over-representation in Ottoman studies due to the relative abundance of available archival documentation. However, due to the unique economic positioning of the Ottoman capital compared to other urban centres, this over-representation can also be misleading. Istanbul is surely one of the least representative urban settings of all the Ottoman towns: we are hopeful, therefore, that with our sizeable sample of urban locations, even lacking Istanbul, we will be able to comment on the role of ethno-religious affiliations in the occupational choices of Ottoman urban dwellers in mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman towns. The Tanzimat reforms were initiated and implemented to varying degrees over a vast geography encompassing the Balkans and Anatolia. The approximate geographical coverage of these reforms, which also roughly delineates the area of the available temettuat, can be seen in Map 5.1. As the dashed line on the map demonstrates, the central administration of the Ottoman polity in the 1840s was not able to extract the desired economic information on the income levels of its subjects residing on the Black Sea coast and in south-east Anatolia. Although not clearly visible on the map, parts of the Bosnian and Albanian lands are also not covered. The geographical coverage of the temettuat clearly hints at the limitations faced by the Ottoman central administration in extracting the information needed to design its economic policies. In this chapter we will not extrapolate on this point. However, one important aspect regarding the temettuat and the capabilities of the Ottoman central state has to be mentioned here. To our understanding, the Ottoman state of the mid nineteenth century tried yet failed to keep up with the emerging field of statistics in the period. The 1841 census is considered to be the first modern population census in the United Kingdom. Starting from the second census in 1851, the British state registered occupational data

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in detail with decadal censuses. Adolphe Quetelet was the leading force behind the emerging statistical activity in Belgium and in other European states. In Belgium, the first census was taken in 1846 with an accompanying agricultural and industrial census, and the first international statistical conference was held in Brussels in 1853 under the chairmanship of Quetelet.15 The Ottoman state was no different in its ambition to collect the demographic and economic data needed to design its policies. However, its bureaucratic and statistical capabilities were insufficiently developed to match that ambition. The first and most extensive attempt by the Ottoman state to gather information on income-yielding assets per household, the temettuat, therefore resulted in a vast collection of unused data. The archival collection of these registers at the BOA (ML.VRD.TMT.d) comprises around twenty thousand registers. In our understanding, backed by the most recent literature on Ottoman taxation,16 the Ottoman state was overwhelmed by the quantum of data it gathered. The temettuat from the 1840s remained effectively unused until they were made accessible for research in the 1990s. The registers enumerate the income-yielding assets in number and value per household based on self-claims. The fact that future taxation was intended to be based upon these claims, and that the temettuat survey was conducted only once, sheds a huge shadow of under-registration –

Map 5.1 Locations in the 1845 temettuat dataset. Created by Piet Gerrits, used with permission.

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and in some cases non-registration – of households’ income sources. Due to this healthy scepticism concerning their reliability, temettuat are notorious in the historiography of the Ottoman economic history.17 We argue, however, that the registered occupational descriptors of the male members in the households covered by the temettuat are nevertheless reliable occupational data specifically for an analysis of the ethno-religious division of labour in the late Ottoman Empire. Still, two issues must be addressed: representative coverage of towns’ populaces, and the limitation of having only occupational information concerning males with income sources.

Representativeness of the Dataset There is an important question concerning whether the temettuat available for our chosen locations cover representative samples of the urban populace. For another study, mentioned above, focusing on the three cities of Ankara, Bursa and Salonica, we used temettuat to compare and contrast the occupational structures of three towns as a whole. In that respect, the coverage was crucially important. We therefore used contemporaneous Ottoman population registers for the same cities to assess whether the towns’ populations were represented in the temettuat to the necessary degree. Our positive evaluation of the urban coverage of the temettuat for those three towns strengthened our confidence in them.18 For the purposes of this analysis, however, our primary goal is to extract reliable occupational data for the maximum number of observations, not for individual locations but for an urban sample for the regions of the Ottoman Empire covered by the temettuat. In other words, our aim is to determine the interactions, correlations or causation between ethnoreligious affiliations and occupations not of urban dwellers in individual towns, but rather for a representative sub-set of Ottoman subjects living mainly in urban locations. Therefore, instead of testing the coverage of the temettuat as a percentage of towns’ populaces and establishing a threshold and discarding the registers that cannot pass it, we opted for the strategy of including all locations for which we have an approximately representative set of observations in parallel to the relative share of ethno-religious communities in situ. Before listing the locations for which we do not have representative observations, we should first explain why Izmir and Kayseri are not included in our dataset. Although the 1845 tax survey was conducted in Izmir, most of the registers did not survive;19 and although Kayseri is another urban centre for which we do have temettuat, we did not include it in our dataset due to the unreliable occupational data the registers convey.

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It is difficult to acquire reliable figures for the populations of midnineteenth-century Ottoman towns or their composition. The Ottoman population registers, which were conducted mainly between the late 1830s and the 1860s and registered only males, began to be made accessible at the BOA (the collection: NFS.d.) only in 2011. There are now more than ten thousand individual population registers available in this collection. However, these registers are not grouped into the units of the Ottoman political administration. Therefore, it is not possible to look for districts (sancak) or sub-districts (kaza) and control the data availability and completeness for these administrative units. For the same reason, it is also cumbersome to look for population registers for individual towns, since for most cases ethno-religious communities were counted in separate registers using neighbourhoods as a unit of entry in towns. Even after locating the population registers for chosen towns, one has to go through individual registers and even occasionally count households and males manually, since not all of the registers give total numbers per neighbourhood. The fact is that neither the Ottoman administration in the nineteenth century nor the state archives or researchers in the twentieth and twenty-first century tabulated or aggregated the data conveyed in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman population registers, and we simply do not know the total population of Ottoman towns or their ethno-religious composition. It is only possible to make use of aggregated data published in the provincial statistical yearbooks (Vilayet Salnameleri) starting from the 1870s. Based upon the figures provided in these yearbooks, one can roughly estimate the ethno-religious composition of Ottoman towns and sub-districts for the 1840s. The reason why we dare venture a very rough back-projection of demographic data as proportions of ethno-religious communities from the 1870s, for which we have aggregate figures, to the 1840s, is the fact that the 1870s precedes the major waves of migration caused by territorial losses in the Balkans and the Caucasia. In this respect, we have assessed the representativeness of our data samples regarding the ethno-religious composition of town populations in our dataset. The sixteen towns qualified as representative regarding the ethno-religious diversity are as follows: Ankara (An), Bitola (Bi), Bursa (Bu), Erzurum (Er), Konya (Ko), Kütahya (Kü), Manisa (Ma), Niš (Ni), Plovdiv (Pl), Ruse (Ru), Salonica (Sa), Sivas (Si), Tokat (To), Turgutlu (Tu), Vidin (Vi) and Vranje (Vr). These are listed in Appendix 5.1 with the breakdowns of observations into ethno-religious affiliations in real numbers and percentages.20 We stress that the ethno-religious compositions of the populations of the above towns do not necessarily reflect actual distributions, yet neither do they omit problematically large shares of ethno-religious

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communities either. The distribution of total observations in the sixteen towns according to ethno-religious distribution is shown in Table 5.1. In this respect, we are confident that they constitute a representative set of urban observations. In the following section, we explain and assess the coverage of occupational titles and aspects of our data.

Occupational Titles as Proxies for Employment and Division of Labour Working with occupational titles and/or descriptors is a well-established methodology in historical research. In economic history, especially for the pre-census era, occupational titles are useful proxies for employment, although their use is not without controversy.21 Nevertheless, for the purposes of testing the validity of the ethno-religious division of labour argument, they are the most useful descriptors available. One important source-specific caveat should still be addressed: the temettuat list only the occupations of males with registered income sources, and this registration practice surely hides the details of the household division of labour.22 However, since Ottoman households were to an overwhelming extent mono-ethno-religious, the listed occupations of males in households comprise the best dataset hitherto available with which to conduct our analysis. The temettuat provide us with a rare opportunity to work with microlevel, unencoded, uncategorized occupational descriptors. Yet this opportunity, based upon occupational variation among 51,401 observations in our dataset, also raises the challenge of working with such rich occupational data. The solution to this complexity is to code individual Ottoman occupational descriptors into an occupational coding scheme which can accommodate the occupational diversity and aggregate Table 5.1 The distribution of total observations in sixteen locations according to ethnoreligious affiliations.

Observations in ethnoreligious categories

Count according to ethno-religious characteristics

In percentages

Armenian

6,087

11.8%

Jewish

3,172

6.2%

Muslim

31,892

62.0%

9,945

19.3%

Roma/Sinti

305

0.6%

Grand total

51,401

100.0%

Orthodox Christian

Ethno-religious Division of Labour 213

Ottoman occupations to a level of operational categorical resolution. There are two occupational coding schemes with international usage: HISCO and PST. The very useful and widely used HISCO scheme23 is based mainly on the 1968 International Standard Classification of Occupations developed by the International Labour Organization, and its main logic of classification is a skill-based one. The other coding scheme – which for our purposes is more suitable – is the PST developed by E.A. Wrigley at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop),24 and updated and further developed to accommodate international comparisons (PSTI-International) by Leigh Shaw-Taylor, the current director of Campop, for the purposes of the project International Comparative Work on Occupational Structure and Population Geography.25

Benefits of Coding Ottoman Occupational Descriptors into the PST for the Purposes of Ottoman Historiography Although initially designed for the detailed examination of structural and occupational change in the economy of nineteenth-century England,26 the PST is also extremely useful for comparing the occupational structures of national economies as well as studying regional differences in occupational structures within national economies. In addition to these advantages for comparisons, the PST also has the property of grouping different-sounding occupational descriptors into the same occupational category, if they belong to it. For example, abacı, çuhacı, çulha, ¸sallici and keçeci are all occupational descriptors for a wool fabric maker; all these variations are therefore coded into the category of wool fabric maker. In doing so, regional variations of occupational descriptors can also be handled and coded correctly. This very elaborate occupational coding scheme reveals its full capacity in the face of entirely unencoded and maximally detailed micro-level occupational descriptors; we may then code the descriptors into the PST according to its four levels: sector, group, section and occupation. The PST can be used as a bottom-up as well as a top-down coding scheme. The agglomerative, bottom-up approach can be exemplified by starting with an individual occupation such as ‘wool weaver/fabric maker (abacı)’, then assimilating this into the section of ‘wool manufacture’, and then into the group of ‘textiles’ and finally into the ‘secondary’ sector. In Table 5.2 we offer further examples of this four-level coding of the Ottoman occupational descriptors extracted from the temettuat, moving from single occupations up to economic sectors.

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Table 5.2 Examples of bottom-up four-level coding with the PST system.

Meslek/ Occupational Descriptor

Sector

Group

abacı

SECONDARY

Textiles

ag˘nam çobanı

PRIMARY

Agriculture

ayakkabı dikicisi

SECONDARY

Footwear

badanacı

SECONDARY

Building and construction

bakırcı

SECONDARY

berber

TERTIARY services and professions

Non-ferrous metal manufacture and products Miscellaneous service industries

Section

Occupation

Wool manufacture Animal husbandry Boots and shoes

Wool fabric maker Sheep husbandry Shoemaker, bootmaker Plasterer, painter, decorator, other

Plasterer, painter, decorator Copper industries

Copper production and processing

Personal services

Hairdressing

Table 5.3 Examples of top-down two-level coding with the PST system.

Meslek/ Occupational Descriptor

Sector

Group

arabacı

Transport and communications

hayvan tüccarı

TERTIARY dealers

kök boya tüccarı

TERTIARY dealers

kuyumcu

SECONDARY

nakliyeci

Transport and communications

Road transport (animal power) Dealers in live animals Dealers in chemicals and chemical products Precious metals and jewellery Road transport (animal power)

Section Occupation

Ethno-religious Division of Labour 215

Table 5.4 Distribution of observations with unspecified groups into PST sectors.

Sectors

Observations

Primary unspecified

6

Secondary unspecified

135

Tertiary dealers unspecified

1,619

Tertiary sellers unspecified

48

Tertiary services and professions unspecified

40

Transport unspecified

1,098

Total

2,946

In several cases, however, the Ottoman occupational descriptors extracted from temettuat do not convey the necessary information to assign them a category in the first level of coding from below, occupation. Table 5.3 provides some examples. In these and similar cases we used a top-down coding approach, assigning first the sector and then the group to those occupations. In doing so, and using both approaches, we were able to code almost all of our occupational descriptors for our observations (94 per cent: 48,455 out of 51,401). For the remaining 2,946 observations’ occupational descriptors we were able to assign the respective sectors (see Table 5.4). At the end of the coding process we have a dataset of a total of 51,401 observations in sixteen locations, coded into eighty-eight categories of sectors and groups, along with the ethno-religious affiliations, as listed in alphabetical order in Appendix 5.2. This contingency table is the first iteration result of our efforts to collect, edit and curate27 data from the temettuat. In the following section we present the second (clustering) and third iterations (signed chi score analysis) of our examination.

Methodology and Analysis Clustering Before testing the ethno-religious division of labour hypothesis using our dataset, we cluster our sixteen locations with their respective shares of the total 51,401 observations with occupational descriptors according to the levels of occupational diversity or specialization. Since we seek to assess the role of ethno-religious affiliation in occupational choices,

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and since we have a large number of observations in sixteen different locations, as a first step we cluster those sixteen locations according to their entropy or dissimilarity of occupational diversification. Entropy or dissimilarity indices, such as the well-known Shannon’s entropy, are used regularly in economics, cartography, plant sciences and ecology.28 To the best of our knowledge, these indices have not been employed in Ottoman studies, and one of the reasons for this may be that in Ottoman studies the total numbers of observations available in individual studies are so low that the use of such a tool is barely warranted. For our analysis, however, it is necessary to group our locations according to dissimilarity of occupational diversification or specialization, and we therefore cross-tabulated our entire observations in sixteen locations grouped into eighty-eight PST sector and group categories (see Appendix 5.3), and then calculated the Shannon entropy values of the represented occupations grouped into PST sectors and groups for those sixteen locations. Table 5.5 Shannon’s entropy for locations and clusters.

Locations

Shannon’s entropy

Clusters created by Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC)

Bursa

14.51

2

Salonica

13.80

2

Plovdiv

12.03

2

Erzurum

10.51

1

Ruse

10.34

1

Sivas

10.30

1

Kütahya

9.89

1

Ankara

9.58

1

Manisa

9.06

1

Vidin

8.14

1

Konya

8.00

1

Bitola

7.88

1

Tokat

6.16

1

Niš

3.00

3

Turgutlu

2.77

3

Vranje

2.60

3

Ethno-religious Division of Labour 217

The higher the Shannon’s entropy value, the higher the level of occupational diversification in a given location. In this respect, Bursa shows the highest level of diversification in occupations, while Vranje, closely followed by Turgutlu, shows the lowest level, that is, the highest level of specialization of occupations. It is not surprising that occupations registered in Bursa have the highest degree of dissimilarity and diversification, since Bursa was a centre for industrial production and administrative functions, and hence had a diverse urban economy. Vranje and Turgutlu, on the other hand, were central points for mainly agricultural economies and it is to be expected that the registered occupations in these locations have a lower level of diversification, being specialized to a higher extent. Due to the very high variations in occupational diversity between locations, as a first step in our analysis we group the locations into clusters according to their entropy values. Instead of imposing our self-made thresholds and forcing our locations into categories or ranks of occupational diversity, we have employed an unsupervised method for clustering our dataset. Clustering or clustering analysis is a huge field of data analysis with proliferating applications in social sciences. By way of a brief explanation of why we employ this step, we borrow a recent definition of clustering for the social sciences from Fonseca: Clustering seeks to identify a finite set of clusters to describe data and cluster analysis is a collection of statistical methods that groups similar objects into homogeneous groups (or clusters). Cluster analytic methods have the ability to rearrange the data, so researchers are more aware of pattern recognition and discovery.29

For present purposes we employ a version of Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA), whose use in the social sciences Fonseca admirably explains. This tool is Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC), which is a bottom-up method that is more suitable for clustering our occupational descriptors as coded into PST sectors and groups.30 We used AHC to create three distinct clusters, and to allocate our sixteen locations into these three clusters according to their dissimilarity, as seen in Table 5.5. Observations in Cluster 2 (Bursa, Plovdiv and Salonica) have the highest level of dissimilarity of occupations, and therefore the highest level of occupational diversification. Observations in Cluster 1, with ten locations listed above, have a relatively medium to high level of dissimilarity, and therefore a relatively medium to high level of occupational diversification. Lastly, observations in Cluster 3 (Niš, Turgutlu, Vranje) have the lowest level of dissimilarity, and therefore the highest level of occupational specialization. Based upon this unsupervised clustering

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method, in the following we assess the role of ethno-religious affiliations in the distribution of these observations for the total of eighty-eight PST2 (section) categories in three clusters using signed chi scores.

Test of Under- and Over-Representation of Ethno-religious Communities in Sectors and Groups in Three Clusters Before we comment on the contingency tables and signed chi score,31 note that the percentages and the numbers of observations should be seen as approximations and proxies for the organization of urban economic life in chosen locations. These figures do not reflect ratios of division of labour. They are merely hints and signifiers for over- and under-representation of certain ethno-religious groups in certain occupations in chosen locations and clusters. In the following we will not try to embed our results within the findings of Ottoman economic and social history for the chosen sixteen locations. Within the limited scope of this study, we seek only to highlight trends and tendencies for the urban and male populace of the empire and their occupational choices or obligations. Cluster 1 consists of the ten locations listed in Table 5.5 and shown on Map 5.1. These are predominantly Anatolian towns (7) with three towns from the Balkans. This cluster contains in total 33,227 observations. The observations in this cluster can be seen as a representative sample both for the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman urban occupational structure and for the ethno-religious composition of the Ottoman urban population. Table 5.6 Ethno-religious composition of three clusters in real numbers and in percentages.

A

J

M

OC

R/S

Total

Cluster 1

4,773

855

23,026

4,322

251

33,227

Cluster 2

1,268

2,277

6,687

4,533

54

14,819

Cluster 3

46

40

2,179

1,090

6,087

3,172

31,892

9,945

J

M

Total

A

OC

3,355 305 R/S

51,401 Total

Cluster 1

14.4%

2.6%

69.3%

13.0%

0.8%

100%

Cluster 2

8.6%

15.4%

45.1%

30.6%

0.4%

100%

Cluster 3

1.4%

1.2%

64.9%

32.5%

0.0%

100%

11.8%

6.2%

62.0%

19.3%

0.6%

100%

Total

Ethno-religious Division of Labour 219

We may begin by commenting on two PST groups within which Armenians are highly over-represented in Cluster 1. As can be seen in Table 5.6, Armenians constitute close to 15 per cent of Cluster 1. However, their very high and positive signed chi scores (SCS) in Clothing (16.81), and Textiles (11.06) clearly show that Armenians were highly over-represented in these three groups. The remarkably high figures of 47.1 per cent and 29 per cent of occupations in these two groups respectively are held by Armenians. Secondly, we highlight the PST group within which Jews are highly over-represented. Although less than 3 per cent of Cluster 1 is constituted by Jews, in the group Small traders Jews have a very high SCS (15.26) and constitute a staggering 25.6 per cent of this group within Cluster 1. Thirdly, Muslims, constituting almost 70 per cent of Cluster 1, held 88.1 per cent of occupations in Agriculture, with an SCS of 13.43. This high concentration is aligned with the general assumption that Muslims were engaged in agricultural activity to an extent exceeding their expected arithmetic share within this group. Although we must recall that the total number of occupations in Agriculture (4,286) within Cluster 1 is quite low, since not surprisingly they do not constitute a large share of occupations in urban locations, we can still affirm that Muslims have a near-monopoly on the occupations in this group. Similar to Armenians, although not as high as for them, Orthodox Christians have high SCS scores in Clothing (9.75) and Textiles (8.69), corresponding to 25.7 per cent and 21.1 per cent respectively although they constitute only 13 per cent of Cluster 1. Lastly, Roma/Sinti, constituting less than 1 per cent of Cluster 1, concentrate with extremely high SCSs in Iron and steel manufacture and products (28.45) and in Machines and tools, making and operation (10.92), corresponding to 6.6 per cent and 12.5 per cent of these groups within Cluster 1. One should be careful in interpreting the high concentrations of Roma/Sinti in these occupations, since several of them might have declared themselves as ironsmiths although they were not engaged in this profession as shop owners or in terms of other craftsmen relations, but as menders and repairers of metals. For Cluster 2 we follow the same order, athough before commenting on the concentrations of occupations and their corresponding ethnoreligious compositions, we should recall that Cluster 2, consisting of Bursa (the most industrialized town in the Ottoman Empire in the mid nineteenth century32), Salonica (the most developed centre of interregional maritime trade and the Jewish metropole of the Mediterranean) and Plovdiv (the most cosmopolitan and economically strong town of

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the Bulgarian lands), not surprisingly has a very high entropy of occupational diversity. This diversity is surely also an indicator of very active urban economies. Furthermore, as can also be discerned from its heavy weight (in total 14,819 observations in only three locations), these towns are the ones for which we have the highest number of observations in our dataset. Armenians in Cluster 2 have the highest SCSs in the very same PST groups as in Cluster 1, namely Clothing (14.89) and Textiles (10.66), furthermore in the same ordering. Although Armenians constitute only around 9 per cent of Cluster 2, their concentrations in Clothing and Textiles are 25.9 per cent (229 out of 885) and 8.2 per cent (168 out of 2,039) respectively. It is evident that Armenians had control of occupations within the group Clothing both in Cluster 1 and Cluster 2. Again in accord with Cluster 1, Jews in Cluster 2 have a very high over-representation in Small traders, with an SCS of 17.20 and a massive concentration therein (70.7 per cent, 471 out of 666) although they make up only around 15 per cent of Cluster 2 as a whole. The second group where Jews are concentrated with a high SCS (9.94) is Transport_ unspecified, these Jews being mostly porters (hamal); overall, 57.5 per cent (283 out of 492) of occupations in Transport_unspecified in Cluster 2 are Jewish, although they constitute a much lower share within Cluster 2. The third group where we can detect a heavy concentration of Jews is Sellers of food, with an SCS of 5.80, Jews constituting 26.9 per cent of these occupations (176 out of 655). With 45.1 per cent, Muslims again formed the majority in Cluster 2, albeit to a lesser extent than in Cluster 1. Yet with SCSs of 9.34 in Textiles, 6.78 in Agriculture and 5.94 in Industries using leather, bone etc., Muslims in this cluster showed different occupational concentrations. Orthodox Christians in Cluster 2, comprising 30.6 per cent of the sample overall, are highly specialized in Textiles with an SCS of 16.76 and 44.9 per cent of occupations in this group (915 out of 2,039). In Agriculture, with an SCS of 9.17 and 45.1 per cent of occupations (524 out of 1,161), they have a strong share, not far off the Muslims. Lastly, at only 0.4 per cent, Roma/Sinti make up an even smaller share of Cluster 2 than they do in Cluster 1. With their total number of fiftyfour, it is quite difficult to make comments on their occupational specializations, as they are an even more marginal group than in Cluster 1. Cluster 3 is the smallest, with 3,355 observations in three rather smallsized towns, Niš, Turgutlu and Vranje. The total number of observations from Niš is alarmingly low, at only 492, and this raises worries regarding the urban coverage of the data. However, we still wanted to include our observations from this location.

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Armenians again have the two highest SCSs in the same groups in the same order, Clothing (25.78) and Textiles (16.22), and although they make up only 1.4 per cent of the cluster overall, they constitute 9.5 per cent (14 out of 148) and 15.8 per cent (9 out of 57) of the occupations in these two groups respectively. Jews again have the highest SCS in Small traders (14.4), followed by Tertiary_dealers_unspecified (12.2) and Dealers in textiles and products (10). If we combine these first two groups, Jews constitute 15.9 per cent, although their overall share in Cluster 3 is only 1.2 per cent. Muslims again constitute the majority of Cluster 3, at 64.9 per cent. In the group Agriculture they have the largest SCS with 49.4, making up 86.1 per cent (1,248 out of 1,450) of occupations in this group. The last ethno-religious category in Cluster 3 is Orthodox Christians, since there are no Roma/Sinti in this cluster. Their share in this cluster is 32.5 per cent and their highest SCS is in Agriculture with 37.3, constituting 13.4 per cent of occupations in this group (195 out of 1,450). Although their share in this sector is not high, the fact that only four Armenians and three Jews had occupations in Agriculture means that Orthodox Christians are still second only to Muslims in their share of this group. The second group where Orthodox Christians are over-represented, and in fact extremely over-represented, is Industries producing products from fibres, with an SCS of 9.01 and constituting 99.2 per cent (124 out of 125) of occupations in this group.

Conclusion Before remarking on our findings, which surprised us with their consistency across clusters, we should once more set them in context. Throughout this study we have focused on occupations as proxies for employment, and this approximation has a major weak point in that it treats Ottoman townsmen’s occupations as almost mutually exclusive categories. Since the temettuat normally provides only one occupation per person, this registration practice obscures by-employment practices. If a person is registered as a barber but earns a substantial part of his living from agriculture or industrial production, this person is only and solely a barber in our dataset. Yet even if by-employments are falling off our radar, to our knowledge the 51,401 registered occupations in sixteen locations in the 790 temettuat registers33 and their concentrations along ethno-religious lines are the best testing ground for the ethno-religious division of labour hypothesis.

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Our conclusion is that male Armenians had an overwhelming overrepresentation in the occupations coded into PST groups Clothing and Textiles, irrespective of the level of diversification of occupational structure in given towns. Jews, on the other hand, again irrespective of the level of economic diversification, had very high concentrations in occupations coded into Small traders. Muslims in urban settings had very high concentrations in occupations coded into Agriculture. Lastly, Orthodox Christians did not show a profile similar to other non-Muslim communities with distinct concentrations in any PST group. Furthermore, also taking into consideration the almost total absence of other nonMuslim communities in occupations in Agriculture, occupations held by Orthodox Christians show the least dissimilar profile to the ones held by Muslims. Based upon our findings, we can reject the idea, prevalent in the literature, that there was a strict ethno-religious division of labour in the main sectors of the economy – agriculture, manufacturing or services – at least for the urban economies of the Ottoman Empire. Yet there are nevertheless significant concentrations of occupations along the lines of ethno-religious belonging in a few sub-sectoral groups. Our initial analysis, therefore, needs to be extended by further developing our methodology to discern local dynamics within urban occupational structures.34 M. Erdem Kabadayı is Associate Professor of Economic History and History of Economic Thought at Koç University, Istanbul. The economic and labour history of the Ottoman Empire have been central to his research agenda. Since 2016 as the principal investigator of UrbanOccupationsOETR, an ERC StG Project (urbanoccupations. ku.edu.tr), he is pursuing his academic career further as an economic historian focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey by using geospatial humanities methods. Murat Güvenç is the director of the Istanbul Studies Center of Kadir Has University, Istanbul. His academic interests concentrate on intra-metropolitan industrial geography, urban history and data visualization. He established and directed the Center for Urban Studies of İstanbul Şehir University between 2010 and 2014, where he carried out a comprehensive study on internal migration in Turkey sponsored by the Scientific and Technical Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) and research projects on the social and economic urban history and geography of Istanbul, Izmir and Bursa metropolitan areas. Professor Güvenç currently works on problems of visualization and communication of big data.

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Notes We would like to thank Mehmet Can Yavuz for his help in our calculations and Piet Gerrits for preparing the map, both members of our ongoing ERC-Starting Grant Project UrbanOccupationsOETR team. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement 679097. 1.

Although not yet catalogued in the BOA, Tevfik Güran had worked on temettuat in the late 1980s as a pioneer, and published his results in Tevfik Güran, 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar (Istanbul: Eren, 1998). 2. We use Orthodox-Christian instead of Greek to translate rum. We are convinced that this term signifies the Greek population in Anatolia and the Balkans in the mid nineteenth century in an appropriate way, and for this reason we use it in our former publications as well. We also fully agree with the recent argument by Ozil on this issue: Ays¸e Ozil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (London: Routledge, 2013). Furthermore, since we also work on Orthodox Christians in Niš, Plovdiv and Vranje, we think it is the most appropriate term. 3. In Ankara and Bursa, small communities of Armenians were registered by the Ottoman administration as Catholics. After careful inquiry we have reached the conclusion that no Levantines or other non-Armenians are included in these Catholic communities. For the sake of simplicity, we included these communities within the category Armenian. 4. Although not recent, for a very detailed review of existing literature and discussion of various views on the millet system, see the introduction to Macit Kenanoğlu, Osmanlı Millet Sistemi: Mit ve Gerçek (Istanbul: Klasik, 2004). 5. Paraskevas Konortas, ‘From Ta’ife to Millet: Ottoman Terms for the Greek Orthodox Community’, in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Philip Issawi (Darwin Press Inc, 1999), 169–79. 6. Alphons J. Sussnitzki, ‘Zur Gliederung wirtschaftlicher Arbeit nach Nationalitäten in der Türkei’, Archiv für Wirtschaftsforschung im Orient 2 (1917), 382–407. 7. Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 125–40. 8. M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines’, International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 69–90, M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Working from Home: Division of Labor among Female Workers of Feshane in Late Nineteenth Century Istanbul’, in A Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, ed. Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 65–81. 9. For example, Peter Mentzel, ‘The “Ethnic Division of Labor” on Ottoman Railroads’, Turcica 37 (2005), 221–41. Here we should mention that Eldem’s study on the ethnoreligious and occupational composition of Ottoman Bank customers in Istanbul in the early twentieth century is very insightful, notably his attempt to embed his data which are limited to Istanbul within the socio-economic context of the Ottoman Empire of the time. Edhem Eldem, ‘Istanbul 1903–1918: A Quantitative Analysis of a Bourgeoisie’, Bog˘aziçi Journal, Review of Social and Economic and Administrative Sciences 11(1–2) (1997), 53–98. 10. Donald Quataert, ‘Textile Workers in the Ottoman Empire, 1650–1922’ (paper presented at the conference ‘A Global History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000’, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2004). 11. Our dataset comes partially from a completed research project, ‘An Introduction to the Occupational History of Turkey via New Methods and New Approaches (1840–1940)’

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

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funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK), October 2012–October 2015, Project No. 112K271. It has also been extended with additional data from an ongoing research project: ‘Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850–2000’, ERC-Starting Grant, Project ID 679097, Acronym: UrbanOccupationsOETR, http://urbanoccupations.ku.edu.tr. M. Erdem Kabadayı is the principal investigator and Murat Güvenç is the advisor for both projects. For this exercise we have used in total 790 temettuat registers, listed below. Temettuat can be translated as income-yielding assets. These registers are very rich sources for Ottoman economic history. For a general evaluation of their uses and limitations, see Tevfik Güran, ‘Temettuat Registers as a Resource about Ottoman Social and Economic Life’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, ed. Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydin (London: Kegan Paul, 2004), 3–14; Yoichi Takamatsu, ‘Ottoman Income Survey, 1840–1846’, in Hayashi and Aydin, The Ottoman State and Societies, 15–46. For an overview of the literature based upon these registers, see Said Öztürk, ‘Türkiye’de Temettuat Çalıs¸maları’, Türkiye Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 1(1) (2003), 287–304. Quataert has addressed the importance of the household division of labour: Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800–1914’, in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 255–69. Tanzimat means literally reforms, and designates the mid-nineteenth-century reform attempts initiated with the 1839 state decree, aiming to increase the military, fiscal and administrative powers of the central state vis-à-vis provincial powers in almost every aspect of economic and political life in the Ottoman Empire. For this reason, 1839 is seen as a watershed in late Ottoman history. Unfortunately, we still lack an authoritative account on Tanzimat as a monograph. For the development of census taking and statistics and their relation to state policies in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States, see the classic work by Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Nadir Özbek, İmparatorlug˘un Bedeli: Osmanlı’da Vergi, Siyaset ve Toplumsal Adalet 1839– 1908 (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2015). For an earlier well-researched study specifically on the design and purposes of temettuat, see Nuri Adıyeke, ‘Temettuat Sayımları ve Bu Sayımları Düzenleyen Nizamname Örnekleri’, Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Aras¸tırmaları ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi (OTAM) 11 (2000), 769–825. Elsewhere we have discussed the nature of temettuat and the quality of the data they convey. M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Working for the State in the Urban Economies of Ankara, Bursa, and Salonica: From Empire to Nation State, 1840s–1940s’, International Review of Social History 61(S24) (2016), 213–41, doi:10.1017/S002085901600047X. Ibid., 219–21. Individual temettuat registers for the European communities of the city of Izmir are available in the BOA at the temettuat collection (ML.VRD.TMT.d) with the respective register numbers: 2095 Sardinians, 2096 Tuscans, 2098 Russians, 2099 Danish, 2101 Prussians, 2102 Genovese, 2105 French, 2106 Flemish, 16115 Austrian, 16116 English. Kütükoğlu has worked on these registers: Mübahat S. Kütükoğlu, ‘İzmir Temettü Sayımları ve Yabancı Tebaa’, Belleten LXIII(238) (1999), 755–73. If we leave these aside, there are only a few temettuat registers from Izmir. Appendixes 5.1–5.3 can be accessed on this volume’s webpage: https://berghahnbooks. com/title/PapastefanakiWorking#toc.

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21. For a detailed and critical evaluation of occupational titles as a source for economic history, see Bart van de Putte and Erik Buyst, ‘Occupational Titles? Hard to Eat, Easy to Catch’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis 40(1–2) (2010), 7–31. 22. The lack of women’s occupations in temettuat is not only a deficiency shared by precensus registration practices; it is a structural problem for censuses as well. For a general critique on this crucial issue, see Bridget Hill, ‘Women, Work and the Census: A Problem for Historians of Women’, History Workshop 35 (1993), 78–94, and more recently Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past’, Feminist Economics 18(4) (2012), 39–67. For an analysis specifically for Greek historiography, see Leda Papastefanaki, ‘Labour in Economic and Social History: The Viewpoint of Gender in Greek Historiography’, in ‘Per una nuova storia del lavoro: Genere, economie, soggetti’, ed. Manuela Martini and Christina Borderias, special issue, Genesis: Rivista della Societá Italiana delle Storiche XV(2) (2016), 59–83. 23. HISCO has been developed by a team at the International Institute of Social History; see ‘History of Work Information System’, International Institute of Social History, accessed 12 June 2019, http://historyofwork.iisg.nl/. Especially after its adaption by the North Atlantic Population Project (‘OCSTATUS: Status Information in Occupation String’, North Atlantic Population Project, https://www.nappdata.org/napp-action/variables/ OCSTATUS#description_section) in the early 2000s it gained popularity, see Evan Roberts et al., ‘Occupational Classification in the North Atlantic Population Project’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 36(2) (2003), 89–96. 24. ‘Categorising Occupations: The Primary, Secondary, Tertiary (PST) System’, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, http://www. campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/occupations/categorisation/. Last accessed 16 March 2020. 25. ‘International Comparative Work on Occupational Structure and Population Geography’, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, http://www. geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/occupations/international/. 26. For a detailed use of PST for this purpose by its designer, see chapter 9, ‘The Occupational Structure of England in the Nineteenth Century’, in Edward A. Wrigley, Poverty, Progress, and Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a more recent use of PST by Shaw-Taylor and Wrigley, see Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Edward A. Wrigley, ‘Occupational Structure and Population Change’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1870, 2nd edition, ed. Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 53–88. 27. These procedures are commonly suggested steps towards data modelling and analysis for digital humanities. For a useful guide and as an introduction to the digital humanities methodologies, see among others Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 28. Shannon developed his entropy measure in the 1940s and it has been used in economics since the 1960s in the fields of inequality, industry-concentration and product variety. See Sebastiaan M. Straathof, ‘Shannon’s Entropy as an Index of Product Variety’, Economics Letters 94(2) (2007), 297–303. For an application of Shannon and other dissimilarity indices in ecology and bio-diversity, see Tom Leinster and Christina A. Cobbold, ‘Measuring Diversity: The Importance of Species Similarity’, Ecology 93(3) (2012), 477–89. 29. Jaime R.S. Fonseca, ‘Clustering in the Field of Social Sciences: That Is Your Choice’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 16(5) (2013), 403, doi:10.1080/13 645579.2012.716973.

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30. For settings we employed Ward’s method as the agglomeration method, and Euclidian distance for dissimilarity. As in all clustering methods, AHC tries to minimize the variance within clusters, and maximize it between clusters. Variance decomposition of our clustering is 13 per cent within clusters and 87 per cent between clusters. 31. For a brief explanation of this statistical measure, see Maheswari Visvalingam, ‘The Signed Chi-Score Measure for the Classification and Mapping of Polychotomous Data’, The Cartographic Journal 18(1) (June 1981), 32–43. 32. Erder argues that Bursa had such a differentiated industrial spatial structure in the mid 1850s that the factories emerging on the periphery count as a distinct category from economic activity at the city centre. Leila Erder, ‘Factory Districts in Bursa during the 1860s’, METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 1(1) (1975) 85–99, 96. 33. BOA, ML.VRD.TMT.d.: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 97, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 199, 201, 202, 204, 927, 929, 2267, 2268, 2277, 2283, 2286, 2288, 2289, 2291, 2300, 2301, 2306, 2311, 2312, 2313, 2760, 2761, 2762, 2763, 2764, 5948, 5949, 6850, 6851, 6852, 6853, 6854, 6856, 6857, 6858, 6859, 6860, 6861, 6862, 6863, 6864, 6865, 6866, 6867, 6868, 6869, 6870, 6871, 6872, 6874, 6875, 6876, 6877, 6878, 6879, 6880, 6881, 6882, 6884, 6885, 6886, 6887, 6888, 6889, 6890, 6891, 6892, 6893, 6894, 6895, 6897, 6898, 7362, 7363, 7364, 7365, 7367, 7368, 7369, 7370, 7371, 7373, 7375, 7376, 7381, 7382, 7383, 7386, 7387, 7391, 7392, 7393, 7394, 7395, 7399, 7402, 7405, 7407, 7408, 7409, 7410, 7411, 7412, 7414, 7415, 7416, 7418, 7420, 7422, 7423, 7426, 7427, 7428, 7429, 7430, 7431, 7432, 7438, 7439, 7441, 7442, 7443, 7444, 7445, 7447, 7448, 7449, 7450, 7451, 7454, 7455, 7457, 7459, 7461, 7462, 7464, 7465, 7466, 7467, 7468, 7469, 7470, 7471, 7472, 7473, 7475, 7476, 7477, 7479, 7481, 7484, 7485, 7486, 7490, 7491, 7492, 7495, 7496, 7497, 7498, 7499, 7500, 7501, 7502, 7503, 7504, 7505, 7506, 7508, 7509, 7515, 7516, 7517, 7518, 7519, 7520, 7521, 7522, 7523, 7524, 7525, 7526, 7528, 7530, 7532, 7533, 7534, 7535, 7538, 7539, 7540, 7541, 7546, 7547, 7548, 7550, 7551, 7553, 7554, 7555, 7556, 7559, 7561, 7562, 7563, 7564, 7565, 7566, 7567, 7569, 7570, 7571, 7572, 8735, 8736, 8738, 8739, 8740, 8742, 8744, 8745, 8746, 8747, 8748, 8749, 8750, 8751, 8752, 8753, 8754, 8755, 8756, 8757, 8758, 8759, 8760, 8761, 8762, 8763, 8764, 8765, 8766, 8767, 8768, 8769, 8770, 8771, 8772, 8773, 8774, 8775, 8776, 9388, 10243, 10244, 10245, 10246, 10247, 10248, 10250, 10251, 10252, 10254, 10256, 10257, 10258, 10259, 10260, 10261, 10263, 10267, 10268, 10270, 10273, 10275, 10276, 10277, 10278, 10279, 10280, 10282, 10283, 10284, 10286, 10287, 10288, 10289, 10290, 10291, 10292, 10293, 10294, 10296, 10297, 10299, 10300, 10301, 10302, 10303, 10304, 10305, 10307, 10308, 10309, 10311, 10312, 10313, 10314, 10315, 10316, 10317, 10318, 10320, 10322, 10323, 10324, 10325, 10326, 10327, 10328, 10329, 10330, 10331, 10332, 10333, 10334, 10336, 10337, 10338, 10339, 10340, 10341, 10342, 10343, 10344, 10347, 10348, 10349, 10350, 10351, 10352, 10354, 10357, 10358, 10359, 10360, 10361, 10362, 10363, 10364, 10365, 10366, 10367, 10368, 10369, 10371, 10372, 10373, 10374, 10375, 10376, 10379, 10380, 10383, 10384, 10385, 10386, 10387, 10390, 10392, 10393, 10397, 10398, 10399, 10400, 10401, 10402, 10404, 10407, 10409, 10410, 10411, 10415, 10417, 10420, 10421, 10422, 10423, 10425, 11024, 11025, 11043, 11059, 11082, 11101, 11105, 11127, 11133, 11138, 11142, 11444, 11464, 11466, 11470, 11487, 11536, 11537, 11546, 11566, 11577, 11587, 11604,

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11609, 11620, 11621, 11635, 11654, 11655, 11671, 11679, 11682, 11699, 11719, 11725, 11726, 11758, 11761, 12123, 12223, 12224, 12232, 12233, 12235, 12236, 13119, 13477, 13660, 13675, 13713, 13876, 14218, 14226, 14270, 14406, 14407, 14410, 14418, 14420, 14421, 14423, 14429, 14430, 14431, 14432, 14433, 14436, 14438, 14439, 14440, 14441, 14442, 14443, 14445, 14446, 14447, 14448, 14449, 14453, 14454, 14455, 14456, 14458, 14462, 14464, 14465, 14466, 14467, 14469, 14470, 14472, 14474, 14476, 14477, 14480, 14481, 14483, 14484, 14486, 14487, 14488, 14489, 14491, 14492, 14493, 14494, 14495, 14497, 14506, 14511, 14519, 14521, 14524, 14525, 14530, 14532, 14533, 14535, 14538, 14542, 14549, 14551, 14552, 14553, 14555, 14559, 14560, 14562, 14566, 14567, 14568, 14569, 14571, 14573, 14576, 14577, 14578, 14579, 14580, 14581, 14582, 14583, 14606, 14645, 14647, 14648, 14657, 14659, 14660, 14662, 14672, 14673, 14675, 14676, 14677, 14678, 14681, 14682, 14683, 14685, 14687, 14688, 14689, 14692, 14694, 14695, 14696, 14700, 14701, 14702, 14703, 14708, 14712, 14722, 14723, 14724, 14728, 14729, 14731, 14732, 14733, 14738, 14739, 14747, 14749, 14751, 14753, 14754, 14765, 14767, 14769, 14774, 15199, 15805, 15809, 15810, 15812, 15813, 15814, 15816, 15817, 15829, 15830, 15831, 15833, 15835, 15836, 15838, 15840, 15841, 15842, 15843, 15844, 15845, 15847, 15851, 15852, 15853, 15854, 15904, 15906, 15907, 15908, 15909, 15911, 15913, 15914, 15915, 15917, 15921, 15924, 15925, 15983, 16039, 16040, 16041, 16042, 16080, 16178, 16179, 16218, 16302, 16396, 16792, 16816, 16818, 17084, 17091, 17162, 17359, 17577, 17581, 17582, 17590, 17592, 17594, 17597, 17599, 17600, 17605, 17608, 17652, 17760, 17761. 34. Fatma Öncel’s chapter in this volume is a good example of how case studies based upon the same source material can shed light on local dynamics. Her study, focusing on three villages in the Plovdiv region, illustrates surprisingly high levels of specialization in textile production in ethno-religiously almost homogeneous locations inhabited by Orthodox Christians. Such a high degree of local economic and occupational specialization certainly calls for explanation; however, in this chapter we have been trying to assess the ethno-religious division of labour argument based upon data from ethno-religiously more diverse urban locations.

Bibliography Adıyeke, Nuri. ‘Temettuat Sayımları ve Bu Sayımları Düzenleyen Nizamname Örnekleri’. Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Aras¸tırmaları ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi (OTAM) 11 (2000), 769–825. Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital_ Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Desrosières, Alain. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Eldem, Edhem. ‘Istanbul 1903–1918: A Quantitative Analysis of a Bourgeoisie’. Bog˘aziçi Journal, Review of Social and Economic and Administrative Sciences 11(1–2) (1997), 53–98. Erder, Leila. ‘Factory Districts in Bursa during the 1860s’. METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 1(1) (1975), 85–99. Fonseca, Jaime R.S. ‘Clustering in the Field of Social Sciences: That Is Your Choice’. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 16(5) (2013), 403–28. Güran, Tevfik. 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tarımı Üzerine Aras¸tırmalar. Istanbul: Eren, 1998.  . ‘Temettuat Registers as a Resource about Ottoman Social and Economic Life’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat

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Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydin, 3–14. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. Hill, Bridget. ‘Women, Work and the Census: A Problem for Historians of Women’. History Workshop 35 (1993), 78–94. Humphries, Jane, and Carmen Sarasúa. ‘Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past’. Feminist Economics 18(4) (2012), 39–67. Kabadayı, M. Erdem. ‘Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines’. International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 69–90.  . ‘Working from Home: Division of Labor among Female Workers of Feshane in Late Nineteenth Century Istanbul’, in A Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, edited by Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou, 65–81. Leiden: Brill, 2013.  . ‘Working for the State in the Urban Economies of Ankara, Bursa, and Salonica: From Empire to Nation State, 1840s–1940s’. International Review of Social History 61(S24) (2016), 213–41. Kenanoğlu, Macit. Osmanlı Millet Sistemi: Mit ve Gerçek. Istanbul: Klasik, 2004. Kırlı, Cengiz. ‘A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul’. International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 125–40. Konortas, Paraskevas. ‘From Ta’ife to Millet: Ottoman Terms for the Greek Orthodox Community’, in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy and Society in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Philip Issawi, 169–79. Darwin Press Inc, 1999. Kütükoğlu, Mübahat S. ‘İzmir Temettü Sayımları ve Yabancı Tebaa’. Belleten LXIII(238) (1999), 755–73. Leinster, Tom, and Christina A. Cobbold. ‘Measuring Diversity: The Importance of Species Similarity’. Ecology 93(3) (2012), 477–89. Mentzel, Peter. ‘The “Ethnic Division of Labor” on Ottoman Railroads’. Turcica 37 (2005), 221–41. Özbek, Nadir. İmparatorlug˘un Bedeli: Osmanlı’da Vergi, Siyaset ve Toplumsal Adalet 1839–1908. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2015. Ozil, Ays¸e. Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia. London: Routledge, 2013. Öztürk, Said. ‘Türkiye’de Temettuat Çalıs¸maları’. Türkiye Aras¸tırmaları Literatür Dergisi 1(1) (2003), 287–304. Papastefanaki, Leda. ‘Labour in Economic and Social History: The Viewpoint of Gender in Greek Historiography’, in ‘Per Una Nuova Storia Del Lavoro: Genere, Economie, Soggetti’, edited by Manuela Martini and Christina Borderias, special issue, Genesis: Rivista della societá Italiana delle Storiche XV(2) (2016), 59–83. Quataert, Donald. ‘Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing, 1800–1914’, in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, 255–69. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.  . ‘Textile Workers in the Ottoman Empire, 1650–1922’. Paper presented at the conference ‘A Global History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000’, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2004. Roberts, Evan, Matthew Woollard, Chad Ronnander, Lisa Y. Dillon, and Gunnar Thorvaldsen. ‘Occupational Classification in the North Atlantic Population Project’. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 36(2) (2003), 89–96. Shaw-Taylor, Leigh, and Edward A. Wrigley. ‘Occupational Structure and Population Change’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1870, 2nd edition, edited by Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson, 53–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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Straathof, Sebastiaan M. ‘Shannon’s Entropy as an Index of Product Variety’. Economics Letters 94(2) (2007), 297–303. Sussnitzki, Alphons J. ‘Zur Gliederung wirtschaftlicher Arbeit nach Nationalitäten in der Türkei’. Archiv für Wirtschaftsforschung im Orient 2 (1917), 382–407. Takamatsu, Yoichi. ‘Ottoman Income Survey, 1840–1846’, in The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers, Islamic Area Studies 5, edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydin, 15–46. London: Kegan Paul, 2004. van de Putte, Bart, and Erik Buyst. ‘Occupational Titles? Hard to Eat, Easy to Catch’. Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis 40(1–2) (2010), 7–31. Visvalingam, Maheswari. ‘The Signed Chi-Score Measure for the Classification and Mapping of Polychotomous Data’. The Cartographic Journal 18(1) (June 1981), 32–43. Wrigley, Edward A. Poverty, Progress, and Population. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Part II

Political Change, Migration and Nationalisms

Chapter 6

Class Formation on the Modern Waterfront Port Workers and Their Struggles in Late Ottoman Istanbul

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One of the most dramatic reactions against the formation and expansion of European capitalism in the Ottoman Empire took place on the Istanbul waterfront. As the port of Istanbul was being modernized to accommodate the interests of both global maritime capitalism and the Ottoman state elites, its workers emerged as one of the most powerful urban actors in the city, through the support of an old, traditional and supposedly fading institution: the guilds. The increasing commodification of port labour, a result of casualization during the late nineteenth century, put the port workers’ guilds at the forefront of workers’ resistance during this period. The commodification process also paved the way for the politicization of workers in line with the rise of the Armenian nationalist movement, as well as for fierce competition for jobs, both of which played a crucial role in the ethno-religious confrontations between Muslim and Armenian workers in the mid 1890s. In an attempt to control labour processes in the port, the Quay Company, which oversaw the port modernization process, along with European maritime companies, pressed for a more casual labour force by gradually undermining and dismissing the traditional privileges of port workers’ guilds, and by threatening to displace those unregistered local workers who had long been established in the port. Resisting the casualization process, the Ottoman guilds, evidently a weakening institution,

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assumed a union-like function to which port workers resorted as an institutional guard on behalf of their own interests. The first part of the chapter describes this casualization process in a comparative perspective with other Ottoman and non-Ottoman ports. In the second part, it demonstrates how this increasing commodification of port labour made guilds the sole and most important institutional structure in the eyes of workers by which they could resist this process and negotiate its terms. This does not mean, however, that increasing solidarity among workers, as evidenced by their collective actions, was the sole impact of the modernization process. As the rise of the Armenian nationalist-revolutionary movement overlapped with the development of the casualization process in the port of Istanbul, increasing competition for jobs and for the control of guilds was thus mediated through the ethnic-religious strife of the mid 1890s. Overall, the most important outcome of this entire process was the rise of the port workers and their guilds (later, associations) as one of the most influential social-urban actors in the early twentieth century, not only in Istanbul but all over the empire.

Transformation of the Ottoman Waterfront After the introduction of steam technology into Ottoman waters in the 1830s, the ratio of steam vessels to sailing ships gradually increased through the century. As steam technology brought larger and quicker vessels, the increase in the tonnage of shipping rose exponentially. While, for instance, the shipping tonnage entering the Port of Alexandria increased ninefold between 1830 and 1860, the increase in Beirut in the same period was ten times as much.1 With the concurrent growth in British and French commercial expansionism into the Middle East, the rate and extent of commerce steadily increased in subsequent decades. Steam vessels gradually replaced sailing ships, to the extent that, for instance, 95 per cent of all goods in Istanbul were shipped by steam vessels by the end of the century.2 These steam vessels were mostly owned by European shipping companies. In 1870, almost all of the steamship lines, except one Ottoman and three Egyptian companies, which had regular services in the Mediterranean, were European-owned (namely, British, French, Austrian, Italian and Russian).3 This dominant foreign involvement in sea transportation would bring continuous pressure to modernize ports according to the needs and requirements of steam vessels. As the shipping industry dramatically expanded with the rise of steam technology, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, competition among shipping companies became more and more intense,

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which in turn led to increasing pressures on these companies to reduce shipping costs and decrease the turnaround time regarding the loading– unloading process in ports worldwide.4 Therefore, as Ottoman integration into global maritime capitalism increased, so did the pressure from shipping interests in relation to the modernization of the Ottoman ports. Designed primarily to serve sailing ships, Ottoman ports had not changed significantly by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Steam vessels had to adapt to the traditional modes of business in the ports. Because the larger ships could not dock due to the insufficient capacity of the existing ports (in terms of depth, width and length), they had to anchor offshore. From there, passengers and goods were carried by boats and lighters to the dockside and to storage boats, from where the goods were carried by porters to the customs and warehouses.5 This process was extremely long and difficult for the ships as well as the merchants, who suffered as a result of the delays. Since it was much quicker to unload ships at a dock, the scale and speed of trade could dramatically increase in modernized and enlarged ports. Ottoman officials, too, saw port modernization as an inevitable phase of urban reform, since it would enable them to collect taxes and ‘to control the movement of people and goods’ much more efficiently in port cities.6 The first port modernization took place in Izmir in 1875, followed by Beirut, Istanbul and Salonica, the most important port cities of the empire. Modernization of these ports involved the construction of new quays that allowed larger ships to unload directly, new warehouses for storage, and new trams to carry goods more easily along the port. The physical transformation of the waterfront, thus, was the most important step in the increasing domination of capitalist relations in these ports. In effect, the transformation of these ports increased the aggressiveness of maritime and port companies, who unashamedly attempted to undermine the traditional privileges of guilds or guild-like communities that traditionally dominated labour relations and processes on the waterfront. As port modernization was an immovable investment like other urban infrastructural projects, there were much higher stakes for these companies in monopolizing their control of these spaces in order to protect and increase their interests.7 Comparative studies on the transformation of work relations in various ports suggest that, in particular, the increasing availability of migrant/seasonal labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to diminished control by the artisanal groups that had previously dominated these ports around the world.8 In the Ottoman Empire, too, the transformation of the major ports enflamed tensions around existing labour relations and processes in these ports, to the extent that the Ottoman government could not stay

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neutral. In Beirut, the port company attempted to replace guildsmen with its own workers hired from a stevedore company based in Marseille, an action that led to staunch resistance by local port workers’ guilds, culminating in the victory of the latter with the support of the palace.9 In Salonica, where the modernized port was opened in 1901, protests by guildsmen did not mount to a comparable crisis, since, according to Downes, what happened in the port of Beirut led the Ottoman government not to concede similar authorities to the port company there.10 In Istanbul, the concession for the modernization of the port was given in November 1890 to a French company named the Société des Quais, Docks et Entrepots de Constantinople. According to the agreement between the Quay Company and the government, the former would open new and modern docks, quays and warehouses, as well as tram lines on the docks and a steam ferry service within the region from Tophane and Azapkapısı on the Galata side and from Sirkeci to Unkapanı on the intramural side of the Golden Horn.11 As in Beirut and Salonica, the project was a direct assault on the established guilds of porters, lightermen and boatmen in the port, who depended on these jobs, trades that would disappear with the project since the modern facilities in the port would render them obsolete.12 Besides the Quay Company, foreign maritime agencies were also involved in attempts to penetrate the traditional labour relations in the port, which were mostly but not entirely limited to the guild structure. The main objective of these attacks was not unlike that of their counterparts in other Ottoman and non-Ottoman ports that experienced capitalist integration. A more casual and fully commodified labour force would not only decrease labour costs in the port, but also give both the port and shipping companies the opportunity to restructure labour processes in a way that would better serve their interests, especially in regard to the efficiency of the loading–unloading process. As a result, guilds became the central line of defence by port workers as they were considered to be the most important institution by which they could protect their job security and their autonomy in the labour process. In this way, guilds were transformed into strongholds of port workers who fought to keep control over their labour, and therefore they assumed a central role in the history of class formation among these workers.

Consolidation of the Guilds Many revisionary attempts have been made to overcome the teleological approach to the fate of the late Ottoman crafts and guilds, which maintains the assumption that these were the inevitable victims of the

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universal process of modernization.13 Although these studies have taught us that many crafts were not simply eliminated, and at least some of them survived by adapting themselves to their new circumstances,14 it is difficult to accept that we yet have a clear picture with regard to the socalled dissolution of the guilds in this period. Chalcraft, for instance, has argued that in Egypt the guilds were dissolved not because of the penetration of European capitalism which eroded the traditional handicrafts, but rather it ‘had far more to do with a restructuring which involved the growth of new trades and the transformation of old’, and as a result they were increasingly ignored by the state, European capital and the labourers themselves.15 Whether the same argument can be applied to the other parts of the empire is hard to answer without further accounts. As for Istanbul, as Faroqhi observes, we still lack detailed studies on the ‘disappearance of guilds’ in the last decades of the empire.16 The dearth of studies focusing on the history of particular crafts/guilds means that we are not sufficiently informed to discuss the issue at length. However, at the very least, our own cases show that the guilds of the port workers continued to be the most influential actors in labour disputes in Istanbul. This was the case not only at the turn of the century when port modernization began, but also during and after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908.17 Even after 1910, when guilds were replaced by ‘Craftsmen’s Associations’, port workers continued to be a powerful bloc within these institutions, playing a critical role during the Turkish War of Independence. So it is important to pay particular attention to the power of these formal institutions, which were popularly used by these workers throughout their struggles. At a time when technological developments and the penetration of European capitalist companies threatened the existence of long-established port workers, guilds became popular among workers in at least two different ways: on the one hand, non-guild workers felt the immediate necessity to be formally recognized as a guild to defend their interests; on the other, the guildsmen reminded the companies and the state elites of the guilds’ existence and power whenever these elites attempted to initiate a modernization project without consulting the workers. And the most effective means to remind them of this was their involvement in contentious collective actions against both the companies and the government. In February 1891, as two coal-carrying foreign ships came to the Kireçkapısı dock in Galata, the coal heavers there began to clash over the right to unload the coal in the ships. The source of the problem, according to an investigation by the authorities, was that the companies’

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boatswains wanted to use ‘vagabonds’ from outside, in the Mutasarrıf’s (district administrator) words, rather than the heavers who had been working there regularly under the title of ‘sea workers’ (deniz amelesi) albeit without a guild certificate and a steward. As events escalated, the sea workers applied to the authorities for a guild certificate and the assignment of a steward for ‘the conservation of their rights’.18 In fact, this case was not exceptional, but representative of continuous attempts by foreign maritime companies to impose a new labour regime in the ports, intended ‘to transform guild members into labourers’, a regime that became a global source of conflict between guild workers and maritime capital throughout the period.19 This left the government in a contradictory situation; for reasons of security it had to supervise this community through these guilds, even while the guilds were being aggressively attacked by European capital.20 Aware of this complexity, a commission of enquiry, which was eventually established to fix the problem, decided to give them guild status on the basis that this would ‘discipline’ them, but with the added proviso that since the problem was an international one, it should also be negotiated with European ambassadors, a process that would require some time. However, time was running out, according to the mayor Rıdvan Pasha, as tensions were escalating between the two sides. Faithful to the promises they had given a few days earlier, the workers who had applied to the government for a guild certificate had totally withdrawn from the job and had not been working for a few days. But now they ‘[had] declared that they could not hold out anymore and that they would enter the next ship by force’.21 Provocation from the other side had worsened the situation: When the heavers, who are under the safeguard of the agencies and boatswains, see the workers who applied to the government, they insult the latter with ‘boos’ in the streets. And for this reason, it is very likely that the workers, who have already withdrawn from the job for a few days, not tolerating both insults and hunger, will incite a great tumult to bring the matter to a conclusion as soon as possible.22

The mayor, anxiously awaiting the final decision of the government, decided that heavers from both sides would be used to unload the coal, as two ships had recently entered the port. This decision was also accepted by the agencies. Despite these agreements, the boatswains continued to dismiss the workers, who subsequently went to the mayor and warned him that they would present a petition to the sultan if the matter was not settled.23 This threat of collective petitioning was, in fact, their last and most powerful card.

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Collective petitioning had been a known and significant element in the repertoires of the Ottoman lower classes for centuries.24 Historically, state authorities always encouraged the use of this tool by the subjects, who, they believed, would abandon alternative forms of demonstrating their discontent against the authorities. In fact, in the eyes of Ottoman subjects, collective petitioning also had a crucial function in the creation of a ‘politics of engagement and negotiation’ with the ruling classes.25 However, because collective petitioning, as a process, was itself a channel for people to come together and discuss their common problems and discontent, and to act collectively to communicate these problems to the authority in a common language, it was viewed as a potential problem for state authorities.26 The process of collective petition-writing, for instance, could easily become a basis for the development of collective politics against governments.27 For this reason, both the workers and the state were not unfamiliar with the impact and consequences of this action. From their experience, the workers knew that collective bargaining was the most effective legal instrument they could use to force the lower bureaucracy to act in their favour. State officials, on the other hand, were aware that it had the potential to incite great disorder, severely undermining their authority and legitimacy, and could even lead to the downfall of the state as a result of foreign intervention. For instance, correspondence by the mayor of Istanbul about this case compared it with the 1882 Alexandria riots against the foreigners, an event that had resulted in the British occupation of Egypt: the correspondence referred to the possibility that a parallel case could happen in the capital city.28 The institutional consolidation of guilds also owed much to the actions of their own members, especially their resistance to the modernization of the port in Istanbul. The agreement that awarded the concession for the Istanbul Port to a French engineer/entrepreneur, named Marios Michael, also known as Mis¸el Pas¸a, was signed on 10 November 1890. Following the agreement, in September 1891, the Istanbul Quay Company was founded and in 1894 the first part of the port went into operation. In the agreement of 1890, and in the statute of 1891 that declared the foundation of the company, both sides seemed to have considered and foreseen every possible problem: the tariffs and taxes, the supervision and sharing of the revenues, the provision of materials to build the ports and other facilities, the security of those facilities, the inviolability of the holy places located within the construction area, and even the formal clothes of the employees of those facilities.29 However, the most essential aspect of the issue was either forgotten or ignored:

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the fate of the port workers there. In fact, there was no reference at all to the conditions of the workers whose jobs would be threatened. As the first part of the port, the Wine Dock (S¸arab İskelesi) in Galata, started operation, and the first ship, owned by the French Messageries Maritimes company, tried to tie up to the dock on 21 July 1894, the workers had the opportunity to remind the world of their existence. On the morning of 21 July, between three and four hundred workers came together to prevent the ship from docking.30 Armenians also numbered among them, a sign that points to the power of class dynamics at this initial stage, bringing together Muslim and Armenian workers within a political context that would, in a short while, pit them against each other, as we will see in the following section.31 When the police attempted to disband them, they responded violently, to the degree that they even attacked Mustafa Pasha, who commanded the security forces and who ‘admonished’ them to cease their action. The pasha was only ‘saved’ with the help of the soldiers.32 On the same day they marched to the palace to complain that they were not allowed to work in the port.33 In the end, security forces disbanded the group by arresting the initiators and splitting up the rest, but the workers succeeded in their attempts to prevent the Messageries ship from reaching the dock. Despite their dispersal, according to the Minister of Police, they continued to insist on their position and it was clear that they would gather again if they saw the ship approach.34 To further complicate the situation for the state, the minister suggested that arresting the protestors in the event of another action could further agitate the guild members. Aside from such direct confrontations, the guildsmen also employed collective petitions written to various departments, seemingly in the hope that they might get their backing on the issue. On 5 August, the Minister of the Navy wrote a strongly worded letter to the Port Chairman. According to the correspondence from the Mutasarrıf of Beyoğlu, the minister says, the lightermen were preparing three reports, one to the Sublime Porte (Bab-ı Ali), one to the Military Department, and the last to the Council of State (S¸ura-i Devlet), in which they complained that the Port Department had forced them to sign an agreement that they would not attempt to prevent the ships from docking at the port.35 The minister reiterated the sultan’s order that the ships would not be tied up until the warehouses had been built and that this should also be explained to the lightermen, adding that ‘the Port Department will be held responsible, if any kind of inconvenience occurs’.36 On the following day, the Mutasarrıf wrote to the palace that both the sultan’s order and the lightermen’s rights to transport between the two sides of the Golden Horn and between two ships had been explained to the

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lightermen. He added that he had also warned the lightermen not to engage in any collective actions or apply to state departments with ‘petitions or reports’, or they would ‘get nothing but regret’ for leaving their jobs.37 On receipt of this warning, the Mutasarrıf concludes, the lightermen guaranteed that they would obey the order of the Sublime Porte and would not oppose it. Perceived as a threat not only to the administration but more so to the authority of the state, it is not surprising that the mere act of petitioning was viewed as contentious by the state authorities. It is seen here how a traditional element of the repertoire, which was usually encouraged or at least tolerated, could occasionally be transformed into a contentious weapon against the authorities. In the background of the Mutasarrıf’s threat that they should not write any kind of contentious documents like petitions, lurked the fear that further collective actions could be triggered, which would be impossible to control. As shown above, the act of collective petitioning had already been discouraged by the state authorities. But in this matter the anxieties of the authorities were more apparent, and so they threatened the workers in a very direct way. However, they were also doing their best to reach a compromise between the company and the workers in order to appease both sides. A month later, on 2 September 1894, as part of a government initiative to transform the truce between the sides into a formal document, the guild and the company signed an agreement with six articles. Accordingly, the agreement determined the areas within which the guild members could transport the goods, including those ‘that are to be unloaded from a ship tied up to the port and the ones from the shore to those ships’, as quoted in the sixth article.38 The company also promised that boatmen and lightermen would be employed in other operations, that the ships would be tied up from their sterns and that all the lighters belonging to the foreign companies would be prohibited from transportation, in favour of the lightermen’s guild. The state authorities, as will be seen, were sure that there was no reason at this point for the lightermen to oppose the operation of the company, as they had gained significant concessions. As in almost all of the documents, however, this agreement also contained loopholes, which gave both the companies and the workers opportunities to continue their struggle by exploiting such gaps. Foreign companies had been using their own lighters outside the harbours, but with this agreement in place they were forced to let the guilds transport their goods to the warehouses on the shore, a practice they were unsurprisingly reluctant to agree to, as it was not in their interest to accede to a system of labour relations outside their control and intervention.

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Thus, they did not hesitate to exploit whatever loopholes they could find in the agreement. On 14 February 1895, a Russian coal ship coming from England attempted to use its own lighters, instead of those of the guild, to transport its cargo from the ship to the warehouse. The guild opposed this practice, arguing that according to the agreement, that right belonged only to its own members. However, the Grand Vizier Cevat Pasha argued that the agreement applied only to ships that entered the quay, not those anchored outside. Relying on this conclusion, Cevat Pasha ordered that no opposition to the Russian-owned lighters should be allowed. The pasha also pointed out that he had already received objections from foreign embassies.39 The root of the embassies’ objections lay in the counterattack by the workers against the Quay Company, which had to do with the wording of the agreement. On 6 February 1895, the lightermen attacked another completed part of the port in Galata, in response to the Quay Company’s attempt to install floating docks for unloading cargo directly to the shore.40 They argued that the sixth article of the agreement, quoted above, gave them the right to transfer cargo from the land to the ship. The lightermen also submitted petitions to the Port Department and the Sublime Porte to complain about the issue. However, the company argued that Article Six applied only to goods that were already disembarked from land to the ship and those embarked to the ship from land. In other words, the company argued, the lightermen had no right to load or unload between land and the ships. It was only after the goods were loaded or unloaded that the lightermen could transfer them to other ships or other locations. At this point, as in Beirut, workers’ protests forced the sultan to intervene, ordering that the problem should be solved ‘immediately, in a way that [would] protect the interests of the lightermen who [were] themselves the subjects of the Sublime State’.41 The discontent of the workers could no longer be ignored, as the lightermen’s problem had now doubled: on the one hand, foreign companies were able to circumvent the agreement by anchoring outside the harbour and using their own lighters; on the other, the Quay Company attempted to install floating docks to allow for unloading directly to the land. While the Quay Company agreed to settle the first problem by relinquishing control over sea transportation to the guild members, the second issue, the floating docks, was more complicated. The lightermen demanded that the floating docks be abolished, and that they themselves should disembark the goods to land. However, the Grand Vizier argued that in the existing port it was not feasible for ships to dock horizontally, nor was it in accordance with the agreement between the lightermen and

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the company. Thus, it seems that the sixth article was not interpreted in the same way as it had been by the lightermen. According to the article, both the company and the state elites agreed that the goods should first be unloaded to the port (or the floating docks) and then transported to other docks by the lightermen. Cevat Pasha added that if the demands of the lightermen were met, the ships would not make such a great effort to approach the dock, and would not incur the heavy taxes which they would then be obliged to pay. The Grand Vizier had no doubt that their demands were irrational.42 The gulf between the different rationales thus came to the surface through the different appropriations of the legal document by both sides. The state elites assumed that as they knew what the interests of the state or society were, they also understood the lightermen’s ‘real interests’. The problem, however, arose when the lightermen demonstrated that their ‘real interests’ were not what the elites had tried to impose on them. They argued that the key benefits for them lay in the income from the transportation of goods between land and ships. The Grand Vizier, based on his ‘clear’ knowledge about the real interests of the lightermen, emphasized the company’s benevolence in giving the lightermen a special concession in sea transportation (between the two sides of the Golden Horn and between the ships). In response to this gesture, the Grand Vizier added that the lightermen’s complaints and demands for ‘impossible things’ could only be explained by their ‘effrontery’.43 In the end, so as not to escalate the matter, and on the sultan’s order, the officials let the matter be, in the hope that with time the lightermen would be persuaded and that the procedures to assign the sea transportation exclusively to the guildsmen would be completed.44 Five months later, on 21 July, the special commission that was set up to resolve the issue submitted its report to the new Grand Vizier Said Pasha. The report, not surprisingly, supported the company against the lightermen, arguing, based on the French copy of the agreement which used the term supalan (sous palan), that the sixth article could not be interpreted as the lightermen had done. The commission, with reference to its communication with the Ministry of the Navy, explained that ‘the term supalan meant that the good could be turned in by its owner to wherever he wants upon the sea’.45 So, in opposition to the lightermen’s interpretation of the text as a weapon to defend their own interests, the elites played the game using their own cards. While they acknowledged that they could not win the argument based on the Turkish text, all they could do was to change the field on which the game was played. They applied to the other copy of the same text, but in a language which better served their own arguments and interests. Besides this, the report

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also quoted Félix Granet, the director of the Quay Company, who was keen to emphasize his compromise with the lightermen, and, of course, his impatience.46 The report concluded that the company had the right to carry out its operations freely and that the lightermen’s claims could not be accepted at all.47 The report suggested that this conclusion should also be explained to the lightermen and that the agitators among them should be punished, and with oblique reference to the notorious Article 113 of the – de facto suspended – Constitution, it argued that their contentious action was a ‘dissident movement against the government without legitimate reason’.48 The foreign embassies and the Quay Company, considering the government’s reluctance to stop the lightermen, attempted to use their own methods to disperse them. On 12 September 1895, the Minister of Police wrote to the Porte that the Quay Company, to defy the lightermen who were preventing an incoming oil ship from tying up, had applied to the French embassy. The French embassy sent an escort to the ship and it tied up under their protection. These actions had more than one meaning: first, the government’s mediation was ignored by the Europeans so that the very legitimacy of the state, coercive control, was defied; second, the company and the embassy decided to put an absolute end to the resistance of the lightermen, by force if necessary; and finally, as mediation attempts broke down, the government was driven to choose sides in the war between the company and the workers. A delegate from the embassy visited the minister, apparently to appease the government, and explained that the embassy’s hand had been forced because the company could not fully practise its ‘rights of concession’ due to the lightermen’s resistance.49 In response, the minister underlined that the single factor that sustained the opposition of the lightermen was ‘the contract’ itself, which the company had signed with the guild members.50 Indeed, workers had used their textual strategies in a very effective manner, seeking to sustain their struggles and resistances by defining them within the legal sphere. As the minister admitted, the lightermen had wilfully used the blurred lines of the agreement in favour of their own interests for a year, but that road had now come to an end. Two days after the embassy–company clique’s ‘demonstration’, the Grand Vizier Said Pasha wrote to the palace that the sultan’s decree to put the commission’s decision into practice would be communicated to the relevant ministries.51 The state, albeit reluctantly, had to choose to side against the workers. Now, an explosion in the city harbour was only a matter of time.

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Politicization through Nationalism The discontent on the capital city’s waterfront converged with the most spectacular collective actions of the two Armenian socialist parties in Istanbul. On 28 September 1895, after a long period of preparation, the Hunchakist leaders sent a telegram to the embassies and the government, informing them that they were going to organize a demonstration, ‘of a strictly peaceful character’. The intention was to present a petition about their discontent with the problems in the Armenian provinces (massacres, cruelties and injustices carried out by both local bureaucrats and Kurdish families) and their demands, which referred to basic social and political rights and economic and administrative reforms concerning the Armenian provinces.52 In the petition, the leaders were careful to emphasize that the demands were not only for the benefit of the Armenians, but for all Ottoman subjects. The Hunchakists were aware that those kinds of collective acts were unacceptable to the Ottoman authorities and that the latter would immediately attempt to suppress them, as happened with this demonstration. The fact that some had knives and revolvers with them suggests that they had foreseen such a violent confrontation and were prepared for it.53 In fact, according to Nalbandian, there had been a disagreement among Hunchakist leaders about whether the demonstration should be violent or peaceful.54 Although the final decision favoured the peaceful side, it is likely that not all the members complied with this. The chosen route for the march was again symbolically determined: from the church at Kumkapı to the Sublime Porte. On 30 September, approximately four thousand Armenians came together for a religious ritual, the celebration of the cross. The crowd started to march to the Sublime Porte. They were stopped by the police and dispersed, but they joined again and a deadly fight broke out between the security forces and the demonstrators. A gendarmerie major, Servet Bey, was killed during the conflict, which probably put both sides in a rage. Both Armenian and Turkish narrators of the events agreed that significant numbers of the city’s working classes had been actively involved in this demonstration. There was a simple reason for this: most of the Armenian workers, especially those in the ports, came from the Armenian regions of Eastern Anatolia, where their families had remained and where the workers planned to return after saving enough money.55 The role of the port workers was underlined particularly by Hüseyin Nazım Pasha, then the Minister of Police. At the start of the Monday events, the pasha ordered that no Armenians should be allowed to cross to the Istanbul side. However, this was to no avail, and the pasha soon received alarming

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news of sightings: ‘several Armenians, coming from Galata, Tophane, and Fındıklı by lighters and boats, are arriving at the Sirkeci Dock; also, many Armenian coal heavers and pole porters are passing through the bridge in a drunken mood’.56 Of course, economic discontent, as outlined above, was not the sole motive behind the Armenian workers’ participation in this demonstration. In addition to asking what socio-economic experiences predisposed workers to radical politics, William Sewell argues, ‘historians must also ask what sorts of political processes, events and ideologies induced workers to participate in radical social movements’.57 Similarly, the factors behind the huge response from Armenian working classes were much more complex than this picture shows. The independence of politics and state from the economy must be recognized in order to fully comprehend why only the Armenians, rather than the Muslim, Greek or Jewish working classes, could be mobilized towards such a reaction against the state throughout this process of proletarianization. The tensions between the Armenians of the empire and the state could be clearly traced back to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. A decade later, this took on an organized form as political parties that positioned themselves against the Ottoman state, or at least the rule of Abdulhamid II. Thus, radical agitation had already started before the 1890s. The deterioration of workers’ economic circumstances and their loss of control and autonomy throughout the modernization process probably facilitated the mobilization of Armenian workers by those political organizations. In other words, the recent economic struggles significantly undermined the legitimacy of the state and workers’ loyalties, and this made them much more receptive to organized forms of protest against the authorities. Armenian political activism was not born into a void, but rather bred from a mass of workers who were antagonized as their basic livelihoods were severely undermined by European companies and by the Ottoman state. The massacre of Armenians throughout Anatolia intensified after the Sublime Porte demonstration in the winter of 1895. To avenge and protest those massacres, after a long period of preparation, a group of Dashnakist militants, mostly young students from Europe, with dozens of dynamite sticks and bombs in their bags, occupied the Ottoman Bank building in the Karaköy district of Istanbul, on 26 August 1896.58 According to their plan, once the occupation had taken place, backed by other Dashnakist militias simultaneously attacking the soldiers in different parts of the city, chaos and panic would emerge, as a result of which Istanbul would be occupied by Europeans who would finally put an end to the Armenian problem.59 The militants had sent a message to the

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European ambassadors in which they had protested against the atrocities of the Ottoman government and outlined their demands, legislative changes that had also been demanded by the Hunchakist militias a year earlier: judicial reforms, a European Governor and High Commissioner in the Armenian provinces, a general amnesty, the security of body and property.60 After long negotiations, the militants agreed to leave the bank, and with an escort of soldiers left the city on a French ship. As the news that an Armenian group had occupied the Ottoman Bank spread quickly throughout the city, Muslim mobs, led by ‘white turbaned men’, the students of the madrasahs, began to attack other Armenians in the city and even attempted to directly attack the occupants of the bank, bypassing the soldiers, to which the occupants responded with bombs.61 The days during and after the occupation of the bank witnessed the murders of thousands of Armenians in Istanbul, the exact number of which is unclear.62 Although it is certain that the leaders of the mob were religious students, most of the narratives on the event put another significant group at the forefront: the port workers. ‘At preconcerted signals’, according to Sir George Young, the second secretary of the British Embassy in Istanbul at the time, ‘organized bands of Moslem roughs, Laz boatmen, Softas from the Medressehs, Kurdish hamals and the dregs of the dock guilds, rushed through the streets of Galata, armed with bludgeons, and knocked the panic-stricken Armenians on the head’.63 According to Eldem, the claim that porters with bludgeons played a significant role in the massacres is stated not only in the Armenian and European sources, but also in the Turkish ones, including that of Res¸ad Ekrem Koçu.64 How can this massive participation by the ‘dregs of the dock guilds’ be explained? Initial impressions would suggest that because the port workers were generally considered to be among the most dangerous and problematic groups in the city, it would appear that it would be easier for the softa (religious students of the madrasahs) agitators to convince them to target the Armenians. However, this may only be one part of the complete answer. As shown above, there was fierce competition for jobs, especially between the guild workers and outsiders, something the company attempted to benefit from by introducing a more casual work process at the guild workers’ expense. This was, in fact, part of a larger Ottoman ‘migration crisis’ that extended throughout the nineteenth century from both Eastern Anatolia and the lost Ottoman lands, and thus, as Riedler put it, economic motives in these massacres were at least as crucial as political ones.65 With the increasing appearance of Islamic propaganda and agitation both from the state and the madrasah students, this economic-based

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competition was accompanied by religious fervour among the Muslim lower classes. Strong claims that the massacres had an organized character (with, at the very least, the passive support of the state bureaucracy66) prove that, especially within the context of recent Armenian insurgencies in Anatolia and Istanbul, Muslim subjects in the city could much easier be mobilized against their Armenian counterparts. This context likely paved the way for some Muslim workers to act against their Armenian fellows in order to better access jobs and/or to relieve themselves of the pressure created by the competition for fewer jobs, which was one of the main outcomes of the port modernization. In fact, George Young also highlighted this dimension of the massacres in his own account: ‘In the city, the massacre had one definite economic object, in that it was directed chiefly against the Armenian hamals (the porters). The Kurdish hamals replaced them much to the detriment of trading interests’.67

Conclusion As a result of the massacres, most of the Armenian workers were purged from the city, and the government acted on behalf of Muslim/Kurdish workers by encouraging the latter to replace the Armenians. However, although this attempt to create a more homogenous and loyal labour force may have diluted the intensity of ethno-religious conflicts among workers, it did not decelerate the process of empowerment and politicization along class lines on the part of the workers. Indeed, they were one of the most active groups during the strike waves and the boycott movements following the revolution of 1908. Due to their powerful position, the Committee of Union and Progress, which was at the centre of political power between 1908 and 1918, was quite sensitive with regard to its surveillance of these workers, and carefully managed the leadership of these guilds/associations so as to ensure that their own loyal men were assigned leadership roles. Although further studies are necessary to ascertain the ways in which these struggles evolved in the republican era, we at least know that they were powerful enough to rebel against the shipping companies in the late 1920s.68 A comprehensive focus on the particular history or histories of these workers might allow us to contextualize this strength through an analysis of class formation, a process that continued through various forms of struggle and resistance against the many facets of power, not only in the macro arena, but also in everyday life. Port workers employed a wide spectrum of collective and individual strategies against companies and state elites. Aside from direct collective actions, they interpreted

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the terms and discourses of legal documents in their own interests, a strategy that had in turn been used against them by the elites. They also employed petitioning, but used this as a threat, as a semblance of collective action, or form of pressure on the lower bureaucratic levels, exploiting splits in the Ottoman system. Additionally, the experiences of workers reveal the liminal position of state bureaucracy between the antagonizing forces in this process. The state made deliberate attempts to legitimize its position in opposition to its subjects, while simultaneously attempting to maintain its position in the international arena, in which it had limited manoeuvring space amidst the imperialist inclinations of the ‘great powers’ of the late nineteenth century. The port workers’ manipulation of guilds in opposition to companies in Istanbul was not a peculiar phenomenon but rather a highly popular strategy among the working classes in general. This is a critical characteristic of working class formation in the nineteenth century, because as Cooper reminds us in his reading of Thompson, people ‘struggled not to be a working class … to avoid being reduced to nothing more than the sellers of labor power’.69 Their unionization in this process, through modern or traditional institutions, was a cornerstone in the formation of their collective consciousness against the capital, as we also see throughout the Ottoman port workers’ struggles. The emergence of port workers as a powerful social movement in Istanbul had much to do with the empowerment of the – supposedly weakening – guild structure, as well as their politicization through ethno-religious identity formation, which should be seen not only as an outcome of economic experiences, but also related to the particular characteristics of Armenian political nationalism. However, this empowerment and politicization signifies more than a mere labour dispute against the hegemony-seeking institutions of authority; it also clarifies the disparateness within each group and institution as well as their different domains of struggle. Akın Sefer is a post-doctoral research fellow at Koç University, Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 at Northeastern University, with a dissertation on the connections between working class formation, industrialization and modern state formation in the Ottoman Imperial Arsenal in the nineteenth century. Previously, he wrote an MA thesis at Boğaziçi University on the struggles of port workers in late Ottoman Istanbul. His research continues to focus on working classes and their experiences in the late Ottoman Empire.

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Notes An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the workshop ‘Urban Landscapes of Modernity: Istanbul and the Ruhr Area 2010’, co-organized by the Orient-Institut Istanbul, Istanbul Bilgi University, and Stiftung Bibliothek des Ruhrgebiets Bochum, Istanbul, 15–18 December 2010.  1. For the number of tonnages of shipping between 1830 and 1914 in these and other Ottoman ports, see Table 3.1 in Charles Issawi, An Economic and Social History of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 48.  2. Donald Quataert, ‘The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914’, in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, vol. 2, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 759–943, 800.  3. Issawi, An Economic and Social History, 46.  4. Brant William Downes, ‘Constructing the Modern Ottoman Waterfront: Salonica and Beirut in the Late Nineteenth Century’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2007), 7–8.  5. Quataert, ‘The Age of Reforms’, 802–3.  6. Downes, ‘Constructing the Modern Ottoman Waterfront’, 47.  7. For a discussion of how this immovability gave local urban powers leverage against European colonial interests in the context of urban modernization in Ottoman Beirut, see Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 84–112.  8. See, for example, Colin J. Davis, ‘Formation and Reproduction of Dockers as an Occupational Group’, in Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, vol. 2, ed. Sam Davies et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 542–59.  9. Downes, ‘Constructing the Modern Ottoman Waterfront’, 323–27. 10. Ibid., 330. 11. Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 96–97. 12. Issawi, An Economic and Social History, 50. 13. Ottoman guild members, like their counterparts in Europe, had the advantage of monopolizing in their own crafts by limiting and regulating the membership, which would be seen as a source of job security by non-guild workers. Faroqhi, in her recent study, suggests a second defining characteristic of guild members, namely that they were ‘capable of initiating court cases or petitioning the central administration in order to protect craft interests’. Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), xvi. Ottoman port workers, in particular, were not unified under one guild, but rather divided into many guilds according to their docks, their tasks (e.g. porters and lightermen) and at times even according to their religion. Although this provided the government with better surveillance ability, it did not prevent the workers from acting together in certain cases, as will be shown in the following pages. 14. Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 15. John Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 194. 16. Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire, 204. 17. See Y. Selim Karakıs¸la, ‘1908 Grevleri’, Toplum ve Bilim 78 (1998), 187–208; and Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, 1908 Osmanlı Boykotu: Bir Toplumsal Hareketin Analizi (Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2004). 18. Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives (Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivleri, hereafter BOA) Y.PRK. S¸H. 3/65, 9 Recep 1308 (18 February 1891).

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19. Downes, ‘Constructing the Modern Ottoman Waterfront’, 242. 20. Actually, this was also a serious concern for a number of governments throughout the 1890s, who were reluctant to lose control of the docks due to their fear of the inevitability of severe conflicts between the companies and the workers. John Barzman, ‘States and Dockers: From Harbour Designers to Labour Managers’, in Davies et al., Dock Workers, 627–56, 639. 21. BOA.Y.PRK.S¸H. 3/65, 9 Recep 1308 (18 February 1891), my own translation. ‘…birkaç günden ziyade beklemeğe kudretleri müsaade olamayacağını beyan ve yine bunlardan bazıları yarın gelecek vapura cebren girmeğe muztar kalacaklarını dermiyan eyledikleri cihetle…’. 22. Ibid., my own translation. ‘…acentelerle lostromoların taht-ı himayelerinde bulunan hamallar hükümet-i seniyeye müracaat eden ameleyi gördükçe zukaklarda yuha avezeleriyle tahkir eylemelerine mukabil zaten birkaç günden beri is¸den el çekmis¸ olan amelenin hem hakarete hem açlığa tahammül etmeyerek is¸i bir an evvel neticelendirmek için bir arbede-i azime çıkarmaları ihtimali pek kuvvetli bulunmus¸…’. 23. BOA.Y.PRK.S¸H. 3/65, 22 Recep 1308 (3 March 1891). 24. Halil İnalcık, ‘S¸ikâyet Hakkı: “Arz-ı Hâl” ve “Arz-ı Mahzar’lar”’, Osmanlı Aras¸tırmaları 7–8 (1988), 33–51. 25. See John Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Politics in Egypt on the Eve of Colonial Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37(3) (2005), 303–25, 318. 26. See Lex Heerma van Voss, ed., Petitions in Social History, International Review of Social History Supplement 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27. M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Petitioning as Political Action: Petitioning Practices of Workers in Ottoman Factories’, in Popular Protest and Political Participation in the Ottoman Empire: Studies in Honor of Suraiya Faroqhi, ed. Eleni Gara, M. Erdem Kabadayı and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2011), 57–74. 28. BOA.Y.PRK.S¸H. 3/65. 29. For the whole text of the agreement and statute, see Osman Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-i Umur-ı Belediyye, vol. 5 (Istanbul: İBB Kültür İs¸leri Daire Bas¸kanlığı, 1995), 2796–817. 30. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 303/62, 17 Muharrem 1312 (21 July 1894). 31. BOA.Y.PRK.AZN. 8/2, 22 Muharrem 1312 (26 July 1894). 32. Ibid. 33. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 303/62. 34. Ibid. 35. BOA.Y.MTV. 102/23, 3 Safer 1312 (6 August 1894). 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., my own translation. ‘…nedametten bas¸ka yedlerine bir s¸ey geçmeyeceği’. 38. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 336/48, 28 Muharrem 1313 (21 July 1895), ‘…rıhtıma yanas¸mıs¸ sefainden çıkarılacak ve sahilden bu sefaine nakl edilcek emtianın esnaf mavnalarıyla naklini…’. See also Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance, 104. 39. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 320/7, 20 S¸aban 1312 (16 February 1895). 40. Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance, 104–5. 41. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 320/10, 20 S¸aban 1312 (16 February 1895), my own translation: ‘mavnacılar devlet-i âliye tebasından olmasıyla bunların muhafaza-i menafi’-i esbabının biran evvel istihsali …’. 42. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 320/10. 43. Ibid., ‘yüz almalarından nes¸’et ettiği’. Such rhetoric highlights the dominant mindset of Ottoman officials, who often attributed the persistence of port workers’ contentious actions to the state’s excessive tolerance towards the workers throughout those years. 44. Ibid.

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45. ‘“supalan” tabirinin manası es¸yanın deniz üzerinde sahibi tarafından irade olunan mahalle tesliminden ibaret olduğu …’. The full text of the report can be found in BOA.Y.A.HUS. 336/48, 23 Rabiulevvel 1313 (13 September 1895). 46. Ibid., ‘and from now on, no concession can be made on this matter, and if this controversy does not come to an end, Granet declared, he will have to close the Quay …’; my translation. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. BOA.Y.PRK.ZB. 16/45, 22 Rabiulevvel 1313 (12 September 1895). 50. Ibid. 51. BOA.Y.A.HUS. 336/48. 52. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 124; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 1997), 119. 53. New York Times, 4 October 1895. 54. Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 123. 55. Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance, 97; Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 120. See also the letter from M.S. Gabriel of the Armenian Patriotic Alliance in the United States, which points out that the event was not organized under the leadership of Hunchakists, ‘an insignificant party, unpopular in Constantinople, and scarcely ever heard of in Armenia’. Rather, it was the Armenian migrants in Istanbul, ‘the true representatives of the Armenian provinces’, that attempted this action. New York Times, 11 October 1895. 56. Hüseyin Nazım Pas¸a, Hatıralarım (Istanbul: Selis Kitaplar, 2003), 21. 57. William H. Sewell Jr., ‘Uneven Development, the Autonomy of Politics, and the Dockworkers of Nineteenth Century Marseille’, The American Historical Review 93(3) (1988), 604–37, 608. 58. For details of how they prepared, see the memoirs of Armen Garo, one of the leaders of the group: Armen Garo, Bank Ottoman: Memoirs of Armen Garo, ed. Simon Vratzian (Detroit, MI: Armen Topouzian, 1990), 90–105. 59. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 104. 60. Ibid., 139; Edhem Eldem, ‘26 Ağustos 1896 “Banka Vakası” ve 1896 “Ermeni Olayları”’, Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklas¸ımlar 5 (2007), 113–46, 114. 61. Garo, Bank Ottoman, 128–30. 62. There has been an ongoing dispute between Armenian and Turkish historians about the number of casualties, of which an overall assessment was made by Eldem, ‘26 Ağustos 1896 “Banka Vakası”’, 130–39. 63. George Young, Constantinople (London: Methuen & Co., 1926), 224. 64. Eldem, ‘26 Ağustos 1896 “Banka Vakası”’, 142–44. 65. Florian Riedler, ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of the 1890s’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 160–76, 169. 66. Even the Armenian militias occupying the bank were aware that as soon as the occupation took place, the massacres would begin. Garo, Bank Ottoman, 119. Eldem, informed by Garo’s memoirs, argues that this was the exact aim of the militias: Eldem, ‘26 Ağustos 1896 “Banka Vakası”’, 120. 67. Young, Constantinople, 225. 68. Fatma Yalçın, ‘1927 Yılında İstanbul Limanında Mavnacılar Grevi’, Toplumsal Tarih 200 (2010), 80–86. 69. Frederick Cooper, ‘Dockworkers and Labor History’, in Davies et al., Dock Workers, 523–41, 525.

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Bibliography Barzman, John. ‘States and Dockers: From Harbour Designers to Labour Managers’, in Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, vol. 2, edited by Sam Davies et al., 627–56. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Çetinkaya, Y. Doğan. 1908 Osmanlı Boykotu: Bir Toplumsal Hareketin Analizi. Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2004. Chalcraft, John. The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.  . ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Politics in Egypt on the Eve of Colonial Rule’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 37(3) (2005), 303–25. Cooper, Frederick. ‘Dockworkers and Labor History’, in Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, vol. 2, edited by Sam Davies et al., 523–41. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. New York: Berghahn Books, 1997. Davis, Colin J. ‘Formation and Reproduction of Dockers as an Occupational Group’, in Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970, vol. 2, edited by Sam Davies et al., 542–59. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Downes, Brant William. ‘Constructing the Modern Ottoman Waterfront: Salonica and Beirut in the Late Nineteenth Century’. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2007. Eldem, Edhem. ‘26 Ağustos 1896 “Banka Vakası” ve 1896 “Ermeni Olayları”.’ Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklas¸ımlar 5 (2007), 113–46. Ergin, Osman Nuri. Mecelle-i Umur-ı Belediyye, vol. 5. Istanbul: İBB Kültür İs¸leri Daire Bas¸kanlığı, 1995. Faroqhi, Suraiya. Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Garo, Armen. Bank Ottoman: Memoirs of Armen Garo, edited by Simon Vratzian. Detroit, MI: Armen Topouzian, 1990. Hanssen, Jens. Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Heerma van Voss, Lex, ed. Petitions in Social History. International Review of Social History Supplement 9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hüseyin Nazım Pas¸a. Hatıralarım. Istanbul: Selis Kitaplar, 2003. İnalcık, Halil. ‘S¸ikâyet Hakkı: “Arz-ı Hâl” ve “Arz-ı Mahzar’Lar”’. Osmanlı Aras¸tırmaları 7–8 (1988), 33–54. Issawi, Charles. An Economic and Social History of the Middle East and North Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kabadayı, M. Erdem. ‘Petitioning as Political Action: Petitioning Practices of Workers in Ottoman Factories’, in Popular Protest and Political Participation in the Ottoman Empire: Studies in Honor of Suraiya Faroqhi, edited by Eleni Gara, M. Erdem Kabadayı and Christoph K. Neumann, 57–74. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2011. Karakıs¸la, Y. Selim. ‘1908 Grevleri’. Toplum ve Bilim 78 (1998), 187–208. Nalbandian, Louise. The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Quataert, Donald. Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881– 1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration. New York: New York University Press, 1983.  . Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  . ‘The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914’, in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman

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Empire, 1300–1914, vol. 2, edited by Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, 759–943. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Riedler, Florian. ‘Armenian Labour Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of the 1890s’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, edited by Ulrike Freitag et al., 160–76. New York: Routledge, 2011. Sewell, William H., Jr. ‘Uneven Development, the Autonomy of Politics, and the Dockworkers of Nineteenth Century Marseille’. The American Historical Review 93(3) (1988), 604–37. Yalçın, Fatma. ‘1927 Yılında İstanbul Limanında Mavnacılar Grevi’. Toplumsal Tarih 200 (2010), 80–86. Young, George. Constantinople. London: Methuen & Co., 1926.

Chapter 7

Labourers, Refugees, Revolutionaries

Ottoman Perceptions of Armenian Emigration

Sinan Dinçer

The 1908 constitutionalist revolution in the Ottoman Empire brought an end to the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II that had lasted for three decades. ‘Liberty’ emerged as a magic word; the multiethnic and multi-religious population of the empire expected it to bring an immediate end to all troubles, including ethno-religious tensions. It was not long, however, before most of these hopes proved to be false. Given the limited means of the government, there was no quick relief for the economic, political and administrative shortcomings of the empire; ethno-religious tensions – after a brief pause – returned as well. Despite fundamental changes to the political system, such as the reopening of parliament, the curbing of the power of the palace and the partial abolition of censorship, there seemed to be little change in the everyday lives of the common people, and especially the peasantry, which constituted the vast majority of the population. However, there was one concrete ‘liberty’ that was an undeniable improvement in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Soon after the revolution, tens of thousands of refugees started to return from abroad, mostly from the United States and the Russian Transcaucasia.1 The refugees were almost exclusively Armenians; many of them had been away since the mid 1890s, some even longer, separated from their families and homelands. Thus, the revolution of 1908 brought an abrupt end to one of the most significant refugee situations in the world at that time.

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The return of large numbers of Armenian refugees had a significant impact on the political and economic situation in Anatolia during the years following the revolution. However, neither the contemporaneous public opinion nor current historiography has seemed to perceive the significance of the return of the refugees, or the refuge situation. Despite consecutive legislative actions to compensate a handful of celebrated political exiles, who were mostly intellectuals or civil servants,2 the situation of the Armenian refugees was mentioned only briefly in the Ottoman parliament in the context of general laws regarding reform in Eastern Anatolia.3 Even their return was a de facto situation instead of a formal legislative arrangement; none of the four general amnesties issued within the two months following the revolution dealt with the situation of the refugees.4 This was perhaps not surprising considering the blurred nature of the beginning of the refugee issue. Despite peak points, like the exodus during the Armenian massacres in Anatolia and Istanbul in 1895 and 1896, the Armenian refugee issue materialized only gradually. In other words, a significant portion of the multitude of Armenian refugees in the United States, in the Russian Transcaucasia and in various Balkan countries did not come to be there as a result of the movement of people at a particular time due to a particular incident; rather, the refugees largely consisted of people who had not fled from violence or persecution, but who had emigrated temporarily as labourers. They became refugees gradually, as the Ottoman government implemented initially moderate restrictive measures against the return of the Armenian migrant labourers from 1893 onwards, followed by an imperial order permanently abolishing the return of Armenian emigrants in October 1896, which was vigorously implemented until the revolution in 1908.5 As we will see in the course of this chapter, this process was defined by a transition from the category of migrant labourer to refugee, in parallel with a shift in the Ottoman government’s perception of Ottoman-Armenians abroad. The most significant official reason for these measures was to prevent the infiltration of Armenian political organizations into the Ottoman Empire.6 Parallel to this was a concern that returning migrants would create a channel for foreign state interference in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, the gradual implementation of travel restrictions was accompanied by a redefinition of Ottoman subjecthood and by complicated diplomatic negotiations between the Ottoman Empire and the United States and Russia. However, due to the limitations of this chapter, and to remain faithful to the general focus of this volume, this chapter will deal with one particular aspect, namely the qualities inherent to the labour migration process in general, which induced the Ottoman government to perceive the Armenian migrant

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labourers as a political threat, and to implement measures to exclude them from the empire. In other words, I argue that the Ottoman government’s perception of a political threat was largely shaped by processes and networks that emerged as inalienable features of most contemporary cases of labour migration in the world. In this respect, the legislatively constructed transition of the status of Armenian sojourners from migrant labourers to political refugees was, to a great extent, the result of the Ottoman government’s failure to correctly interpret the relations of causality between labour migration and the environing socioeconomic dynamics.

Fishing for Sources Despite the gradually increasing scholarly interest during the last two decades in labour emigration from the Ottoman Empire,7 which mostly focuses on the transatlantic route, studies dealing exclusively with the Ottoman state’s response to the emigration are still very rare. One of the two major scholarly works in this area is Engin Deniz Akarlı’s article on the Ottoman government’s response to emigration from LebaneseSyrian territories during the Hamidian era.8 Despite its excellence in demonstrating the perception of that emigration movement by Ottoman statesmen, as well as discussing the state’s measures and their outcomes, it is of limited use in understanding the case of the Armenian migrants, since the Ottoman Empire’s perceptions of, and policies on, emigration varied greatly depending on the ethno-religious identity of the emigrants in question. The other major work on this subject is Nedim İpek’s article that demarcated the state’s response to the return of the Armenian emigrants to the Ottoman domains.9 Although this article was unprecedented in terms of its comprehensiveness, its analytical power was weakened through its uncritical reproduction of the Ottoman government’s point of view on this issue. There are also other studies that deal with particular episodes of this subject, albeit for our purposes less comprehensively.10 While scholarly works on Armenian migrant labourers are scant, there is a disproportionately large amount of scholarly work on the ‘Armenian Question’ in the Ottoman Empire due to the political significance of the tragic incidents related to the forced relocation of Armenians during World War I. This vast literature makes little or no effort to place the violent incidents within a socio-economic context and, hence, does not cover the role of Armenian labourers in political developments within the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, these scholarly works, as well as the compilations of primary sources, like the collections

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of archival documents published by the Turkish state over the past two decades, contain significant amounts of information, which can be used to reconstruct the Armenian labour migration experience and its impact on the political situation.

General Characteristics of Ottoman Labour Migration Labour migration from the Ottoman Empire was a continuation or extension of domestic labour migration. Whereas labour migration from the provinces to major cities of the empire, most importantly to Istanbul, was a centuries-old phenomenon, it was during the nineteenth century that mobility of labour in the Ottoman domains reached an unprecedented level. The major motivation for emigration was earning money. The central state, with its ever-tightening grip on the provinces, increasingly demanded monetary taxes as opposed to taxes in kind. However, due to deficient means of transportation, most peasants had no chance of marketing their agricultural products. Thus, migrating to the cities was one of the few ways of earning money to pay the taxes.11 On the other hand, as a strategy of risk management, among other reasons, most peasants did not wish to settle in the cities permanently. Thus, labour migration in the Ottoman Empire developed as a family strategy, in which one or more male members of the family went to the city to earn money, while the rest of the family remained in the village to work the land.12 In general, the aim of the migrant was to earn the required sum in the shortest time possible, and to return to his village. In order to secure continued employment, another member of the family was usually sent to the city to replace the returning migrant. In many cases this strategy went beyond the family level and expanded to the level of villages, creating locality-based networks in which inhabitants of one or more villages interchangeably occupied a niche, or a certain number of positions in the city’s job market. Whereas the need for money in the countryside constituted a continuous motivation for migration, war, disorder and consecutive years of drought could induce large numbers of people to seek refuge in cities temporarily. Such ‘refugee’ situations had the potential of initiating new routes of labour migration during the following years. Overall, the increasing supply of migrant labourers from the countryside was met by an ever-increasing demand for labour in Istanbul and other port cities, which rapidly entered the world trade market over the course of the nineteenth century, thus requiring ever more labourers to facilitate trade. Finally, steamships regularly operating between Ottoman ports made labour more mobile than ever. As a result of these

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developments, towards the end of the nineteenth century a significant portion of Ottoman villagers were involved in migrant networks, combining circular migration with chain migration.13 Over time, corresponding means of state control also developed. Guild-like corporations, municipalities and the modern police force not only gave the government the means to establish state authority over the provincial migrant workers in the city, but, together with the regime of internal passports, they also made the control of this massive movement of people possible.14 If the Ottoman government felt that public order in the cities was being threatened by migrant labourers, it had the means to send them back to their provinces.

The Thin Line between Refugee and Migrant Labourer In the 1890s, when migration from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas grew rapidly, there were three major geographical sources of international emigrants in the empire. One was the Lebanese-Syrian provinces, which sent immigrants to North and South American countries. Another source was the Balkans, sending people both to the United States and Russia. In the Ottoman case, the motivation for international migration was usually the same as domestic migration. Consequently, just like domestic migration, the migration to foreign countries was to a significant extent circular, and operated through locality-based networks.15 However, in the case of international migration there was one additional motivation, the importance of which varied greatly depending on time and place: evading Ottoman jurisdiction. Apart from obvious motivations such as escaping prison sentences or compulsory military service, persecution by the state or inter-communal violence could be a reason for emigration for certain groups at certain times. The latter two reasons could create a grey area, where the categories of migrant labourer and refugee intermingled. For example, the collection of taxes in arrears, although remaining within the boundaries of the law, could be undertaken by the government and lead to the persecution and penalization of a group, forcing them to seek work abroad in order to accumulate the money.16 Similarly, intercommunal violence, which was almost always accompanied by plundering and destruction of the means of livelihood, could induce people to work abroad temporarily to earn enough money to rebuild their lives in their homelands. Furthermore, people who had to flee abroad to avoid violence, like the Armenians escaping to foreign ports on board ships during the massacre in Istanbul in August–September 1896, had to make a living there, in case conditions did not allow them to speedily return

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home.17 Furthering the flux between the categories of migrant labourer and refugee was the fact that, more often than not, refugees sought to go to places frequented by their relatives and countrymen. Finally, there were cases in which the persecution was relatively subtle, with the effect of solely changing preferences with regards to the route of migration. According to an early study on the Armenian immigrants in the United States, the Armenian migrant ‘merely substituted New York for Constantinople, a city steadily growing less safe for Armenian residence and less productive of profitable employment’.18 All these factors blurred the line between the migrant labourer and the refugee.

A New Phenomenon: International Labour Migration For the Ottoman state, emigration of its subjects to foreign countries was fundamentally different than domestic migration in terms of the governability of the process. Unlike domestic migration, all stages of which could more or less be controlled by the state, it could only control the departure and return stages of international migration. In comparison with its institutionalized means of control over domestic migrant labourers, at least initially the government had very little knowledge of, and no control at all over, the networks of Ottoman migrant labourers abroad. It was only later that the Ottoman government was able to systematically collect information about them, and consequently adopted the limiting of the right of return for emigrants as a punitive means of control. In the 1880s, when the Eastern Anatolian provinces were still recovering from the shock of the devastating Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and when the government – rightly or wrongly – perceived the sporadic expressions of discontent among the Armenians in these provinces as signs of the emergence of a nationalist or separatist political movement, labour migration to foreign countries was still a relatively new phenomenon for the Ottoman government. Compounded with the predicament of having limited means to intervene in international labour migration, two factors spurred the government’s perception of the emigration of Armenians as a threat. On the one hand, by that time several Armenian political organizations, albeit with very limited influence, had emerged in foreign countries. One was the Armenakan Party, which was founded in Van in 1885. Although this organization was based in Eastern Anatolia, its ‘rallying point’ and unofficial publication, the journal Armenia, was published in Marseilles by Mekertitch Portugalian. That city was also among the major ports of transit for Armenians immigrating to the United States. There was also the Hunchak Party, which was founded in

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Geneva in 1887 by a group of Armenian students from Russia. During the following years, this party managed to open branches in a number of places, including those Bulgarian, Romanian and US cities frequented by Armenian immigrants. Finally, there was the Dashnaktsuthiun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) founded in 1890 in Tbilisi, the administrative centre of Transcaucasia, which also attracted tens of thousands of Armenian migrants every year.19 The presence of these parties put almost every Armenian visiting these places under suspicion of subversion from the point of view of the Ottoman government. Another issue that clouded the Ottoman government’s view of the immigration of Armenians to Russia and the United States was the way in which this movement was initiated. In the Transcaucasian case, the Russian state had actively encouraged the immigration of Armenians. As part of the annexation of Transcaucasia by the Russian Empire and its colonization, Armenians in Anatolia and Iran were encouraged to settle there after the wars of Russia with Iran in 1826–28 and the Ottoman Empire in 1828–29. Some sources estimate that around one hundred thousand Anatolian Armenians immigrated to Transcaucasia at that time.20 Those who settled there had relatives and kinsmen in the Ottoman domains, which possibly facilitated an ongoing cross-border movement of men and goods. While the strategy of colonization of under-populated lands through migrants was used by both empires with political and economic ends, it was the strategic colonization of Transcaucasia as a commercial and military border region, and subsequent industrial development, which acted as a pull factor for the labour emigration from Eastern Anatolia. According to the Russian Ministry of the Interior, as early as 1845 many Armenian masons and carpenters were coming to Transcaucasia and monopolized these professions in the region.21 From the 1870s onwards, oil extraction created an industrial boom in Transcaucasia, generating an ever-increasing demand for labourers. By 1897, oil production in Transcaucasia had surpassed US oil production.22 Tens of thousands of Armenian labourers, probably both natives and immigrants, were employed at the oil wells in Baku, at the oil refineries in Batumi, and in the factories, primarily tobacco and chemicals, in Tbilisi.23 The oil industry created a large number of side jobs, which were spread throughout the region. A significant example were the six thousand labourers in Batumi who were employed in building tin gas cans and wooden boxes for the export of oil.24 Parallel to these developments, the construction of railroads created another significant demand for seasonal labour. Together with native Armenians, Georgians, Azeris and Russians, both Muslim and Christian migrant labourers from the Ottoman Empire and Iran constituted the multi-ethnic and

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multi-religious workforce of the region. Of course, even though the Armenians might have dominated the migration from the Ottoman domains to Transcaucasia, numerous sources indicate that Muslims and Greeks had also joined this movement in significant numbers.25 However, despite the industrial boom, from the 1870s onwards the movement of people from the Ottoman Empire to Russia increased only moderately, suggesting that by the 1870s the Ottoman–Russian migrant networks had already matured and the supply of labour had already approached its limits.26 However, considering the gradual expansion and establishment of the Russian Empire in Transcaucasia during the course of the nineteenth century, and the strategic significance of population movements in this process, it is not surprising that the uneasiness of the Ottoman Empire concerning the migration of Armenians to Russia did not correlate with the increase in the number of emigrants. The circular nature of this migration might have partially relieved Eastern Anatolia from a significant loss of population, but it also increased the risk of the penetration of Russian political influence into Eastern Anatolia.27 Despite the Russian government’s apparent full cooperation with the Ottoman authorities in the suppression of Armenian political movements, the Ottoman government still considered Transcaucasia a hotbed of Armenian subversion from the 1880s onwards.28 In the case of the initiation of immigration to the United States, Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire played a crucial role. This was especially the case in the Eastern Anatolian town of Harput, where missionaries were present from 1851 onwards.29 Several accounts suggest that the missionaries did not willingly encourage the migration of Armenians to the United States, yet their preaching about the marvels of life in the New World was effective enough to motivate some pioneering immigrants to undertake the difficult trip to this uncharted territory.30 Although the migration of Armenians from Harput to the United States gradually expanded to other localities in Eastern Anatolia, as well as to other ethno-religious groups in the region, Harput still remained at the centre of this movement. By 1914, some of the peasants working on the fields in the vicinity of Harput could speak English as a result of labour migration.31 Relations between the Ottoman state and the Protestant missionaries are a subject that cannot be adequately handled here, but suffice to say that even though the Ottoman government tolerated the operation of the missionaries, primarily due to pressure from the United Kingdom and the United States, it eyed them with suspicion. In particular, the missionary schools in Eastern Anatolia, which were attended by many Armenian children, were suspected by the Ottoman government of contributing to the spread of subversive and nationalist ideas among

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the Armenians. The government at times inquired about relations between the American Protestant churches and the Armenian migrants in the United States through its consuls. In this respect, in March 1893 Alexandre Mavroyéni, the Ottoman Ambassador in the United States from 1886 to 1896, commented that while the Armenians themselves had no impact on the US government, some of them had converted to Protestantism with the intention of persuading the Protestant missionaries to put pressure on the US government.32 Other consuls were not as alert as Mavroyéni Bey regarding the conversion of Armenian migrant labourers. According to a report by the Ottoman consul in San Francisco in 1895, the majority of Armenians in California joined the Protestant church to improve their social status, and their spiritual interest diminished once they had been officially converted.33 In any case, the involvement of the missionaries in the emigration of Armenians probably kept alive the Ottoman government’s suspicion about the presence of an ulterior political motive behind the emigration.

Too Sudden to Control: The Trouble with Returning Immigrants What made the immigration to the United States even more frightening for the Ottoman government was perhaps that its dramatic development corresponded to a time when the government’s sensitivity regarding Eastern Anatolia had peaked. In a similar manner to Transcaucasia, the industrial boom in the United States was the major pull factor, demonstrated by the fact that the typical Armenian immigrant to the United States was a factory worker in New England.34 According to official US statistics, which, notwithstanding their unreliability, give some idea about the course of development of the movement, annual immigration to the United States from ‘Asiatic Turkey’, which also included Syria and Lebanon, was as low as fifteen in 1886, whereas it almost doubled every year from 1888 to 1891, when it approached 2,500. Afterwards the increase was arrested until 1896, when the number jumped from the previous year’s 2,767 to 4,139 and reached 4,732 in 1897. After another period of stagnation, and a slight decline, it started to increase in 1901, reaching 7,118 in 1903.35 According to Armenian organizations, by 1894, before the start of the Armenian massacres in Eastern Anatolia, there were around ten thousand Armenians of Ottoman descent in the United States.36 Thus, the migration to the United States evolved from an insignificant phenomenon into a movement of thousands in the few years from the mid 1880s to the early 1890s, the very same period of

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time when the Ottoman government had to deal with Armenian political parties of hitherto unseen qualities. After a while, some of the Armenian workers in the factories of New England made steps towards permanent settlement and moved to the west. The farms of Armenians in Fresno, California, apparently functioned as a means of transition for permanent settlement. Replicating their mode of production in the Ottoman lands, these Armenians brought their families to the United States and operated their farms as family establishments.37 Another example was the settlement of around 350 Armenians in Chicago in the aftermath of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.38 Nevertheless, among the Armenians the circular nature of the migration was maintained to a significant degree. This introduced another problem for the Ottoman state, namely the naturalization of the Armenians who, upon their return to the Ottoman Empire, would claim US protection as a result of the treaties and capitulations giving the citizens of signatory countries extraterritoriality in the Ottoman domains. Whereas this issue constituted a significant part of the Ottoman state’s concern about the Armenian migrants returning from the United States, its course of development will be excluded from this chapter, since it does not contribute to the understanding of the government’s concern relating to features of labour migration. However, it should be mentioned that at times some Ottoman statesmen, like the Minister of Police in 1892, described the migration of Armenians to the United States in terms of their desire to become US citizens and to enjoy US protection upon their return.39 In relation to this, in March 1888 the Ottoman government had declared to the provinces and related bodies that the US government had decided not to accept ‘those who went there for work’. Based on this argument, the Ottoman government sent back to Harput seventy people who had arrived in Istanbul for the purpose of going to the United States, and in April 1888 informed all relevant government bodies that they should not issue passports for those who wanted to go to the United States and elsewhere for work or ‘for harmful aims’, meaning political subversion.40 In this respect, the initial steps towards the banning of the return of Armenian migrants involved naturalized Armenians, and only later was it generalized to include all Armenian migrants.

Profitability of Illegality: Smuggling of Men The prospect of earning high wages abroad, together with the restrictions on travel imposed by the Ottoman government through the passport laws, as well as by the United States through the various immigration

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acts, made the smuggling of migrants a lucrative business. The passport system imposed by the Ottoman state required the applicant to have paid his taxes, including those in arrears, and usually also to give guarantees for his future taxes. Getting passports was costly; apart from the fee officially required by the state, the applicant usually had to bribe the responsible authorities.41 The difficulties were uneven for different ethno-religious groups. In the case of the Armenians, getting a passport was normally extremely difficult, even though this was relaxed in the period preceding the ban on the return of Armenian emigrants in October 1896. Apparently, the Muslim Turks, who constituted the backbone of the Ottoman army, also faced considerable difficulties, especially if they were potential candidates for military service. For other groups it was usually easier to procure a passport.42 Under these circumstances, leaving the country without a passport became an attractive alternative. Even during exceptional times, when restrictions against the issuing of passports were somewhat relaxed, some foreign observers estimated that the majority of Armenians still left the country without passports.43 Whereas those who left the country illegally had the chance of procuring a passport for their return from the Ottoman consulates abroad, they often opted to also evade the authorities during their return, since the Armenians, especially those returning from Transcaucasia, were more likely to face difficulties at the Ottoman border. Migrants were smuggled through land borders, as well as maritime boundaries. For Armenians who wanted to emigrate, Trabzon, Samsun, Mersin and Iskenderun were the primary ports of exit. Since many ships that operated between these ports and domestic destinations for migrant labourers, such as Istanbul, Izmir and Beirut, continued their journey to foreign ports, the Armenians with internal passports for these destinations could theoretically trick the authorities by boarding these ships for domestic ports, and then failing to disembark. This, on the other hand, gave the Ottoman authorities an excuse for arresting or sending back to their provinces the Armenians who arrived in these exit ports, even when they had a valid passport for their domestic destination.44 Once the emigrant set foot on a foreign ship, the Ottoman government had no means to retrieve him.45 The primary actors involved in the smuggling in and out of people at the seaports were boatmen and Ottoman officials, who took bribes from the migrants.46 At least in some cases, Kurdish guides were instrumental in human smuggling through the land borders.47 Although the Armenian migrant labourer’s preference for a clandestine exit and entry was largely a result of the restrictive travel regime of the state, the Ottoman government considered this frequent breach

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of law as a further reason to suspect Armenian migrant labourers. The very mechanisms used for smuggling out workers were also used for smuggling in militants, guns and explosives by the Armenian revolutionary organizations, as various Ottoman intelligence demonstrated.48 Perhaps the most significant examples of such activity took place at the Russian border. Just like the Armenian migrant labourers returning from Transcaucasia clandestinely in groups, gangs of Armenian militants supposedly trained and armed across the border were entering the Ottoman domains. Demonstrating the (mis)interpretation of such movements across the border by Ottoman statesmen, a report by the Ottoman consul general in Batumi in October 1895 warned Istanbul about several armed gangs consisting of hundreds of Armenian revolutionaries crossing the border, at least one of which consisted of labourers.49 Whereas some gangs of Armenian revolutionaries certainly slipped across the border, the exaggerated numbers mentioned by the consul general implied that he was unable or unwilling to differentiate between Armenian revolutionaries and migrant labourers. No matter the extent to which this example is merely representative of the Ottoman statesmen’s own views, for the authorities, distinguishing between Armenian militants and migrants captured while crossing the border was a difficult task and required extensive investigations.

Cross-Border Networks Smuggling at the border was only the tip of the iceberg. It was, perhaps, the extensive organization complementing the smuggling that made the Ottoman government more anxious about the migrant labourers. Clueless peasants with limited means trying to leave the country would be easy prey for the Ottoman security forces. The necessity of experience and connections for smuggling meant that these emigrants required the assistance of middlemen, who did this on a regular basis. More importantly, the relatively high cost of immigration necessitated some kind of credit institution. These functions were fulfilled by agencies. The agencies conveying immigrants to the United States paid for the ship fare and other travel costs and lent them the required money to show to US immigration officials. Several cases suggest that mortgaging the land and property of the peasant was common practice in, at the very least, the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire.50 A further service provided by the agencies was the arrangement of employment and accommodation for the immigrant. This ‘service’ was also a must for the agencies, which had to ensure timely payment for

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the services mentioned above. The result of this arrangement was the so-called ‘padrone system’. To use the immigration sociologist Davie’s precise definition: the padrone was a labour agent who agreed to furnish and control a certain supply of labour for a specified work, in return for which he was to receive certain concessions, as for example the commissary or housing privileges in a railway or other construction camp. In other cases he acted merely as the representative of the labourers in negotiations with employers or other persons, and for this service each labourer in his gang regularly paid him a specified amount. The padrone did aid the newly arrived immigrant in numerous respects, such as getting him a job, finding him lodgings, handling his money or transmitting it to Europe for him, but he usually charged exorbitantly for every service rendered.51

Another function of the agencies was the recruitment of emigrants, which could take place in the villages or port cities. While recruitment of emigrants in their villages was apparently not as institutionalized as in Greece,52 the most obvious reason being the restrictions imposed by the Ottoman government during the Hamidian era, there were still some instances demonstrating that such middlemen were also operating in Eastern Anatolia. According to a letter to the Ottoman Embassy from an Armenian informant from Worcester in 1891, the immigration of Armenians to the United States was on the rise. Behind this trend were several organizations in Harput, which had branches in Istanbul and the United States. At least one of these organizations was led by a certain Gaspar Nahigyan, a native of Hüseynik village, which was described as a ‘centre of subversion’. The organization’s branch in Istanbul was also run by people from Harput, whereas it was Nahigyan’s son who ran the organization’s branch in the United States. The organization lent money to those intending to migrate, and received it back with interest when they began work in the United States. The informant also claimed that the Armenians, as well as the Muslims in Harput, were receiving letters of recommendation from the Protestant missionaries.53 The informant’s letter, to the extent of its reliability, demonstrated that even though the Protestant missionaries had initiated and perhaps still supported immigration, it was now run by a profit-oriented agency. Nahigyan was probably a former immigrant himself and employed his relatives or kinsmen for his operations, which covered recruitment in Harput, transit in Istanbul and employment in the United States. Whereas the family business model of the agency, as well as the concentration of recruitment activities in Harput, resembled chain migration, perhaps due to the commercialization of the network, the recruitment efforts of the

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agency expanded to include Muslims too.54 The spread of the desire to migrate from Armenians to Muslims was possibly even more problematic for the Ottoman government, especially in Eastern Anatolia, where the population ratios of different ethno-religious groups were of political significance. Notwithstanding Nahigyan’s agency, in the Ottoman context the most common method seemed to be the recruitment of emigrants in port cities. Port cities gave the recruiter several advantages, the most important of which was the presence of a significant number of migrant labourers from remote villages, thus saving the recruiter the costs and risks of travelling inland. Furthermore, considering the restrictions against internal travelling, the migrant labourer went to the port city at his own risk, thus diminishing the risk of the recruiter. Most importantly, the migrant labourer in the city was a man already on the move, who did not need to decide whether he would migrate or not, but simply to which destination. Recruitment and human smuggling were operating right under the nose of the government, in the capital city. A dispatch from the Ottoman general consul in the Romanian port city of Galati, dated January 1885, reported on the distress of Armenian migrant labourers there. According to the consul, this situation was caused by an ‘agency’, consisting of two Armenian innkeepers, who went to Istanbul every spring and lured Armenian porters to Galati with promises of higher wages. Whereas it was true that the porters in Galati were paid more, there was no work for them in winter; this information was omitted by the innkeepers. Although the migrant labourers were indeed able to save money during the port’s busy season, during the winter they resided idly at the inns of these agents. Soon their savings were spent and they had to depend on the credit provided by the innkeepers. By the end of the winter the porters were heavily indebted to the innkeepers, so they had to stay in Galati and resume work as porters to pay their debts. They also wasted some of their income on prostitution and gambling. There were around eighty Armenian porters in this position, some of whom were quite ill. The consul was able to help about forty of them to return to their homelands; the rest had become used to the decadent lifestyle and did not want to leave, so the consul had to ask the Romanian authorities to scare them away. The general consul pleaded with the Ottoman government to prevent the operation of these labour agents.55 Noticeably, there was no word about subversion in the report of the general consul; the connection between Armenian labourers and subversion had not yet arisen. However, five years later, the same general consul in Galati sent a report concerning a certain coffeehouse, where Armenian porters from Erzurum and Mus¸ gathered, and where the journal Armenia was

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distributed and donations were collected for the repair of a Catholic church in Mus¸. The general consul also stressed that these migrant labourers had come to Galati without passports. After inquiries made by the Ottoman government, it turned out that the Armenian Catholic Patriarch had not authorized the collection of funds for this purpose.56 Following the imperial order of October 1896, the Armenian porters in Galati were among those whose return to the Ottoman domains was not permitted.57

A Challenge: Telling Revolutionaries and Migrant Labourers Apart From the point of view of the Ottoman government, the operations of these well-organized agencies resembled the recruitment and smuggling efforts of the Armenian political organizations. Although the Sublime Porte was aware as early as 1889 that such agencies were active in the emigration not only of Armenians but also of Lebanese Syrians,58 political concerns overwhelmed the economic dimension of the operation of agencies in the Armenian case. This perspective was supported by concrete cases, a salient example of which existed in the Romanian port city of Sulina. Aghbiur Serop, from the village of Soghort in Ahlat near Lake Van, who later became an important Dashnaktsuthiun commander, took refuge first in Istanbul and then in Sulina after killing a Kurd in self-defence. There he began work as a cook and then started to operate an Armenian coffeehouse, which was frequented by Hunchakists and Dashnakists. After joining the Dashnaktsuthiun in 1893, he began to organize fedayeen (armed volunteer) units from among the Armenian ‘exiles’ in Romania in 1894. In the summer of 1895 these units were dispatched to the Ottoman domains and one of them was commanded by Serop.59 Der Minasian’s account was complemented by a report from the Governorate of Trabzon, which reconstructed the confession of an Armenian from a village in Van, Koçi oğlu Adom, who was arrested in Rize on his way from Batumi to Constanta in 1896. According to his statement, he had migrated to Istanbul and worked as a porter at the customhouse for a while. Upon receiving consecutive calls from a Hunchak leader in Sulina, he went there and joined their recruitment efforts. With the fedayeen he gathered there, he infiltrated the Ottoman domains through Kars in the summer of 1895.60 Notwithstanding the discrepancy in the name of the organization in question, which might very well be due to an error of one of the sources, and considering the similarities in the dates of the entrance of fedayeen

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units to the Ottoman domains, it is very likely that the two narratives refer to the same network in Sulina. Comparing these two accounts with the case of the Armenian migrant labourers in Galati mentioned above demonstrates the similarities between them, which must have increased the anxiety of Ottoman statesmen about Armenian migrants. In both cases, Armenians had gone to Istanbul and worked there as porters. Again, in both cases, the porters were recruited by Armenians operating establishments of a similar type, albeit with different purposes. Finally, in the latter case, the recruits returned from Romania to their homeland clandestinely. In the former case, in 1885 the recruits were allowed to return, but the report in 1890 revealed that they had come to Galati without papers, implying that they would also return clandestinely. All these parallels between the stories of the fedayeen and the migrant labourers might have contributed to the Ottoman government’s perception of Armenian migrant labourers as agents of subversion. Ironically, it was to a great extent the restrictive emigration regime of the Ottoman government itself that provided for the spread and institutionalization of the agencies. According to the US authorities, it was due to the Ottoman restrictions against emigration that ‘a system of exploitation without parallel’ had emerged, beginning in the Ottoman domains, flourishing in Marseille and Liverpool, and extending to the United States and Canada.61 The relationship between the restrictive policies and the profitability of the agencies was also noted by some Ottoman statesmen.62

From Clandestine Networks to Migrant Organizations According to Seraphic, who conducted a comprehensive study on the padrone system in the United States for the Immigration Commission in the early 1910s, the system appeared to be a transitional situation for marginalized immigrants.63 Indeed, even though ‘the early Armenian immigrants were victimized by ruthless opportunists of their own race who served them as interpreters and guides’, due to ‘their ignorance of American customs and of the English language’, at a later stage these exploitative organizations were apparently replaced by other institutions. Thus, when a certain Tophanelian, an educated Armenian from Istanbul, came to Worcester and found out about the conditions of his compatriots, he worked towards getting the Armenian labourers organized. As a result of his efforts the Armenian Club was founded in 1888.64 This club apparently functioned as a place where Armenian migrant labourers could come together and learn about opportunities and improve

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their situation; thus, it worked at cross-purposes to the establishments of padrones, who aimed at keeping the Armenian labourer isolated from, and ignorant of, the outside world. This first step towards institutionalization and legitimization was followed by the opening of the first Armenian–Apostolic church in Worcester in 1891. For this purpose, in 1889 Armenian migrants in Worcester had asked the Armenian Apostolic Patriarch in Istanbul for a priest.65 A decade later, Armenian churches were operating in New York, Providence, Boston and Fresno. Apart from this, several secular organizations also kept the Armenian community together. Centred in New York, the Haugaguan Mioutioun was led by Armenian notables, including merchants and clergy. Despite the inclusion of the latter group, this association was not involved in religious affairs and aimed at keeping the national spirit awake, hindering the co-mingling of Armenians with Americans and helping the poor within the Armenian community. Another association cooperating with Haugaguan Mioutioun operated reading halls in various cities, where Armenians could read Armenian newspapers and literature published in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Other organizations consisting of Armenian women collected donations for Armenian orphans and sent the money to the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate in Istanbul. Finally, there were smaller associations founded by Armenians from specific localities, which collected money to be sent to their fellow countrymen in the provinces, usually to support schools and the poor.66 Apart from these rather formal organizations, the increasing number of migrant labourers also facilitated the opening of shops like grocery stores, bakers, barbers and coffeeshops, which primarily served the community of migrant labourers, and operated as ‘safety-valves’ during the adaptation process of migrant labourers.67 The replacement of the padrone system was gradual, and did not happen at once in all places. Whereas the Armenian migrants in Worcester might have been able to stand on their own feet at an earlier date, the dispersion of Armenian immigrants throughout the United States caused this transition to take place at different times in different places. An example of an Armenian padrone in Boston in 1896 was Harutyun, who used the Americanized version of his name, Harry. Having made a deal with factory managers to fill an entire floor with Armenian migrants, he operated some sort of boarding house where residents were Armenian migrants, almost exclusively from the Kiğı district in the Erzurum Province. On payday, Harry received their pay checks, and after subtracting their expenses, gave the labourers a very small amount of money, so that they could not save anything. Unable to speak English, the Armenian labourers did not even know how much their wages were until a Canadian

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co-worker informed them. In the end they moved to their own place, hired a cook of their own and beat up Harry, literally.68 In any case, by the early 1900s Armenian social spaces that enabled Armenian labourers to survive without padrones were widespread in towns frequented by Ottoman immigrants. According to a report about Armenian immigrants by the Ottoman general consul in New York in 1902, ‘in every town there were oriental restaurants, where they had been gathering in their free time. These restaurants were all alike, contained rooms for eating and gambling, and served as the Armenian community’s gathering hall, exchange, or neighbourhood. The Armenians gathered there to talk about the daily affairs and to get news from the world’.69 Parallel to freeing the immigrants from the agencies’ padrone system, as the first wave of immigrants got settled and saved some money, they were also able to convey funds and information back to their relatives and neighbours in their homeland, so that the next wave could come without the assistance of the agencies. As happened elsewhere, ‘once the number of migrants reached a critical threshold, the expansion of networks reduced the costs and risks of movement’, thus diminishing the need for agencies.70 On the other hand, probably due to the geographical dispersion of migration departure points, and in the Anatolian case also the destination points, the threshold was not reached everywhere at the same time, and agencies were apparently able to survive this trend for many years by recruiting immigrants from villages that had not previously sent immigrants to the United States.

National Identity in the Diaspora Considering the point of view of the Ottoman state, we could assume that at least some of these changes were welcome. In particular, for the Ottoman authorities the rather more formal institutions of Armenian immigrants were far more transparent than clandestine agencies. Moreover, Armenian Apostolic churches in the United States, or at least the one in Worcester, were assigned priests by the Patriarchate in Istanbul, which was formally an institution of the Ottoman state. However, the social function of these establishments contained potential for new problems. As mentioned above briefly, one of the primary objectives of these secular and religious institutions was the creation of an exclusively Armenian social space, and the containment of the impact of the host culture on Armenian immigrants. However, isolating Armenians from the host society would be at cross-purposes with the initial function of these organizations, namely the freeing of Armenians from the

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conditions of isolation and ignorance imposed by the padrone system. Therefore, their strategy was focused on countering influence on religious and secular levels. Considering the significance of the Armenian church in the maintenance of Armenian identity over the centuries, the function of the opening of Armenian Apostolic churches in various US cities was evident. It should be noted that as far as the size of the Armenian community allowed, in certain localities Armenian-Protestant churches were opened as well, possibly neutralizing the assimilationist impact of the US Protestant churches.71 On the secular level, the locality-based institutions for the support of schools and the poor in the hometowns and villages linked the immigrants with the Heimat. This function of the secular organizations coincided with two important aspects of Armenian labour migration: its circularity, and remittances. The secular organizations based on a common Armenian identity rather than belonging to a locality had similar functions, although the idea of an Armenian nation was, of course, at the centre of their efforts, complementing the function of the church in the secular sphere. Whether focusing on a locality or encompassing all Armenians, these institutions ended up irritating the Ottoman government. This was mostly due to these institutions’ activities slightly encroaching into the sphere of politics. According to reports reaching the Sublime Porte, in October 1889 around two hundred Armenians in Hoboken, New Jersey attended a meeting in which Ottoman civil servants were accused of mistreating the Armenians in Anatolia, and donations were collected.72 The mobilization of the Armenian immigrants increased as the situation in Eastern Anatolia worsened. One example was the Erzurum incident in 1890, which prompted the Armenians in the United States to petition the president to help the victims through American diplomats in the Ottoman Empire.73 Rumours about disorder in Kayseri were the reason for another wave of excitement among Armenian migrants in the United States in March 1893.74 Dark news from the homeland also moved Armenian migrants in other countries. In December 1894, around three thousand Armenians in the Bulgarian port city of Varna organized a demonstration to protest against the Sason massacre.75 Reportedly, the Armenians in Russia and Iran donated generously to the victims of the massacre.76 Overall, due to censorship in the Ottoman Empire, news about events in the remote Eastern Anatolian provinces was prone to exaggeration. The same apparently applied to the reports of the Ottoman consuls and informants about the reaction of Armenian immigrants and their institutions abroad too. According to Robert W. Graves, who was a British consul in Erzurum during the greater part of the 1890s, during the course of the consecutive massacres throughout Anatolia large

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numbers of Armenians took refuge in neighbouring countries.77 This further fuelled anger among Armenian migrant labourers, as well as the Armenian citizens of these countries. According to a newspaper report from Odessa, even though the Russian government was attempting to prevent agitation among the Armenians in Russia caused by Armenian revolutionaries, ‘great excitement existed among these colonists and was becoming worse in consequence of the arrival among them of mutilated Armenian refugees from Asiatic Turkey’.78 It is not hard to imagine that in the face of these incidents, which affected almost all the Eastern Anatolian provinces, the Armenian immigrants’ organizations, whether focusing on singular localities or on all Armenians, became to some extent involved in activities aimed at helping their families, neighbours and the Anatolian Armenians in general. As a result of this politicization, the Ottoman state also came to view the ‘non-political’ activities of the institutions as suspicious. For example, when the immigrants raised money for the victims of the massacres, some of whom were their relatives and neighbours, the Ottoman government considered this to be a political campaign against it.79 From the Ottoman government’s point of view, by rallying around the victims of the massacres, the Armenian immigrants were calling for foreign intervention in the crisis. Furthermore, since the Ottoman government argued that the massacres in 1895 and 1896 were caused by the provocations of Armenian revolutionaries, it associated the funds sent to the victims with help for subversive activities. Apart from the massacres, the funds sent for the opening and maintenance of schools were a matter of suspicion for at least some Ottoman statesmen. From their point of view, the Armenian schools in Anatolia financed by independent means were one of the primary sources of subversion.80 For example, Portugalian, the publisher of the journal Armenia in Marseille, used to be the superintendent of the Normal School in Van before his arrest in 1881. In 1886 the superintendents or teachers of other Armenian schools were arrested with accusations of subversive activities and many of these schools were closed.81

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy The soaring sensitivity among Armenian immigrants about violent incidents in their homelands was an opportunity for the Armenian revolutionary organizations. There were several advantages for Armenian political organizations to become involved with the Armenian immigrants. Even though the immigrants were dispersed throughout the United States, Transcaucasia and the Balkans, reaching them was still

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easier than reaching the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, many of whom were living in isolated villages in the countryside, under the watchful eyes of the Ottoman authorities. Parallel to this, Armenian political organizations had a reasonable chance of recruiting agitated young migrant labourers far away from the conservative influence of their families, and convincing the migrants to donate part of their remittances for the defence and salvation of their homelands. Seizing these opportunities was not a straightforward process for the Armenian revolutionary organizations. Whereas they might have been able to get organized with greater ease among the Armenian immigrants in Bulgaria and Romania, where other religious or secular immigrants’ institutions had little or no influence and governments were disinterested, to work among the immigrants in Transcaucasia they had to watch out for the authoritarian Russian state, which by that time had little sympathy for Armenian political organizations and their nationalist and revolutionary rhetoric. Although the activities of both parties among the migrant workers in Transcaucasia were significant in many ways, space limits in this chapter force us to focus on the US case only, which is more illustrative for our purposes. In the United States, where the government was usually indifferent to the complaints of the Ottoman authorities regarding the activities of Armenian revolutionaries, the revolutionaries had to deal with the existing religious and secular institutions of Armenian migrants. According to Vartooguian, who rightly or wrongly associated the Hunchakists with the Protestant Armenians, since both groups were critical of the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian revolutionaries faced stiff resistance from the more conservative elements of the Armenian community in their attempts to spread their influence among the Armenians in the United States. Since the priest of the Armenian Apostolic church in Worcester was against the Hunchakists, they had started a riot in the church, Vartooguian argued. He also claimed that before the Sason incident in 1894, tensions had risen to such a level that ‘the bitter opposition of the Armenians of the National [Apostolic] Church, and the obstinacy of the Protestants in remaining in sympathy with the [Hunchakists] culminated in a bloody conflict among the [Hunchakist] and anti-[Hunchakist] Armenians in Providence’.82 According to the report of the Ottoman consul in Chicago in July 1895, upon the arrival of the news about the Sason massacre the Armenians there had founded a national benevolent organization to help their relatives and friends in the Armenian provinces, as well as the poor and the unemployed within their own expatriate community. Arguably, the foundation of this association was led by some prominent Armenians,

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called the ‘party of moderates’ by the consul, while active Hunchakists were excluded from it. The consul also claimed that before the massacres there was a Hunchakist branch, but its membership was confined to a few dozen immigrants mainly from Görele and S¸ebinkarahisar.83 According to a report in 1894 by a group of Muslim informants from Worcester, while Armenians from all villages in Harput were present within the Hunchak organization in the United States, most of them were natives of Hüseynik village.84 These examples implied that the revolutionaries were sometimes able to get organized among immigrants by simply fulfilling the need for locality-based institutions. However, such focus on a specific segment of the immigrants possibly isolated them from the rest of the Armenian immigrant community. Even though the Hunchakists had started to get organized in New England quite early on, and had opened branches in Boston and Worcester by 1890, it was apparently only during and after the massacres that the Armenian revolutionaries, especially the Dashnaktsuthiun, were able to get a foothold in the Armenian immigrant community in the United States.85

Building up the State Outside Parallel to these developments, the Ottoman state was building up its own network in order to deal with the problem of the Armenian immigrants. As early as 1893, the Ottoman consulates abroad, especially those in the United States, systematically reported on the Armenian immigrant communities. The initial reports in 1893, some of which have been referred to throughout this chapter, were comprehensive, appeared to be responding to a set of questions, and provided numerical data and background information about the Armenians abroad. The reports gave special emphasis to the social and political organizations of the Armenians, their involvement in political affairs and also to their social background. The latter emphasis implied an attempt to look for connections between their class position and politicization. In 1894 the Ottoman legations’ policing efforts were elevated to a more systematic level. The Pinkerton Company was hired by the consul in Boston to spy on the Armenian migrants.86 In 1895, perhaps with the help of these private agents, detailed reports on the membership and activities of Armenian organizations in Worcester, Chicago and Fresno were conveyed to Istanbul.87 Ironically, these reports, possibly ordered, written and read under convictions already moulded, did not help towards a more sophisticated and empathetic consideration of the situation of Armenian immigrants together with related socio-economic

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mechanisms, as a natural consequence of international labour migration. On the contrary, these reports ended up becoming footnotes of an imperial order in October 1896, which branded all Armenian immigrants as subversives and pushed them into the status of political refugees by not allowing them to return.

Conclusion What moved the Hamidian government towards the gradual exclusion of a significant portion of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire was a combination of misperceptions about the qualities of labour migration and the synchronicity of this dramatic cross-border movement with the emergence of Armenian political parties. The government was not entirely delusional; circular migration and the existence of Armenian colonies of young labourers in various places beyond the reach of the Ottoman state indeed offered the Armenian political parties a potentiality for growth. On the other hand, as I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, it was rather the government’s restrictive measures against the Armenian migrants and the violent incidents in the Ottoman provinces that eventually turned this potentiality into reality. The clandestine smuggling networks, which increased the suspicions of the government, were nothing but a response to the government’s attempts to curb emigration. News of persecution and violence from the homeland certainly contributed to the politicization of the Armenian immigrant organizations. Finally, instructed to focus on traces of subversion among the Armenian immigrants, the Ottoman diplomats inevitably sent reports further aggravating the government’s fears. Sinan Dinçer received his BA and MA degrees in Political Science from Duke University in North Carolina and Bogazici University in Istanbul, respectively. His published work focuses on migration and subjecthood in the Ottoman Empire in the modern era.

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Notes  1. Foreign Office, Turkey No. 1 (1909), Correspondence Respecting the Constitutional Movement in Turkey, 1908 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1909), 89; Armen Garo, Osmanlı Bankası: Armen Garo’nun Anıları (Istanbul: Belge Yayınevi, 2009), 201; Philadelphia Record, 31 July 1908.  2. Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (hereafter TBMM), Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre I, İçtima Senesi 1: Levayih ve Tekalif-i Kanuniyye ve Encümen Mazbataları; Sene 1324–1325 (Ankara: TBMM Basımevi, 1992), 230–31; TBMM, Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre I, İçtima Senesi 1, vol. 1 (Ankara: TBMM Basımevi, 1982), 162.  3. TBMM, Meclis-i Mebusan, Levayih, 119.  4. Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Osmaniye, 1329), 3–7, 40–44.  5. House of Representatives, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1896 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 937.  6. Foreign Office, Turkey No. 1 (1898), Further Correspondence Respecting the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey (London: Harrison and Sons, 1898), 15.  7. Philip M. Kayal and Joseph M. Kayal, The Syrian Lebanese in America (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1975); Kemal H. Karpat, ‘The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860–1914’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 17(2) (1985), 175–209; Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Is¸ıl Acehan, ‘“Ottoman Street” in America: Turkish Leatherworkers in Peabody, Massachusetts’, in Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Gavin D. Brockett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 19–44; Rıfat N. Bali, From Anatolia to the New World (Istanbul: Libra, 2013).  8. Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Ottoman Attitudes towards Lebanese Emigration, 1885–1910’, in The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), 109–38.  9. Nedim İpek, ‘Anadolu’dan Amerika’ya Ermeni Göçü’ Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Aras¸tırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 6 (1995), 257–80. 10. Ignacio Klich, ‘Argentine–Ottoman Relations and Their Impact on Immigrants from the Middle East: A History of Unfulfilled Expectations, 1910–1915’, The Americas 50(2) (1993), 177–205; Adem Kara, Yeni Kıtaya Osmanlı Göçleri ve Neticeleri (Istanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2007). 11. This situation was best explained by Hagop Mıntzuri, who had migrated to Istanbul to work at the bakery operated by his father in the 1890s: ‘Why did we come to Istanbul from Armudanlar, from a distance of eleven days? Were we poor at home? No. Our storehouses, our haylofts were full. But what is one piaster? We didn’t have it; we couldn’t have it. Who would buy our produce? The produce of our land, of our orchards were worth nothing’ [my own translation from Turkish]. Hagop Mıntzuri, İstanbul Anıları (1897–1940) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), 109. 12. An introductory description of this micro approach, namely the ‘new economics of migration’, can be found in Douglas S. Massey et al., ‘Theories of International Migration’, in Migration: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, vol. I, ed. Steven Vertovec (London: Routledge, 2010). 13. Isabel Kaprielian, ‘Migratory Caravans: Armenian Sojourners in Canada’, Journal of American Ethnic History 6(2) (1987), 20–38, 27. 14. The Regulation of Municipality issued in 1826 for the first time introduced a standardized bureaucratic procedure for the migrant labourers in Istanbul, whereas the Regulation of Internal Passports in 1841 established general rules for the movement of people within the country. Osman Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-i Umur-ı Belediyye (Istanbul: Kültür İs¸leri Daire

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15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

Bas¸kanlığı Yayınları, 1995), 328–41; Musa Çadırcı, ‘Tanzimat Döneminde Çıkarılan Men-i Mürur ve Pasaport Nizamnameleri’, Belgeler 15(19) (1993), 169–82. According to official US statistics, repatriations amounted to between one-ninth and onethird of Ottoman immigrants in the years 1908–13, whereas in Argentina they amounted to almost half of the immigrants between 1901 and 1910, and one-third from 1911 to 1920. Walter F. Willcox, ed., International Migrations (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1929), 94. House of Representatives, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1895 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 1402. The Times, 3 November 1896; John Bellows, Letters and Memoir (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904), 277. In the autumn of 1896 John Bellows, who was a British Quaker and philanthropist, visited Romania, Bulgaria and Istanbul to help the victims of the massacre in Istanbul in August 1896. Armenian Historical Society, The Armenians in Massachusetts (Boston, MA: The Armenian Historical Society, 1937), 31. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 90–96, 105, 151. Kemal Beydilli, 1828–1829 Osmanlı-Rus Savas¸ı’nda Dog˘u Anadolu’dan Rusya’ya Göçürülen Ermeniler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1988), 370, 407. Touraj Atabaki, ‘Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire’, International Review of Social History 48(3) (2003), 401–26, 408. Parvin Akhanchi, ‘Interrelations among Ethno-Religious Groups of Industrial Workers in the Baku Oil Fields during Inter-Ethnical Conflicts in Early 20th Century’, in Osmanismus, Nationalismus und der Kaukasus, ed. Fikret Adanır and Berng Bonwetch (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2005), 86; Atabaki, ‘Disgruntled Guests’. Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 82. Alexander Dorn, ed., Die Seehäfen des Weltverkehrs (Vienna: Volkswirtschaftlicher Verlag Alexander Dorn, 1891), 187. Christopher Clay, ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth-Century Anatolia’, Middle Eastern Studies 34(4) (1998), 1–32, 13. The statistics on the ‘distribution of alien passengers with passports and other travel documents traveling outward and inward across the Russian frontier from or to the Ottoman Empire’, as provided by the Russian government and cited by Willcox, did not include dramatic increases in the number of immigrants from 1870 onwards. From 12,095 in 1870, the number passed 20,000 only in 1896, and 30,000 in 1903, but this level could not be maintained consecutively until 1908, probably because of the unrest in Transcaucasia in 1905 and 1906. Reaching 31,355 in 1908, the number jumped to 52,909 in 1909, and did not fall below 44,000 until World War I. The number of people returning from Russia to the Ottoman Empire almost always lagged behind the movement towards Russia. However, Russian statistics are of very limited use since a significant portion, perhaps the majority of emigrants from the Ottoman Empire to Russia, avoided the official procedures and controlled routes when entering the country, especially as a result of the Hamidian emigration regime, and even a portion of those who actually had passports did not feel obliged to report their departure for their homelands to the Russian authorities. Willcox, International Migrations, 802–3. From the early nineteenth century onwards, Eastern Anatolia had been considered as a territory for potential expansion by the Russian Empire. At least up until the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian statesmen regarded Armenians as potential allies, who were expected to populate the newly acquired lands in Transcaucasia and Anatolia. The

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28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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migration of Anatolian Armenians to Russia was apparently an important part of these designs. A critical part of this project was the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, which was founded in 1815 in Moscow. Most of its students being Armenians, the aim of the institute was to raise officers and bureaucrats familiar with Oriental languages and affairs. The institute was initiated by the Lazarev (Lazarian) family, who were Armenian immigrants from Anatolia. Beydilli, Rusya’ya Göçürülen Ermeniler, 368. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlığı, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni-Rus İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 1841– 1898 (Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2006), 21–22, 42, 57; E. Aknouni, Political Persecution: Armenian Prisoners of the Caucasus (New York, 1911), 11–12. E. Aknouni, whose real name was Khachatur Malumian, was a prominent Dashnakist. Despite being a Russian-Armenian, he moved to the Ottoman Empire in the constitutional era. Apart from his works on the suppression of Armenians by the Czarist government in Russia, he also published the book Depi Erkir [Homeward bound], calling the Armenians abroad to return to their homelands in the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the revolution in 1908. E. Aknouni, Depi Erkir (Boston, MA: Hayrenik, 1911). Acehan, ‘Ottoman Street’, 25; Armenian Historical Society, Armenians in Massachusetts, 26. Hagop Bogigian, In Quest of the Soul of Civilization (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1925), 20. Victor Pietschmann, Durch Kurdische Berge und Armenische Städte (Vienna: Adolf Luser Verlag, 1940), 138–39. Victor Pietschmann was an Austrian natural scientist, who made a tour of Eastern Anatolian provinces in 1914 for the collection of samples of plants and animals. During World War I, he served as a trainer of Ottoman Alpine troops. Pietschmann, Durch Kurdische Berge, 5–6. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlığı, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 1839–1895 (Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2007), 65. Ibid., 195. The consul’s report probably referred to the kicking out of the Armenians from the Congregational church in Fresno, California, in 1894. In this case, the Armenians were accused of ‘failing to live up to their covenant with the church’, although ‘they had promised to keep its rules and to contribute to its support’. Considering that the first Armenian-Apostolic priest arrived in Fresno in 1895 and was able to gather a church community of significant size within a few years, it was likely that the Armenians had simply joined the Protestant church as a substitute for the non-existing Armenian Apostolic church. Berge Bulbulian, The Fresno Armenians (Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 2001), 87, 91. Armenian Historical Society, Armenians in Massachusetts, 31. Willcox, International Migrations, 386–89. A brief evaluation of the degree of reliability of these statistics can be found in Karpat’s article, ‘The Ottoman Emigration’, 181. House of Representatives, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1894 (Washington, DC, 1895), 758. Vartan M. Malcom, The Armenians in America (Boston, MA: The Pilgrim Press, 1919), 88, 91. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 186. Ibid., 53–54. Ibid., 43–44. John Bassett Moore, ed., A Digest of International Law, vol. III (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 692; House of Representatives, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1908 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 758.

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42. House of Representatives, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 561. 43. Foreign Office, Turkey No. 6 (1896), Correspondence Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey: 1894–95 (London, 1896), 55. 44. Sadik Shahid Bey, Islam, Turkey and Armenia (St. Louis: C.B. Woodward, 1898), 190. 45. Henry Allen Tupper, Armenia, Its Present Crisis and Past History (Baltimore, MD: J. Murphy & Company, 1896), 127–28. 46. Karpat, ‘The Ottoman Emigration’, 187; House of Representatives, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1895, 1261. 47. Kaprielian, ‘Migratory Caravans’, 25. 48. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlığı, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. II, 1896–1919 (Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2007), 187–92, 188. 49. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Rus İlis¸kileri, 93. 50. Kara, Osmanlı Göçleri, 82–83. 51. Maurice R. Davie, World Immigration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939), 173/468. 52. Henry Pratt Fairchild, Greek Immigration to the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 91–92. 53. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 52–53. 54. Another example in which a commercialized network expanded from non-Muslims to Muslims was the agency of the Tsokas brothers, whom the US authorities identified as Bulgarians; they recruited hundreds of Bulgarians, Turks and Macedonians through their subagents in Turkey. In later years, the US authorities discovered a Muslim agent too, albeit operating on a much smaller scale. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1908 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 129–31; Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1911 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 120. 55. Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, BOA.HR.TO, 40/29, 9 Ocak 1885. 56. BOA.HR.SYS, 2764/9, 21 Nisan 1890. 57. BOA.HR.SYS, 2766/35, 21 Eylül 1898. 58. Akarlı, ‘Ottoman Attitudes’, 112. 59. Rouben Der Minasian, Armenian Freedom Fighters (Boston, MA: Hairenik Association, 1963), 126. Der Minasian was a prominent member of the Dashnaktsuthiun and had participated in fedayeen units in the Hamidian era. 60. Hüseyin Nazım Pas¸a, Ermeni Olayları Tarihi, vol. II (Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 1998), 307. 61. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1914 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 403. 62. Akarlı, ‘Ottoman Attitudes’, 113. 63. A.A. Seraphic, ‘The Greek Padrone System in the United States’, in Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 392. 64. Armenian Historical Society, Armenians in Massachusetts, 36. 65. Ibid., 26. 66. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. II, 148–49, 171–72; Kevork A. Sarafian, History of Education in Armenia (La Verne: Press of the La Verne Leader, 1930), 190.

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67. Acehan, ‘Ottoman Street’, 22, 30. 68. Garine Narzakian, ed., Memoirs of Sarkis Narzakian (Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 1995), 112–14. 69. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. II, 146–47. 70. Massey et al., ‘Theories of International Migration’, 78, 79. 71. For example, in Fresno, California, where a significant Armenian community existed by the late 1890s, the Armenian First Presbyterian Church was founded in 1897, and the Armenian Congregational Church in 1901. These coexisted with the Armenian Apostolic church in the town. Bulbulian, The Fresno Armenians, 88, 90. 72. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 44–45. 73. Ibid., 51. Provoked by a search conducted in some Armenian institutions by the security forces in Erzurum, clashes ensued, which according to different sources led to the deaths of fourteen to one hundred people. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlığı, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni İsyanları, vol. I, 1878–1895 (Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2008), 43–45; Rubina Peroomian, ‘A Call Sounded from the Armenian Mountains’, in Armenian Karin/Erzerum, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2003), 207. 74. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 65. 75. The Times, 11 December 1894. 76. The Times, 11 March 1895. 77. Robert W. Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1933), 151, 155. 78. The Times, 4 December 1895. 79. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. II, 15–43. 80. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Rus İlis¸kileri, 28–33. 81. Sarafian, History of Education in Armenia, 218, 219. 82. Armayis P. Vartooguian, Armenia’s Ordeal (New York, 1896), 148, 168. 83. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 186–87. 84. Ibid., 119. 85. Armenian Historical Society, Armenians in Massachusetts, 47, 51. 86. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 104. The Pinkerton Company was a private detective and security agency, founded in the 1850s, which was hired for various jobs by different patrons, including the US federal government. The company gained some degree of notoriety due to its role in various strikebreaking actions, some episodes of which were reported in detail. Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy (New York: Wilshire Book Co., 1907). 87. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 156–57, 160.

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Bibliography Acehan, Is¸ıl. ‘“Ottoman Street” in America: Turkish Leatherworkers in Peabody, Massachusetts’, in Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History, edited by Touraj Atabaki and Gavin D. Brockett, 19–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Akarlı, Engin Deniz. ‘Ottoman Attitudes towards Lebanese Emigration, 1885–1910’, in The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, edited by Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, 109–38. London: I.B. Tauris, 1993. Akhanchi, Parvin. ‘Interrelations among Ethno-Religious Groups of Industrial Workers in the Baku Oil Fields during Inter-Ethnical Conflicts in Early 20th Century’, in Osmanismus, Nationalismus und der Kaukasus, edited by Fikret Adanır and Berng Bonwetch, 85–98. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2005. Aknouni, E. Depi Erkir. Boston, MA: Hayrenik, 1911.  . Political Persecution: Armenian Prisoners of the Caucasus. New York, 1911. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1908. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1911. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1914. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915. Armenian Historical Society. The Armenians in Massachusetts. Boston, MA: The Armenian Historical Society, 1937. Atabaki, Touraj. ‘Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire’. International Review of Social History 48(3) (2003), 401–26. Bali, Rıfat N. From Anatolia to the New World. Istanbul: Libra, 2013. Bellows, John. Letters and Memoir. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904. Beydilli, Kemal. 1828–1829 Osmanlı-Rus Savas¸ı’nda Dog˘u Anadolu’dan Rusya’ya Göçürülen Ermeniler. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1988. Bogigian, Hagop. In Quest of the Soul of Civilization. Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1925. Bulbulian, Berge. The Fresno Armenians. Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 2001. Çadırcı, Musa. ‘Tanzimat Döneminde Çıkarılan Men-i Mürur ve Pasaport Nizamnameleri’. Belgeler 15(19) (1993), 169–82. Clay, Christopher. ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth-Century Anatolia’. Middle Eastern Studies 34(4) (1998), 1–32. Davie, Maurice R. World Immigration. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939. Der Minasian, Rouben. Armenian Freedom Fighters. Boston, MA: Hairenik Association, 1963. Dorn, Alexander, ed. Die Seehäfen des Weltverkehrs. Vienna: Volkswirtschaftlicher Verlag Alexander Dorn, 1891. Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, vol. 1. Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Osmaniye, 1329. Ergin, Osman Nuri. Mecelle-i Umur-ı Belediyye. Istanbul: Kültür İs¸leri Daire Bas¸kanlığı Yayınları, 1995. Fairchild, Henry Pratt. Greek Immigration to the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911. Foreign Office. Turkey No. 6 (1896), Correspondence Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey: 1894–95. London, 1896.  . Turkey No. 1 (1898), Further Correspondence Respecting the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey. London: Harrison and Sons, 1898.  . Turkey No. 1 (1909), Correspondence Respecting the Constitutional Movement in Turkey, 1908. London: Harrison and Sons, 1909. Friedman, Morris. The Pinkerton Labor Spy. New York: Wilshire Book Co., 1907. Garo, Armen. Osmanlı Bankası: Armen Garo’nun Anıları. Istanbul: Belge Yayınevi, 2009.

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Graves, Robert W. Storm Centres of the Near East. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1933. House of Representatives. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1894. Washington, DC, 1895.  . Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1895. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896.  . Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1896. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897.  . Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1906. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909.  . Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1908. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912. Hüseyin Nazım Pas¸a. Ermeni Olayları Tarihi, vol. II. Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 1998. İpek, Nedim. ‘Anadolu’dan Amerika’ya Ermeni Göçü’. Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Aras¸tırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 6 (1995), 257–80. Kaprielian, Isabel. ‘Migratory Caravans: Armenian Sojourners in Canada’. Journal of American Ethnic History 6(2) (1987), 20–38. Kara, Adem. Yeni Kıtaya Osmanlı Göçleri ve Neticeleri. Istanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2007. Karpat, Kemal H. ‘The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860–1914’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 17(2) (1985), 175–209. Kayal, Philip M., and Joseph M. Kayal. The Syrian Lebanese in America. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Klich, Ignacio. ‘Argentine–Ottoman Relations and Their Impact on Immigrants from the Middle East: A History of Unfulfilled Expectations, 1910–1915’. The Americas 50(2) (1993), 177–205. Malcom, Vartan M. The Armenians in America. Boston, MA: The Pilgrim Press, 1919. Massey, Douglas S., et al. ‘Theories of International Migration’, in Migration: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, vol. I, edited by Steven Vertovec, 69–96. London: Routledge, 2010. Mıntzuri, Hagop. İstanbul Anıları (1897–1940). Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998. Mirak, Robert. Torn between Two Lands. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Moore, John Bassett, ed. A Digest of International Law, vol. III. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906. Nalbandian, Louise. The Armenian Revolutionary Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Narzakian, Garine, ed. Memoirs of Sarkis Narzakian. Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 1995. Osmanlı Ars¸ivi Daire Bas¸kanlığı. Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni-Rus İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 1841–1898. Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2006.  . Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. I, 1839–1895. Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2007.  . Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni-Amerikan İlis¸kileri, vol. II, 1896–1919. Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2007.  . Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeni İsyanları, vol. I, 1878–1895. Ankara: T.C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet Ars¸ivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 2008. Peroomian, Rubina. ‘A Call Sounded from the Armenian Mountains’, in Armenian Karin/ Erzerum, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian, 189–222. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2003. Pietschmann, Victor. Durch Kurdische Berge und Armenische Städte. Vienna: Adolf Luser Verlag, 1940. Sadik Shahid Bey. Islam, Turkey and Armenia. St. Louis: C.B. Woodward, 1898. Sarafian, Kevork A. History of Education in Armenia. La Verne: Press of the La Verne Leader, 1930.

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Seraphic, A.A. ‘The Greek Padrone System in the United States’, in Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. II, 387–408. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. Suny, Ronald Grigor. Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Tupper, Henry Allen. Armenia, Its Present Crisis and Past History. Baltimore, MD: J. Murphy & Company, 1896. Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi. Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre I, İçtima Senesi 1, vol. 1. Ankara: TBMM Basımevi, 1982.  . Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre I, İçtima Senesi 1: Levayih ve Tekalif-i Kanuniyye ve Encümen Mazbataları; Sene 1324–1325. Ankara: TBMM Basımevi, 1992. Vartooguian, Armayis P. Armenia’s Ordeal. New York, 1896. Willcox, Walter F., ed. International Migrations. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1929.

Chapter 8

The Greek Labour Movement and National Preference Demands, 1890–1922 Nikos Potamianos

It has been argued that class ideology and nationalism are both inherent to the working class,1 which moves continuously between these two antinomic poles. Thus, the formulation of demands for national preference over ‘foreigners’, that is, of the privileged treatment of locals regarding employment and returns from the welfare state, is a tendency that is permanently present, and can find itself at the forefront of the collective action of the working class depending on the wider political framework. The concept of national preference demands has been developed by Etienne Balibar, who adopted the term with which the contemporary French far right describes its beliefs: ‘first the French’, and then the immigrants, as regards, for example, health and education provisions.2 Racist assumptions, of course, albeit modified, lie at the root of these views.3 Why, then, use the concept of national preference demands instead of racism itself? Mainly because the two concepts refer to different ways of founding inequality and exclusion. Exclusions such as those referred to in this chapter are not necessarily based on an ideological system of a hierarchy of races and nations that legitimizes dominance, like the one developed during colonialism.4 Yet, as Balibar observes, such exclusions are integrally related to the existence of the ‘national-social state’.5 In other words, they are related to one of the basic organizational principles of politics in the modern world, the correlation of rights with citizenship and nationality.

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This relationship of citizenship with nationality constitutes a legal practice, but also defines a field of political confrontation: are those who do not have citizenship entitled to social rights and, if so, which ones? And what happens when foreigners are considered to be part of the same nation, as was the case with the Ottoman Greeks, the millions of Greeks who until 1922 were subjects of the Ottoman Empire? Moreover, to the degree that citizenship is not fully identified with a cultural or biological perception of the nation,6 the claim for privileged treatment could turn against people who have the status of citizen. In other words, the demand for national preference can be based on a more limiting perception of national community than the one that is legally accepted, and be equivalent with the demand for a respective adaptation of the status of the citizen. Here the distinction made by Anthony Smith between nation and ethnie could be useful: the differentiation between the political and cultural determinants of the nation produces an inherent instability and provides a substratum that is often utilized by demands for national preference.7 The demand for national preference constitutes a form of politicization of some of the antagonisms between ethnic groups. As argued by Balibar, it is not a dyadic relationship (between Self and Other) but a triadic one, with the presence of the state also being necessary, and to which requests are directed to translate social/cultural difference into public policy.8 This necessity of the presence of the state entails two preconditions for the formulation of national preference demands. Firstly, such demands refer to communities that are constituted as political ones, are legally determined and are supported by the ideological mechanisms of the state (which process, cultivate and map out national identity). In less centralized states, these specifications can be fulfilled by the regions and take the forms of ‘regional preference’, but in the Greek context the establishment of institutional inequalities needed to pass through a process of renegotiation of the composition and limits of the national community. Secondly, since such claims are cited mainly in respect of the labour market (as well as in returns from the welfare state, which had not yet emerged in Greece in the period under consideration in this chapter), the ‘politicization’ of the competition presupposes that the state has a legitimate claim to intervene in fields which according to classical liberalism belonged strictly to the private sphere. National preference demands belong to the era of social liberalism and social democracy, of the rise of statism – which started in Greece in the first decades of the twentieth century.9

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This chapter examines the development of such demands in Greece, mainly in Athens (the capital) and Piraeus (its port) during the 1910s. Who can be symbolically and politically expelled from the nation and its networks of solidarity? What are the preconditions for the development of national preference demands? How are they related to the broader developments of these years? Answers to these questions promise to contribute to the historicizing of the concept, and its placement in the context of the contemporary world that was then arising. First, I present the development of national preference demands against the refugees from the Ottoman Empire; next, I attempt to interpret the phenomenon and the timing of its emergence, by examining the social and intellectual structures that made it possible. The focus is on three areas: the changes in the way foreigners (of Greek origin or not) who came to work in Greece were treated; the competition of ethnolocal communities of immigrants in many labour markets, which reached its peak and was transformed when the refugees appeared as a community against which national preference demands could be formulated; and the practices for controlling the labour market that were applied both by the labour unions and by groups of workers with common places of origin after 1890, when the labour unions were established in Greece and strikes and other forms of collective demands grew in frequency. Finally, I examine the connections of the particularisms upon which the national preference demands were based during the formation of the Greek working class in the first decades of the twentieth century. The sources used consist mainly of newspapers and archival material. Charters, resolutions, memoranda and proceedings of the meetings of unions and labour centres constitute one significant body of sources. News and interviews in the daily press of Athens are another – and it should be stressed that the wealth of information relevant to social history found in some newspapers, such as Akropolis, which published inquiries about economic and social issues in which humble workers and shopkeepers were sometimes interviewed. Of course, I also draw extensively from already published material, local histories and scientific literature, and discuss this evidence from a new perspective.

Local Workers and Refugees during the 1910s After the defeat of the Greeks in the Greco–Turkish war of 1919–22, millions of refugees from Asia Minor came to Greece, most of them experiencing an abrupt proletarianization. The conflicts between local populations and refugees were intense, and still constitute part of the

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Greek collective memory. Cultural and political differences definitely contributed to these conflicts, but there was a powerful material background as well: conflicts in the labour market between local wageworkers and refugees, competition between local and refugee retailers and members of the liberal professions in attracting customers, and conflicts regarding the expropriation of the lands of Turkish landowners.10 This post-1922 conflict is a well-known story in Greece, although not adequately studied. But while the two latter forms of conflict (regarding customers and land) emerged after 1922, those in the labour market had emerged in the previous decade, and already taken a significant leap. Waves of Greek refugees from Asia Minor and elsewhere had also sought temporary refuge in Greece in previous periods of Greco– Turkish conflict, in 1912 and 1914.11 I will present the various forms of competition that developed in the labour market between the local population and the refugees, and place them in their wider context. In 1912 a house painter protested that in Athens there was an ‘accumulation of craftsmen and workers from all over Greece and the Ottoman Empire, while we, the indigenous population, are deprived of work’.12 Such complaints are rarely encountered prior to that time: on the few occasions that we read about claims for privileged treatment of the local population, they are as a rule directed against foreigners who were not of Greek ethnicity. Perhaps the most important example is the 1910 strike by marine engineers who demanded, among other things, that the ship-owners stop employing engineers ‘unknown, of unknown origins, of every nationality’.13 In 1912 a significant strike by bakery workers was defeated due to the recruitment, as strikebreakers, of Ottoman Greeks who had flocked to Athens to avoid being drafted into the Ottoman army.14 This incident can be considered as a prelude to a period of inter-worker conflicts that were structured around the two poles: the ‘locals’ and the ‘foreigners’ of Greek origin. Of decisive importance for the conflict taking this form was the creation of a reserve army of labour consisting of refugees who not only lacked Greek citizenship before 1922 but also remained outside the organized labour movement, since they did not consider their residence in Greece as permanent. In 1914 thousands of refugees from Asia Minor took refuge in Greece; negative attitudes towards them quickly emerged in the labour unions, since they agreed to work under worse conditions, ‘continuously driving away organized workers from some occupations’.15 Especially in the port of Piraeus, the refugees, consisting of a mass of workers of great numbers and easily mobilized, were used as strikebreakers in the grain dockers’ strike of 1914, while in 1916 contractors attempted to replace

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the coal dockers with refugees but gave in when the Piraeus Labour Centre threatened a general strike.16 The antagonisms that emerged led to the formulation of demands of national preference over the refugees. In August 1914 the representative of the tanners in the Athens Labour Centre announced that ‘many refugees, on the one hand receive benefits from the government, and on the other they work for minimum wages and deprive many of our workers of the opportunity to feed themselves’, an intervention that was incorporated in a memorandum by the Athens Labour Centre on various issues that was submitted some time later. In the memoranda of the Athens and Piraeus Labour Centres studied, no such demand was encountered again; however, in the summer of 1916 the president of the Piraeus Labour Centre announced that at the coming workers’ convention there would be a discussion about ‘imposing a preference for hiring Greeks, who had served in the army’.17 This formulation was clearly intended to discriminate against the refugees, who had not served in the Greek army. It can be observed that the claim for their exclusion was not legitimized with a delimited perception of the nation that called into question the national bonds uniting the population of Greece with the Greek populations in the Ottoman Empire; instead it was founded on an active (and not just legal) perception of citizenship, based on shared sacrifice within the political community and the nation, three years after the end of the Balkan Wars and immediately after a period of army mobilization. Ideas that set refugees outside the national body, on a cultural as well as a political level, were not encountered in the texts of the workers’ unions; however, these had already been developed in 1916, as we shall see, and functioned as a background that legitimized the above claims. In addition, in 1914–15 provisions appear in some charters of workers’ unions that restricted participation only to Greek citizens.18 Here it was the legal definition of citizenship that was invoked in order to exclude refugees. The development of these anti-refugee attitudes and the way they were transformed into national preference demands can be better understood if placed within three wider frameworks: the monopolistic practices of the early workers’ movement, the role of the immigrant communities in the life of the workers, and the changing attitude of the Greek state and its citizens towards foreigners who came to work in Greece. Let us start with the latter.

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Foreigners in the Greek State In 1907 foreign subjects constituted approximately 2 per cent of the population of the Greek state and 6–6.5 per cent in Athens and Piraeus. The majority were Ottoman subjects (Greeks, but not only so), while there were also communities of Italians, Maltese and so on.19 Generally, the presence of workers who were not locals, whether of Greek ethnic origin or not, appears in the nineteenth century to have been naturally accepted. The labour of the itinerant artisans remained an important aspect of social reality in the Balkans, and the Greek state was one of their destinations.20 The agricultural development up until the end of the nineteenth century created a steady demand for workers in agriculture, seasonal and not, which was often met by workers from the Ottoman Empire;21 many foreign workers worked in the large public works of the 1880s.22 It was also a period without identity cards and passports.23 The naturalization of foreigners must have operated without problems, if we consider the number of people who voted who came from the Ottoman Empire, and in 1881 the procedure was simplified.24 The conflict that had emerged in the 1840s regarding the civil rights (and the right to be employed by the state) of the Greeks who came from the Ottoman Empire was settled quickly, and the development of the irredentist vision of the Great Idea (the creation of a state that would include all Greeks) shaped an intellectual environment of positive attitudes towards the Greeks who remained under foreign rule.25 In the 1870s there were negative representations of the Greek grand-bourgeois who came from the Ottoman Empire, but these did not concern the Ottoman Greeks of the lower classes.26 However, the identities of the indigenous and the foreigner, although under continuous renegotiation in cities (like Athens and Piraeus) that saw significant increases in their population thanks to internal immigration, did not fade into the background. For example, some candidates for the office of the mayor of Athens invoked the fact that they were born there, in contrast to their opponents.27 The participation of foreigners of Greek origin in political mobilization was generally tolerated and can be seen in numerous instances.28 However, in 1885, when Ottoman Greeks demonstrated in Athens in favour of the governing party, the conservative newspaper Kairoi questioned their right to intervene in politics and threatened them with deportation.29 In the 1910s there was an intensification of attacks against ‘foreigners’, initially against members of the new political elite that followed

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Venizelos and the Liberal Party, then against the ‘not drafted refugees’ who supported the participation of Greece in World War I. In the great August 1916 royalist demonstration, the conservative opponents of Venizelos and supporters of the king who opposed the entry of Greece into the Great War, many insults were heard against the refugees. Somewhat later, the Pan-Hellenic Association of Mobilized Soldiers, the most important body of mass support for the royalists, launched a violent attack against the ‘refugees, who may speak Greek but showed servile attitude towards the foreigners [of the Entente] and follow them blindly’. When the political conflict in Athens escalated to the level of a low-intensity civil war, during the events of November 1916, dozens of refugees were executed by the royalists.30 This rapid development of anti-refugee attitudes cannot be explained solely on the basis of the refugees’ political choices (although this is an important part of the story). Certainly, the mass character of the wave of refugees in 1914 created difficulties in their integration into the social structures, while it coincided with the decline in the standard of living of the lower classes created by inflation and the army mobilizations. It also coincided with the difficulties for small businesses, something that led, for the first time in modern Greek history, to complaints about ‘overcrowding’ in the trades.31 Moreover, the wars of 1912–22 (Balkan Wars 1912–13, World War I 1917–18, Greco–Turkish War 1919–22), the ‘National Division’ regarding foreign policy in 1915, the political and military interventions by the Entente in 1915–17, and the problems created by the integration into the Greek state after 1912 of large populations of different religions and ethnicities, all led to redefinitions of national ideology concerning, among other issues, the composition and the limits of the national community. Should the ‘traitors’ and the ‘slaves of the foreigners’ be expelled from the nation? Were the exclusions of or even acts of violence towards Greek citizens of different ethnicity (or towards non-citizens of Greek ethnicity) legitimate? Obviously this renegotiation of national bonds constituted an intellectual environment favourable to the development of national preference demands. Finally, it was in the second decade of the new century that the state’s intervention into the economy started to expand into the labour market, with the labour legislation that was introduced by the Liberal Party in 1910–14 but also with the frequent involvement of governments in dealing with strikes.32 This definitely facilitated the politicization of the competition that developed within the working class between ethnic groups, and thus the emergence of demands for national preference.

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Bonds of Common Origin and Workers’ Collectivities Passing to the second area of our analysis, the role of the immigrants’ communities was important in the organization of everyday life in the cities and in such places of work as mines. The bonds of common origin were of great importance regarding the reception of the newly arrived and their ability to find employment.33 They expressed companionship and were the roots of places of gathering, political networks and solidarity relationships,34 as well as patterns of marriage.35 These bonds left their imprint on the city web, as fellow villagers tended to reside in the same neighbourhoods.36 In various professions an ethno-local division of labour can be detected, based either on the traditional skills developed by people of certain areas (potters from Sifnos, goldsmiths from Stemnitsa and so on)37 or ‘specializations’ that developed in the new location in which they settled.38 The ‘contract-work organization of labour’ played an important role in the creation of groups of fellow countrymen working together in the port, construction works, mines or tobacco factories, under an efficient craftsman or a small capital owner who undertook projects and carried them out with people of his choice.39 These subcontractors often functioned as leaders or middle ‘cadres’ of the immigrant communities, and their choices concerning the recruitment of workers can be regarded as forms of control of specific labour markets by collectivities of fellow countrymen. In brief, competition in the labour market took place not only between individuals but also between immigrant groups, particularly when the job openings were the subject of negotiation, not in isolated cases but by many people at the same time. Characteristic here is the discussion at the association of people from Kefalonia living in Athens in 1906 regarding the possibility that people from Kefalonia could work as longshoremen at the customs house of Piraeus if the people from Mani were expelled from that post; eventually it was islanders from Astypalaia and Santorini who replaced the Maniates there.40 Competition between the communities of immigrants was endemic in certain specific areas of the labour market, and sometimes led to violent clashes between groups of workers who came from the same place. In mines, three major conflicts of this kind were detected that took place between 1903 and 1910,41 while in 1906 a battle proper took place in Piraeus between the Maniates and Cretans: for three days houses were invaded, shops were set on fire and people were shot, a clash that began with a conflict in the port of Piraeus and finished with a change in the pattern of employment in the port.42

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This competition would be reproduced within the labour unions, although of course in ‘softer’ forms. One of the most important figures of the early labour movement in Greece criticized the habit within the labour unions of voting on the basis of the ‘localist egoism of the nonformed workers’ mass’.43 The spirit of ethno-local particularism could be manifested with the creation of particular associations of workers and shopkeepers coming from the same place,44 or with provisions such as the one found in the charter of the Brotherhood of People from Lakonia in Athens and Piraeus (1915): the association would ‘support people from Lakonia wherever they may be’, and specifically mentioned ‘those working in groups in the customs of Piraeus and other workplaces’.45 Thus, the competition between immigrant communities in the labour market created an environment of monopolistic demands and ethnolocal particularisms upon which sat the rivalry with the refugees in the 1910s. From one aspect the refugees functioned and were perceived as a group of people from the same place against which everybody else rallied. And while the competition between groups of fellow countrymen could not easily be politicized, at least not in the given institutional and political framework, in the 1910s the refugees from Asia Minor became, as we have already seen, a community of non-citizens against which demands of national preference could be formulated.

The Aspiration for Monopolies of the Labour Unions The last point of our analysis deals with the practices that dominated the labour movement in its early period in Greece (1890–1918). Next to other demands (on wages, working hours, limiting the prices of goods, control of the working process and so on), there are also demands that aim at control of the labour market.46 The limitations in the supply of labour were a form of reducing competition (and maintaining wages at a high level) familiar from the past, when the guilds determined the employment of apprentices and accession to the status of master artisan,47 while the collective control of the labour market constituted in general a prerequisite for the success of the other demands of the workers, since their mobilization frequently brought them up against the possibility that their employers would replace them with other workers, temporarily during a strike or even permanently.48 Therefore, we must consider that the development of monopolistic strategies by the workers’ collectivities (both formal and informal) was part of their automatic response. The control of workers’ collectivities over the labour market could be exercised in favour of an immigrant community, across gender or

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ethnic-religious lines or on any other basis. The following paragraphs will not refer to specific intra-class divisions and conflicts,49 but to monopolistic strategies that did not turn against a particular competitor in the labour market. The most essential demand in the direction of the establishment of local monopolies was the recognition of the responsibility of the labour union to determine who was entitled to work in the profession. This is encountered for the first time in 1895,50 but it was mainly in the 1910s and 1920s that the labour movement demanded vigorously that hiring should take place through the unions.51 Usually they promoted the argument that the union guaranteed the ability of its members, while in some fields emphasis was given to guaranteeing their honesty,52 and they also brought forth reasons of hygiene: workers’ ‘booklets’ were established for the first time in 1912 for bakery workers, in combination with their obligation to undergo medical examinations, after a request by their union; three months later they were used to delay the recruitment of strikebreakers during the strike by bakery workers.53 In the 1920s there was a more explicit demand to establish ‘closed professions’, at the same time as the appearance of policies against unemployment in professions with very few job openings.54 Certainly, the workers’ booklets, in effect identity cards indicating who was entitled to work in a profession, constituted a weapon that could be used by the other side as well: by the employer (since he was able to make notes and comments on them) in order to discipline his subordinates and by the state (since the state issued them) against militant syndicalism and communists.55 There were two other methods of control of the labour market by the unions. Firstly, their members occasionally worked according to a rotation method, which in periods of increased unemployment ensured a minimum income and limited the reduction in wages. This is first encountered as a demand in the early stages of the labour movement in Greece: it was claimed and won in the field of shipping in the 1910s, and must have had important impetus given that the longshoremen in the port of Piraeus in 1924 managed to gain it during a period of labour oversupply and in spite of opposition by the employers.56 Second, the labour unions sometimes operated as contracting teams undertaking various projects, substituting for entrepreneurs and ensuring work for their members57 – an initiative that was not without problems.58 This practice could well have enhanced the unions’ basis within a closed labour group of people from the same place, like the union of customs workers.59 All these monopolistic strategies had shaped workers’ attitudes. When the refugees emerged as a threat to the control (achieved or aimed for) of the labour market by the unions or other workers’ groups, demands

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for privileged treatment of locals must have been an almost automatic response.

Working Class Formation and Particularisms So far I have defined the social, political and intellectual structures that made possible the formulation of national preference demands against the refugees. However, the story does not end here, with the simple prevalence of the pole of ‘nationalism’ (or other ethno-local identities) over the pole of ‘class ideology’ in workers’ loyalties – to use Balibar’s terms that began this chapter. On the contrary, what strikes the researcher is the temporal coincidence between the development of national preference demands against the refugees and the first big steps in the formation of the working class in Greece after 1910. In fact, the development of the practices of exclusion, monopoly and entrenchment described above kept pace with (and in one respect were part of) the tendencies towards working class formation which led to the establishment of the General Federation of Greek Workers in 1918. The two ‘antinomic poles’ appear not as absolutely opposed, but as entangled in a dialectical relationship. This constitutes a paradox only for an idealized perception of class, which ignores the hierarchies within the classes and the exclusions on the basis of which they are partly defined – hierarchies and exclusions based on gender, ethnicity or skill. There was a dialectic between class formation on the one hand, which by definition meant the enlargement of the community of solidarity, and exclusions and particularisms on the other. This dialectic between the universalistic and the particularistic rationale appears in characteristic form in the summer of 1916, when the army mobilization that had been imposed almost a year previously came to an end. The demand brought forth by the labour centres of Athens and Piraeus, for workers discharged by the army to be rehired in their jobs,60 contributed to class unification, since it concerned every kind of workplace, promoted a common identity for all workers, and demonstrated the right to work on a general level and not related to specific communities, privileges or vested interests. However, this demand de facto was not addressed solely to the employers, but was also directed against those who had taken the jobs of the mobilized workers: refugees, internal immigrants, women and adolescents. There were cases in which forms of solidarity based on local bonds not only did not contradict class formation but also contributed to it. The solidarity bonds of the communities around the mine of Serifos in 1916 probably contributed crucially to the militant strike of that year.61 The

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union of quarrymen from Karpathos was one of the four that founded the Athens Labour Centre in 1910. However, it should not be ignored that in so doing the quarrymen were involved in a process that led to the modification of their charter in 1911, such that they would accept as a member any labourer working in the trade, irrespective of place of origin.62 Despite their entanglement, class and national/local particularism remained two different poles, often posing dilemmas for individuals: to which did they owe their primary loyalty? Ronald Aminzade has stressed that ‘class interests typically compete politically and organizationally with alternative interests rooted in nonclass identities’,63 but this competition does not necessarily have an either/or outcome. To put it in a way that resembles the analyses of Ernesto Laclau,64 the specific articulation of the multiple identities of the subjects, and the hierarchy and relations between them, constitutes a field of antagonism; the tensions that developed between the identities in the process of their articulation could be neutralized or intensified. In our case, ‘class identity’ could prevail over other identities or take a subordinate position in the hierarchy of loyalties of individual and collective subjects; it could incorporate some identities, neutralize others, and be contra-distinguished from many (but not necessarily opposed to them). The specific outcome of the articulation would be decided by a multitude of factors, and politics was not the least important, as the interwar developments in Greece suggest. Indeed, in Athens and Piraeus in the second decade of the twentieth century, despite the acceleration of the process of working class formation, conflicts between ethno-local communities in the labour market remained the dominant pattern, perhaps reinforced by the arrival of the refugees from Asia Minor and Thrace. Yet a tendency was further developed for transcending particularism, or at any rate for expanding the boundaries within which the solidarity relationships functioned and collective action was developed. This research does not extend to the interwar period, but the impression is given that an important impetus in this direction was provided by the leading role of the Left and the socialist ideas in many workplaces, and their efforts to integrate the refugees into working-class organizations, by promoting the union of local and refugee workers and discarding any national preference demands. This is not to say that the communist and socialist trade unionists immediately abandoned their monopolistic practices. At the association of lithographers, for example, ‘the supervision so that every worker that is hired should come from the members of the association’ is added into the objectives of the charter of 1924, when the union was under the control of the Communist Party.65 These practices promised to strengthen the

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unions and their status in negotiations, and for this reason they were accepted, but they contradicted the drive towards the transcendence of conflicts within the working class (and the focus on the struggle against employers) which unions ought to have provided. There was realization of this contradiction: it can be seen to explain the concealment in the newspaper of the Communist Party, when writing about the strike in textile factories in 1921, of the demand for exclusively hiring members of the union.66 Therefore, a tension developed between the coexistence of monopolistic practices and the universal character of the socialist project, and it seems that in the long term the former receded. The dialectic between universalism and particularism of course continued to exist; however, from a certain point the establishment of ‘local’ monopolies would be connected not so much with the militant spirit of the labour movement, which expressed a universalistic rationale, but with paternalist policies of concessions from above which aimed at ensuring social consent, especially in the years following the Greek Civil War. Perhaps typical is the case of the workers in the port of Preveza, where the practices not only of work monopoly but also hereditary rights in employment were later related to the state’s demand for a ‘Certificate of political beliefs’ on the part of the workers, and with the other measures of the anti-communist state adopted after 1936/1949.67 As regards national preference demands, after the bitter conflicts of the interwar years, the new divisions of the 1940s contributed to the improvement of relations between ‘Old Greeks’ and refugees. This normalization, and in general the gradual unification of Greece in ethnic terms, discouraged the formulation of preference demands on an ethnic basis until the coming of immigrants from Eastern Europe in the 1990s. It was no longer refugees who were, in the discourse of their opponents, to be symbolically expelled from the Greek nation; instead, until 1974 it was not an ethnic group at all, but rather the communists, who were accused of being antipatriotic collaborators with international communism and with the neighbouring communist states of the Balkans. Many thousands of communists were expelled from the national body, not only symbolically in the official discourse of the so-called ‘nationally minded’ state, but also legally, being deprived of their citizenship when they sought refuge behind the ‘Iron Curtain’. Nikos Potamianos is an assistant researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies – Foundation for Research and TechnologyHellas, based in Rethymno, Greece. He is a member of the academic

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board of the journal Ta Historica, and has published widely on the contemporary social and political history of Greece, focusing on labour history, the lower middle class of shopkeepers and artisans, populism and radicalism. His new book is about the social history of the carnival of Athens in 1800–1940 (Cretan University Press, 2020). He is currently working on the concept of moral economy and its potential for historical research.

Notes Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the conference ‘I istoria tis ergasias’ [History of labour] organized by the journal Historein in Athens, 20–21 May 2011, at the 16th summer meeting of postgraduate students of modern and contemporary history at the University of Crete, Rethymno, 18–20 July 2011, and at the conference ‘Working in the Ottoman Empire and in Turkey: Ottoman and Turkish Labour History within a Global Perspective’ which took place at Istanbul Bilgi University, 18–20 November 2011.  1. Etienne Balibar, ‘Class Racism’, in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 204–15.  2. Jean-Yves Le Gallou, La préférence nationale: réponse à l’immigration (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985).  3. Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la nouvelle droite (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 1994).  4. Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, ‘Introduction’, in Racism and the Labor Market, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), 9–19. This racist emphasis on inequality and dominance is stressed by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 136, who argues for the proximity of racial visions more towards social class than to nation, to the extent that they ‘justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination’ (in the interior of both national states and colonial empires); see Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 2002), 43–46 for criticism and demonstration of the common characteristics of nationalism and racism. Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte, 1987) bases his analysis on the distinction between racism that aims at domination and racism that aims at exterminating the Other. For our purposes it would be more useful to distinguish between racism that aims at the ‘justifying of exploitation of labour’ and racism of those who ‘feel exploited’ (typical is the anti-Semitism utilized by Nazism), a distinction made by Dik van Arkel, ‘Why Are Historical Labor-Market Studies Relevant to the Understanding of Racism?’, in Van der Linden and Lucassen, Racism and the Labor Market, 21–53.  5. Etienne Balibar, Les frontieres de la democratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1992).  6. Something that is generally the rule even in countries like Greece where the bond between citizenship and nationality was tighter than Western Europe: Antonis Liakos, ‘Multiple Paths to Citizenship: T.H. Marshall’s Theory and the Greek Case’, in Citizenship in Historical Perspective, ed. Steven Ellis, Guomundur Halfdanarson and Ann Katherine Isaacs (Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2006), 65–70. On the other hand, the differentiation between citizenship and the nation is expressed on a legal level in Greece from very early on: next to the contrast between the indigenous and the foreigner, a distinction was introduced between people of Greek ethnic origin and those of different ethnicity, a distinction that was used not only for instituting a favourable treatment of the Greek Orthodox Christians

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 7.  8.

 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

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from the Ottoman Empire, for example regarding the citizenship procedures, but also in order to differentiate the status of the Muslim residents of Thessaly in 1881 and of Macedonia and Epirus in 1913 concerning the way in which they obtained Greek citizenship: Dimitris Christopoulos, ‘Peripeteies tis ellinikis ithageneias: Poios (den) echei ta prosonta na einai Ellinas?’, Theseis 87 (2004), 61–90. Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 149–52. Etienne Balibar, ‘Insurrection et Constitution: La citoyenneté ambiguë’, in Pensées critiques: Dix itineraires de la revue Mouvements, 1998–2008 (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 9–28. Christos Hadziiossif, I giraia selini: I viomichania stin elliniki oikonomia, 1830–1940 (Athens: Themelio, 1993), 391–92. George Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 193 ff. For the arrival and settlement of refugees in Greece, either following the defeated Greek army or later with the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey, but in any case leaving (the great majority of them) all their belongings behind, see Giorgos Tzedopoulos, ed., Pera apo tin katastrofi: Mikrasiates prosfyges stin Ellada tou mesopolemou (Athens: Idryma Meizonos Ellinismou, 2003); Kostas Katsapis, ‘To prosfygiko zitima’, in To 1922 kai oi prosfyges: Mia nea matia, ed. Antonis Liakos (Athens: Nefeli, 2011), 125–69. Nikos Andriotis, ‘I proti prosfygia: Ellinikes prosfygikes metakiniseis, 1906–1922’, in Istoria tou Neou Ellinismou, 1700–2000, vol. 6, ed. Vassilis Panagiotopoulos (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2003), 95–104. Akropolis, 3 April 1912. ‘Appeal of the strikers’, April 1910, in the archive of Stefanos Dragoumis (in Gennadius Library, Athens), dossier 71.1 – where there is abundant material on the strike; see also Astrapi, 21 and 23 October 1909; Koinonismos, 16 April 1910; Ergatikon Kentron Peiraios, Oi ergatai tou Peiraios pros to Anotaton Symvoulion tis Ergasias (Piraeus, June 1912), 5 and 10–11. For an earlier isolated protest regarding the employment of foreign workers in the construction of railroads, see Akropolis, 18 October 1890. Akropolis, 21 and 26 May, and from 29 May to 9 June 1912 (especially 8 June); see also Ypomnima tou Ergatikou Kentrou Athinon: Oi ergatai tis Ellados pros tin diplin voulin ton Ellinon (Athens, 1911), 6. Avraam Benaroya, ‘O epangelmatikos agon tou ellinikou proletariatou’, in his I proti stadiodromia tou ellinikou proletariatou, 2nd ed. (1921; repr., Athens: Kommouna, 1986), 228. Viomichaniki kai viotechniki epitheorisis 1(8) (December 1914), 248–49, and Astir, 17 September 1916. Idrytiki praxi systasis EKA: Praktika synedriaseon, 1910–1914 (Athens, 2004), 556; Empros, 23 August 1914; and Chronos, 15 July 1916. Labour centres were a very important structure of the early Greek labour movement, corresponding to the dominance of small production units and based on the efforts of local avant-gardes of workers and intellectuals to propagate modern labour identities and politics (based on the opposition between labour and capital) and to mobilize non-unionized workers. Constituted on the basis of the city, labour centres were something more than local federations, both consisting of already existing trade unions and creating the political and social space required for unionizing. The first labour centre was founded in Volos in 1908, and was followed by Athens in 1910, Piraeus in 1912 and so on: Antonis Liakos, Ergasia kai politiki stin Ellada tou Mesopolemou: To Diethnes Grafeio Ergasias kai i anadysi ton koinonikon thesmon (Athens: Idryma Emporikis Trapezas, 1993), 98–99. Syndesmos ton ypallilon kafeneion, zythopoleion kai zacharoplasteion Athinon kai Peiraios: Katastikon (Athens, 1914); Katastatikon ergaton artopoion Athinon ‘I perithalpsi’

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

(Athens, 1915); charter of 1914 of the union of port workers of Piraeus at the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece, file 1 40 44 109. Ypourgeio Esoterikon, Statistika apotelesmata tis genikis apografis tou plithysmou kata tin 27 Oktovriou 1907, vol. I (Athens, 1909), 42–43. For example, Konstantinos Faltaits, Oi Ipeirotai pou xenitevontai (Athens, 1930). Pyrros, 18 October 1907; Akropolis, 6 and 27 May 1910; and Nitsa Koliou, Oi rizes tou ergatikou kinimatos kai o ‘Ergatis’ tou Volou (Athens: Odysseas, 1988), 34. Christina Agriantoni, Oi aparches tis ekviomichanisis stin Ellada ton 19o aiona (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Emporikis Trapezas, 1986), 291–94; Evi Papagiannopoulou, I dioryga tis Korinthou (Athens: Politistiko Technologiko Idryma ETVA, 1989), 82–83 and 94. Passports reappear in European countries at the turn of the century and the controls on international movement intensify after World War I: John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Law PI, ‘Peri sympliroseos tou arthrou 15 tou astikou nomou’, Efimeris tis Kyverniseos I, no. 19, 25 February 1881. An important percentage of the Italians in Patras had obtained Greek citizenship: Christos Moulias, To limani tis stafidas: Patras, 1828–1900 (Patras: Peri technon, 2000), 192. Ioannis Dimakis, I politeiaki metavoli tou 1843 kai to zitima ton aftochthonon kai ton eterochthonon (Athens: Themelio, 1991); Elpida Vogli, ‘Ellines to genos’: I ithageneia kai i taftotita sto ethniko kratos ton Ellinon (1821–1844) (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2007); Elli Skopetea, To protypo vasileio kai i Megali Idea: Opseis tou ethnikou provlimatos stin Ellada (1830–1880) (Athens: Polytypo, 1988). Skopetea, To protypo vasileio. Efimeris, 7 April 1879; Akropolis, 23–26 August and 2 September 1899. Something that classifies them high in the ranks of ‘semi-citizenship’, distinguished by Elizabeth F. Cohen, Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Kairoi, 12 and 14 February 1885. Gunnar Hering, Ta politika kommata stin Ellada, 1821–1936, vol. 2 (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezas, 2004), 824–25, originally published as Die politischen Parteien in Griechenland, 1821–1936, 2 vols (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992); Spyros Marketos, ‘O Alexandros Papanastasiou kai i epochi tou’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Athens, 1998), 354–55, http://www.scribd.com/doc/20074536; Nea Ellas, 16 August 1916; Chronos, 20 August 1916; and Chr. S. Chourmouzios, Ta kata tin 18 kai 19 Noemvriou 1916 kai epekeina (London, 1919), 102, 123–24. Nikos Potamianos, Oi noikokyraioi: Magazatores kai viotechnes stin Athina, 1880–1925 (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2015), 124–35. Spyros Koronis, I ergatiki politiki ton eton 1909–1918 (Athens, 1944). Leda Papastefanaki, Ergasia, technologia kai fylo stin elliniki viomichania: I klostoyfantourgia tou Peiraia (1870–1940) (Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2009), 240–41. Telling are some charters of fellow countrymen’s associations, where provisions for finding jobs for the newcomers are included. They were published in Efimeris tis Kyverniseos I, no. 193, 29 July 1889 (Charter of the Association of the People Coming from Ipeiros in Thessaly); Efimeris tis Kyverniseos I, no. 311, 7 November 1891 (Charter of the Association of the People Coming from Dorida in Athens); Efimeris tis Kyverniseos I, no. 19, 30 January 1893 (Charter of the Association of the People Coming from Nafpaktos in Patras). Nikos Potamianos, ‘I paradosiaki mikroastiki taxi tis Athinas: Magazatores kai viotechnes, 1880–1925’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Crete, 2011), 482–84, 677–79; Yannis Yannitsiotis, I koinoniki istoria tou Peiraia: I sygkrotisi tis astikis taxis, 1860–1910 (Athens: Nefeli, 2006), 358–64.

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35. According to the books of marriage of the registry office of Athens in 1885–88, 1901–03 and 1911–12, the marriages between people from the same place of origin made up 25 per cent of the total when the groom was a worker, peasant, shopkeeper or master artisan, but only 16 per cent when the groom was an entrepreneur, doctor, lawyer and so on: Potamianos, ‘I paradosiaki mikroastiki taxi’, 1161–62. 36. Potamianos, ‘I paradosiaki mikroastiki taxi’, 75–78; Myrto Dimitropoulou, ‘Athènes au XIXe siècle: De la bourgade à la capital’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008), 220–26. 37. Eleni Spathari-Begliti, Oi aggeioplastes tis Sifnou: Koinoniki sygkrotisi paragogi, metakiniseis (Athens: Arsenidis, 1992); Stathis Tsotsoros, Oikonomikoi kai koinonikoi michanismoi ston oreino choro: Gortynia (1715–1828) (Athens: Emporiki Trapeza tis Ellados, 1986). Kostas Faltaïts, ‘Oi planodioi technites stin Ellada’, Ellinika Grammata 3 (1928), 8–13, 69–72, 181–84, provides a detailed list of the local specializations, while Kostas Biris, Ai Athinai apo tou 19ou eis ton 20on aiona (Athens: Melissa, 1999), 247–48, refers to the ethno-local division of labour in nineteenth-century Athens. 38. A review of the mechanisms through which the ethnic division of labour is created is provided by Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998), 160–64; see also Michael Hechter, ‘Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor’, American Journal of Sociology 84 (1978), 293–318. Of course, such a division of labour could never be absolute; we should be careful about adopting oversimplified stereotypes, as argued by M. Erdem Kabadayı, ‘Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines’, International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 69–90. 39. Kostas Fountanopoulos, Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima sti Thessaloniki: Ithiki oikonomia kai syllogiki drasi sto mesopolemo (Athens: Nefeli, 2005), 74–78; Dimitra Lampropoulou, Oikodomoi: Oi anthropoi pou echtisan tin Athina, 1950–1967 (Athens: Vivliorama, 2009), 188–94. 40. Akropolis, 15 February and 28 May 1906. During the bloody conflicts between Cretans and Maniates in Piraeus, the Cretans demanded that the Maniates, who worked as porters in the customs house (where the conflict began), be expelled. 41. Skrip, 19 August 1903; Akropolis, 11 February 1905 and 31 May 1910. 42. Empros, 14–16 February 1906; Akropolis, 16–22 February 1906; Chronos, 13 March 1906; Vasiliko Diatagma, ‘Peri kanonismou tis komistikis ypiresias en to teloneio Peiraios’, Efimeris tis Kyverniseos I, no. 49, 23 February 1906. 43. Benaroya, I proti stadiodromia, 112. 44. For example, in the list of the associations of Athens and Piraeus published in Nikolaos G. Inglesis, Odigos tis Ellados, 1925–26 (Athens, n.d.), 561–76, the union of longshoremen ‘Andros’ and the association of coopers from Thira make their appearance. See also Thodoris Spyros, ‘Oi imi-nomades stin “poli”: I propolemiki metanastefsi ton Vlachon tou Gardikiou ston Peiraia’, Ariadne (2009), 237–66. 45. The charter can be found in the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece, file 1 40 44 285. 46. See, for example, the recording of the demands of the strikes in 1909–14 by Foteini Soulioti, ‘Oi apergiakes kinitopoiiseis tis periodou 1909–1914 ston athinaïko typo’ (Master’s thesis, University of Thessaloniki, 1991), 128–34. 47. Spyros Asdrachas, ‘Oi syntechnies stin tourkokratia: Oi oikonomikes leitourgies’, in Zitimata istorias (Athens: Themelio, 1983), 97–115; idem, Greek Economic History: 15th–19th Centuries, 2 vols (Athens: Politistiko Idryma Omilou Peiraios, 2007). 48. For examples of strikes during which the employers brought in workers from other cities or countries, see Yiannis Kordatos, Istoria tou ellinikou ergatikou kinimatos, 3rd ed.

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49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

(Athens: Boukoumanis, 1972), 34, 43; Athinai, 22 September 1909; Skrip, 25 October 1911. For what remains the best attempt to incorporate intra-class conflicts in the interpretation of a significant moment of the labour movement in Greece, see Efi Avdela, ‘Classe, ethnicité et genre dans la Thessalonique post-ottomane’, in Le genre entre classe et nation (Paris: Syllepse, 2006), 131–52. Another example of the study of intra-working-class conflicts, which relates directly to our topic since it refers to an aspect of the labour centres’ demands in the 1910s, again comes from feminist historians. They have interpreted the demands for ‘protection’ of women workers (regarding working hours, working at night etc.) as attempts by male workers to reinforce notions of the superiority of male labour and to control employment by restricting women’s wage work. See Efi Avdela, ‘“To the Most Weak and Needy”: Women’s Protective Labor Legislation in Greece’, in Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1890–1920, ed. Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris and Jane Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 290–317; Leda Papastefanaki, ‘Katamerismoi ergasias kai politikes diacheirisis tis ergasias stis ellinikes poleis (teli 19ou – proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona)’, in I proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona, by Etaireia Spoudon (Athens: Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias, 2012), 145–66. In the Charter of the Association of the Cookery Employees of Athens and Piraeus, in Efimeris tis Kyverniseos III, no. 59, 17 June 1895. In working environments as varied as commercial stores, silversmiths, bakeries, tobacco processing or port docks: Archive of the Emporikos Syllogos Athinas, Praktika Genikon Synelefseon, 6 December 1918; Syndesmos adamantopolon kai argyrochrysochoon Athinon kai Peiraios, Praktika Dioikitikou Symvouliou, 5 September 1918; and Praktika Genikon Synelefseon, 9 September 1918 (in the union’s archive); Astrapi, 20 July 1909; Liakos, Ergasia kai politiki, 425; Soulioti, ‘Oi apergiakes kinitopoiiseis’, 102, 128–33; Vassilis Lazaris, Politiki istoria tis Patras, 3 vols (Athens: Achaïkes ekdoseis, 1986), vol. 1, 358–61, and vol. 2, 39–41; Memorandum of the Union of Transport (Syndikato sygkoinonias kai metaforon), 12 February 1921, in the archive of Dimitrios Gounaris, ELIA archives, file 1. For example, employees of hotels and waiters, see Akropolis, 17 and 4 October 1908; Syndesmos ton ypallilon kafeneion, zythopoleion; Efimeris tis Kyverniseos III, no. 96, 10 December 1894 (Charter of the Association of Barber Workers of Athens). Akropolis, 12 January, 15 February and 5–8 June 1912. Fountanopoulos, Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima, 108–9; Liakos, Ergasia kai politiki, 139, 400–401 and 430–35. Gnomi tou dioikitikou symvouliou ton en Athinais xylourgon (Athens, 1906); I.V., ‘Peri sympliroseos tis ergatikis nomothesias’, Viomichaniki kai viotechniki epitheorisis 2 (September 1915), 132–36; Fountanopoulos, Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima, 107–9, 240–41, 366. Charilaos Gkoutos, Oi apergies sti Syro to 1879 (Athens: Sakoulas, 1999), 35; Kanonismos tou syndesmou thermaston ‘o Stephenson’ in 1907 (archive of Stefanos Dragoumis, Gennadius Library, dossier 71.1); Ioannis Zarras, Anergia kai ek peritropis ergasia (Athens, 1940), 232–34; Fountanopoulos, Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima, 55, 103–6. Of course, for the institutionalization of rotation working for the workers in the port in 1924, the support provided by the state was decisive in order to ensure a peaceful environment in the field of labour. It should be noted that in other cases a rotation method was imposed by the employers: see for example Zarras, Anergia, 232. The unions at the port of Piraeus were pioneers in demanding and adopting such practices too: Akropolis, 31 July 1912; Soulioti, ‘Oi apergiakes kinitopoiiseis’, 27; To Ypourgeio tis Ethnikis Oikonomias: I drasis aftou kata tin trietia, 1917–1920 (Athens, 1920), 3. For example, dependencies developed on the ‘financiers’ of these union-cooperatives, as well as conflicts in their interior that could lead to great division: in the case of the army

304

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62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

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boots workers, who undertook orders from the army, see Arist. N. Klimis, Oi synetairismoi stin Ellada (Athens: Pitsilos, 1985), 309–10; Patris, 8 September 1920; Kathimerini, 21 November 1921; Eleftheros Typos, 10 June 1923. See also Idrytiki praxi systasis EKA, 545, 548, 569, 582, for the conflicts that developed in the union of manufacturers of ‘tsarouchia’ shoes. Being an ‘association related to the solidarity of place of origin and the recognition of vested rights’, according to Akropolis, 16 February 1906. Dimitris Livieratos, Megales ores tis ergatikis taxis (Athens: Proskinio, 2006), 101–2. Konstantinos Speras, I apergia tis Serifou (Athens: Vivlopelagos, 2001). Cf. Craig Calhoun, ‘The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable Disguise and Borrowed Language?’, American Journal of Sociology 88(5) (1983), 886–915. Idrytiki praxi systasis EKA and Katastatikon tou en Athinais syllogou Karpathion latomon ‘i Proodos’ (Athens, 1911). Ronald Aminzade, ‘Class Analysis, Politics and French Labor History’, in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard Berlanstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 90–113, 92. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). Charters of 1915, 1919 and 1924 can be found in the historical archive of the National Bank of Greece, 40 44 dossier 143. Papastefanaki, Ergasia, technologia kai fylo, 392–93. Vangelis Avdikos, Preveza, 1945–1990: Opseis tis metavolis mias eparchiakis polis (Preveza: Dimos Prevezas, 1991), 136–40.

Bibliography Agriantoni, Christina. Oi aparches tis ekviomichanisis stin Ellada ton 19o aiona. Athens: Istoriko Archeio Emporikis Trapezas, 1986. Aminzade, Ronald. ‘Class Analysis, Politics and French Labor History’, in Rethinking Labor History, edited by Lenard Berlanstein, 90–113. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Andriotis, Nikos. ‘I proti prosfygia: Ellinikes prosfygikes metakiniseis, 1906–1922’, in Istoria tou Neou Ellinismou, 1700–2000, vol. 6, edited by Vassilis Panagiotopoulos, 95–104. Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2003. Asdrachas, Spyros. ‘Oi syntechnies stin tourkokratia: Oi oikonomikes leitourgies’, in Zitimata istorias, 97–115. Athens: Themelio, 1983.  . Greek Economic History: 15th–19th Centuries. 2 vols. Athens: Politistiko Idryma Omilou Peiraios, 2007. Avdela, Efi. ‘“To the Most Weak and Needy”: Women’s Protective Labor Legislation in Greece’, in Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1890– 1920, edited by Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris and Jane Lewis, 290–317. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.  . ‘Classe, ethnicité et genre dans la Thessalonique post-ottomane’, in Le genre entre classe et nation, 131–52. Paris: Syllepse, 2006. Avdikos, Vangelis. Preveza, 1945–1990: Opseis tis metavolis mias eparchiakis polis. Preveza: Dimos Prevezas, 1991. Balibar, Etienne. ‘Class Racism’, in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 204–15. London: Verso, 1991.  . Les frontieres de la democratie. Paris: La Découverte, 1992.

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 . ‘Insurrection et Constitution: La citoyenneté ambiguë’, in Pensées critiques: Dix itineraires de la revue Mouvements, 1998–2008, 9–28. Paris: La Découverte, 2009. Benaroya, Avraam. I proti stadiodromia tou ellinikou proletariatou, 2nd ed. Athens: Kommouna, 1986. Biris, Kostas. Ai Athinai apo tou 19ou eis ton 20on aiona. Athens: Melissa, 1999. Calhoun, Craig. ‘The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable Disguise and Borrowed Language?’ American Journal of Sociology 88(5) (1983), 886–915. Chourmouzios, Chr. S. Ta kata tin 18 kai 19 Noemvriou 1916 kai epekeina. London, 1919. Christopoulos, Dimitris. ‘Peripeteies tis ellinikis ithageneias: Poios (den) echei ta prosonta na einai Ellinas?’ Theseis 87 (2004), 61–90. Cohen, Elizabeth F. Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Cornell, Stephen, and Douglas Hartmann. Ethnicity and Race. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998. Dimakis, Ioannis. I politeiaki metavoli tou 1843 kai to zitima ton aftochthonon kai ton eterochthonon. Athens: Themelio, 1991. Dimitropoulou, Myrto. ‘Athènes au XIXe Siècle: De la bourgade à la capital’. Ph.D. dissertation, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008. Ergatikon Kentron Peiraios. Oi ergatai tou Peiraios pros to Anotaton Symvoulion tis Ergasias. Piraeus, June 1912. Faltaits, Konstantinos. Oi Ipeirotai pou xenitevontai. Athens, 1930. Faltaïts, Kostas. ‘Oi planodioi technites stin Ellada’. Ellinika Grammata 3 (1928), 8–13, 69–72, 181–84. Fountanopoulos, Kostas. Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima sti Thessaloniki: Ithiki oikonomia kai syllogiki drasi sto mesopolemo. Athens: Nefeli, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Routledge, 2002. Gkoutos, Charilaos. Oi apergies sti Syro to 1879. Athens: Sakoulas, 1999. Gnomi tou dioikitikou symvouliou ton en Athinais xylourgon. Athens, 1906. Hadziiossif, Christos. I giraia selini: I viomichania stin elliniki oikonomia, 1830–1940. Athens: Themelio, 1993. Hechter, Michael. ‘Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor’. American Journal of Sociology 84 (1978), 293–318. Hering, Gunnar. Die politischen Parteien in Griechenland, 1821–1936. 2 vols. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992.  . Ta politika kommata stin Ellada, 1821–1936, vol. 2. Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezas, 2004. Idrytiki praxi systasis EKA: Praktika synedriaseon, 1910–1914. Athens, 2004. Inglesis, Nikolaos G. Odigos tis Ellados, 1925–26. Athens, n.d. I.V. ‘Peri sympliroseos tis ergatikis nomothesias’. Viomichaniki kai viotechniki epitheorisis 2 (September 1915), 132–36. Kabadayı, M. Erdem. ‘Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines’. International Review of Social History 54(S17) (2009), 69–90. Katastatikon ergaton artopoion Athinon ‘I perithalpsi’. Athens, 1915. Katastatikon tou en Athinais syllogou Karpathion latomon ‘i Proodos’. Athens, 1911. Katsapis, Kostas. ‘To prosfygiko zitima’, in To 1922 kai oi prosfyges: Mia nea matia, edited by Antonis Liakos, 125–69. Athens: Nefeli, 2011. Klimis, Arist. N. Oi synetairismoi stin Ellada. Athens: Pitsilos, 1985. Koliou, Nitsa. Oi rizes tou ergatikou kinimatos kai o ‘Ergatis’ tou Volou. Athens: Odysseas, 1988. Kordatos, Yiannis. Istoria tou ellinikou ergatikou kinimatos, 3rd ed. Athens: Boukoumanis, 1972. Koronis, Spyros. I ergatiki politiki ton eton 1909–1918. Athens, 1944. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005.

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Lampropoulou, Dimitra. Oikodomoi: Oi anthropoi pou echtisan tin Athina, 1950–1967. Athens: Vivliorama, 2009. Lazaris, Vassilis. Politiki istoria tis Patras. 3 vols. Athens: Achaïkes ekdoseis, 1986. Le Gallou, Jean-Yves. La préférence nationale: réponse à l’immigration. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. Liakos, Antonis. Ergasia kai politiki stin Ellada tou Mesopolemou: To Diethnes Grafeio Ergasias kai i anadysi ton koinonikon thesmon. Athens: Idryma Emporikis Trapezas, 1993.  . ‘Multiple Paths to Citizenship: T.H. Marshall’s Theory and the Greek Case’, in Citizenship in Historical Perspective, edited by Steven Ellis, Guomundur Halfdanarson and Ann Katherine Isaacs, 65–70. Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2006. Livieratos, Dimitris. Megales ores tis ergatikis taxis. Athens: Proskinio, 2006. Marketos, Spyros. ‘O Alexandros Papanastasiou Kai i Epochi Tou’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Athens, 1998. Retrieved 7 September 2019 from www.scribd.com/doc/20074536. Mavrogordatos, George. Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–1936. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Moulias, Christos. To limani tis stafidas: Patras, 1828–1900. Patras: Peri technon, 2000. Papagiannopoulou, Evi. I dioryga tis Korinthou. Athens: Politistiko Technologiko Idryma ETVA, 1989. Papastefanaki, Leda. Ergasia, technologia kai fylo stin elliniki viomichania: I klostoyfantourgia tou Peiraia (1870–1940). Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2009.  . ‘Katamerismoi ergasias kai politikes diacheirisis tis ergasias stis ellinikes poleis (teli 19ou – proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona)’, in I proti dekaetia tou 20ou aiona, by Etaireia Spoudon, 145–66. Athens: Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias, 2012. Potamianos, Nikos. ‘I paradosiaki mikroastiki taxi tis Athinas: Magazatores kai viotechnes, 1880–1925’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Crete, 2011.  . Oi noikokyraioi: Magazatores kai viotechnes stin athina, 1880–1925. Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2015. Skopetea, Elli. To protypo vasileio kai i Megali Idea: Opseis tou ethnikou provlimatos stin Ellada (1830–1880). Athens: Polytypo, 1988. Smith, Anthony. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Soulioti, Foteini. ‘Oi apergiakes kinitopoiiseis tis periodou 1909–1914 ston athinaïko typo’. Master’s thesis, University of Thessaloniki, 1991. Spathari-Begliti, Eleni. Oi aggeioplastes tis Sifnou: Koinoniki sygkrotisi paragogi, metakiniseis. Athens: Arsenidis, 1992. Speras, Konstantinos. I apergia tis Serifou. Athens: Vivlopelagos, 2001. Spyros, Thodoris. ‘Oi imi-nomades stin “poli”: I propolemiki metanastefsi ton Vlachon tou gardikiou ston Peiraia’. Ariadne (2009), 237–66. Syndesmos ton ypallilon kafeneion, zythopoleion kai zacharoplasteion Athinon kai Peiraios: Katastikon. Athens, 1914. Taguieff, Pierre-André. La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris: La Découverte, 1987.  . Sur la nouvelle droite. Paris: Descartes et Cie, 1994. To Ypourgeio tis Ethnikis Oikonomias: I drasis aftou kata tin trietia, 1917–1920. Athens, 1920. Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Tsotsoros, Stathis. Oikonomikoi kai koinonikoi michanismoi ston oreino choro: Gortynia (1715– 1828). Athens: Emporiki Trapeza tis Ellados, 1986. Tzedopoulos, Giorgos, ed. Pera apo tin katastrofi: Mikrasiates prosfyges stin Ellada tou mesopolemou. Athens: Idryma Meizonos Ellinismou, 2003. van Arkel, Dik. ‘Why Are Historical Labor-Market Studies Relevant to the Understanding of Racism?’, in Racism and the Labor Market, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, 21–53. Bern: Peter Lang, 1995.

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van der Linden, Marcel, and Jan Lucassen. ‘Introduction’, in Racism and the Labor Market, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, 9–19. Bern: Peter Lang, 1995. Vogli, Elpida. ‘Ellines to genos’: I ithageneia kai i taftotita sto ethniko kratos ton Ellinon (1821– 1844). Herakleion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2007. Yannitsiotis, Yannis. I koinoniki istoria tou Peiraia: I sygkrotisi tis astikis taxis, 1860–1910. Athens: Nefeli, 2006. Ypomnima tou Ergatikou Kentrou Athinon: Oi Ergatai tis Ellados pros tin diplin voulin ton Ellinon. Athens, 1911. Ypourgeio Esoterikon. Statistika apotelesmata tis genikis apografis tou plithysmou kata tin 27 Oktovriou 1907, vol. I. Athens, 1909. Zarras, Ioannis. Anergia kai ek peritropis ergasia. Athens, 1940.

Chapter 9

Refugees, Foreigners, Non-Muslims Nationalism and Workers in the Silahtarağa Power Plant, 1914–1924

Erol Ülker

There is considerable scholarship on the rise of Turkish economic nationalism in the formative years of the Republic of Turkey. In his important research on the Greek minority of Istanbul, Alexis Alexandris identifies this policy with ‘a sustained assault against local Christian business interests and commercial institutions…’.1 Ayhan Aktar and Murat Koraltürk provide a more comprehensive account of the nationalist policies that aimed to Turkify the economy.2 They show the way in which economic nationalism led to the exclusion of foreign nationals and non-Muslim (gayr-i Müslim) Turkish subjects from the state bureaucracy, commercial and business activities, and many other professions. The policy of expelling foreigners and non-Muslims from the labour force has received much attention in this literature dealing with Turkish economic nationalism.3 According to Koraltürk, this policy, which favoured Muslim-Turkish workers, was an important part of the attempts at the Turkification of the economy in the 1920s. The elimination of workers of different nationalities from foreign companies was often regulated by contracts signed between such companies and the government. Koraltürk argues, however, that the purge of non-Muslim workers of Turkish nationality, who had come to be perceived as foreigners, did not have a solid legal basis. They often lost their jobs due to the pressure exerted directly by the government.4 Hence, the major economic centres of Turkey, such as Istanbul and Izmir, witnessed the expulsion

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of foreigners and non-Muslim minorities from the labour force in the 1920s and afterwards.5 In this chapter I aim to contribute to the existing scholarship by providing insights into how nationalism affected the character of relations between Muslim and non-Muslim workers in the course of the transition to Turkish national rule in Istanbul.6 I address this question by concentrating on the specific case of the Silahtarağa Power Plant, which was operated by the foreign-owned Ottoman Electric Company (henceforth I often refer to this power station simply as Silahtarağa). In the armistice period (1918–23), during which Istanbul was under Allied occupation, a significant proportion of Silahtarağa personnel consisted of Russian refugees and non-Muslim Ottoman subjects. The goal of this chapter, in particular, is to examine to what extent and how the ethnoreligious differences of the Silahtarağa workers were politicized as the Turkish national regime in Ankara gradually seized control of Istanbul after September 1922. Which actors, other than the state, were involved in the so-called Turkification process? Did this process bring about significant changes in the collective identifications of Muslim workers?7 The first part of the chapter provides a brief review of Istanbul’s political and demographic conditions after World War I. The next section looks at the ethno-religious composition of the labour force in Silahtarağa. Then I discuss the rise of Turkish economic nationalism in Istanbul after the Greco–Turkish War ended in Anatolia in September 1922, paying particular attention to the establishment of the General Union of Workers (GUW) as a nationalist labour confederation. In what follows, I examine how a local union of this confederation, the Association of Tram, Tunnel, and Electric Workers (ATTEW), launched an anti-Christian campaign in Silahtarağa through the efforts of its representative Recep Sadettin (Sa’düddin) Efendi, a temporary worker who had been dismissed from the power station in November 1922. This micro-study focusing on Silahtarağa offers insights into the grassroots dynamics of the rise of Turkish economic nationalism. It points out that a nationalist tendency within the labour movement played an active part in this process. In most cases, ATTEW member Recep Sadettin was much more aggressive than the government in his hostile attitudes towards Greek, Armenian and foreign employees – especially Russian refugees. The existing sources indicate that Recep Sadettin had a significant following among Muslim workers. He sought to use this influence in his attempts to get himself re-employed at the power station and to incite the government to intensify measures for eliminating Christian personnel. In the context of nationalist mobilization in Istanbul, Recep Sadettin merged his personal struggle with the broader demand for the

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Turkification of the labour force, and it appears that by doing so he was able to mobilize a considerable number of Muslim workers at Silahtarağa. I make use of a range of primary sources in this research. In addition to news items from the daily papers Vakit, İkdam, İleri and Tevhid-i Efkar, I utilize several documents from the Institute for the History of the Turkish Revolution Archives – Ankara (TİTE, Türkiye İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü Ars¸ivi) and the Defense Historical Service Archives – Paris (SHAT, Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre). I also use four documents from the not-yet-classified Istanbul Electricity, Tramway, and Tunnel (İETT) Archives, where I was allowed to carry out research for two days in 2009. These documents provide crucial information about the activities of the GUW and the ATTEW. One of them consists of a list of thirty-three Russian refugees employed in Silahtarağa as of December 1921. Figure 9.1. The List of the Russian Nationals Working at the Silahtarağa Central Factory, photographed by the author.

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My research concerning the relations between Silahtarağa workers and company management relies mostly on the files that I have obtained from the Prime Ministry Republican Archives in Ankara (BCA, Bas¸bakanlık Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivi). These files include workers’ petitions, reports of the commissions appointed by the government to investigate conditions in Silahtarağa, and the Electric Company’s correspondence with the government. Of course, there are limits to what can be gathered from such archival materials about interactions between the different actors in the labour politics of Silahtarağa. Many of them are state-centric sources reflecting the official views of the government’s commissions rather than the actual conditions that prevailed in the power plant. Also, the petitions submitted by labour representatives and the company’s responses to them provide biased interpretations of relations between Muslim and Christian workers, on the one hand, and the ATTEW and the Silahtarağa administration, on the other. Therefore, instead of seeking to derive objective information from these sources, I have concentrated on how the labour organizations under study, the government representatives and the company administration dealt with the ethno-religious diversity of the labour force. What is to be highlighted before proceeding any further is that all the actors involved in the labour politics, despite having conflicting interests, resorted to more or less the same categorization of ‘Muslim’, ‘non-Muslim’ and ‘foreigner’ in order to identify the ethno-religious backgrounds of Silahtarağa employees. In general, the category of ‘non-Muslim’ referred to Christian workers of Turkish nationality, above all Greek and Armenian workers. The Electric Company also made use of the categorization of ‘Muslim workers’ and ‘other Turk(ish) nationals’ (dig˘er or sair Türk tebaası) to draw the same distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim personnel. On the other hand, the category of ‘foreigner’ referred to employees of different nationalities. During the period examined in this chapter, many of the foreign employees were Russian refugees. Finally, the category of ‘Christians’ included, in general, both foreign nationals and non-Muslims. Recep Sadettin in particular made use of this category in his petitions. As discussed below in detail, this was part of his nationalist strategy against the Electric Company and the administration of the Silahtarağa Power Plant.

Istanbul after World War I The end of World War I brought about a series of crucial developments that eventually led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.8 Soon after

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the signing of the Armistice of Mudros by the British and Ottoman delegates on 30 October 1918, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) fell from power and the Allied powers began to occupy Ottoman territory. In this context, a number of regional movements were organized under the initiative of the CUP cadres in various parts of Anatolia and Thrace.9 In September 1919, these regional movements were centralized under the Society for the Defense of National Rights. This organization led the initial stages of the war against the Greek army (1919–22), which occupied parts of Asia Minor. In April 1920, the Turkish Grand National Assembly was established in Ankara, a provincial town in central Anatolia.10 Istanbul, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, was under Allied occupation during the Greco–Turkish War.11 The de facto occupation by the British, French and Italian forces started shortly after the armistice was signed. On 16 March 1920, the Allied authorities established military control over the Ottoman capital by formally occupying it. After the defeat of the Greek army in September 1922, the national government established in Ankara gradually seized control of Istanbul. On 19 October, Refet (Bele) Pasha entered the city as the official representative of the Ankara government. On 1 November the Ottoman Sultanate was dissolved. Three days later, the Ankara government declared its sovereignty over Istanbul. The Allied forces completely evacuated the city only a couple of weeks before the Turkish Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. Ankara, not Istanbul, became the capital city of the new regime. At the end of the Greco–Turkish War, Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city whose population consisted of diverse ethno-religious elements.12 According to the statistics provided by Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul’s population numbered around 1.2 million in 1920.13 There were 560,434 Muslims, 384,689 Orthodox Greeks, 118,000 Armenians and 44,765 Jews. Levantines and foreign nationals constituted the rest of the population.14 It is more difficult to estimate the number of foreign nationals than non-Muslim Ottomans registered by the churches and synagogues. According to the census of 1906, foreigners accounted for 14.95 per cent of Istanbul’s population, which means more than 120,000, but Ottoman records did not specify the different national and religious groups that constituted the category of foreign nationals.15 During the armistice period, Istanbul received large numbers of refugees from different regions. In addition to Muslims who fled the areas occupied by the Greek army, a considerable number of Ottoman Christians left the Turkish-controlled regions and moved to Istanbul. According to the statistics provided by the Ottoman Directorate-General

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of Refugees (Muhacirin Müdüriyet-i Umumiyesi), the total number of Muslim refugees was 27,755 in April 1921 and 65,000 in October 1921.16 It is estimated that Armenian refugees in Istanbul numbered around 3,200 and Greek refugees 5,000 as of April 1921.17 White Russians who escaped the civil war and the Bolsheviks no doubt formed the largest group of refugees in Istanbul under Allied occupation. Although the majority of them were ethnically Russian or spoke Russian as their mother tongue, there were Ukrainians, Greeks, Tartars, Circassians, Georgians and Armenians among them as well.18 It is not clear exactly how many refugees came to Istanbul from Russia in the course of the armistice period. Bülent Bakar mentions different sources on the number of Russians arriving in Istanbul, which indicate that the number was around 150,000.19 Yet only a small proportion of White Russians stayed in Istanbul. More than sixty thousand refugees were settled in camps around Çatalca, Limni and Gelibolu,20 and Istanbul was just a transit city for many Russian refugees who later moved to different parts of Europe and the Balkans. According to one estimate, there were some 65,000 Russians in Istanbul as of April 1921,21 yet only some 28,000 White Russians remained in Istanbul by November 1922.22 In their efforts to settle down in Istanbul, Russian refugees benefited from the assistance and support of the Allied authorities as well as a diverse group of Russian, American, French, British and Jewish charity organizations.23 Many of the refugees still needed jobs to survive and provide for their families. They were thus engaged in various economic activities, working as shopkeepers, waiters, photographers or carpenters, becoming active participants in the labour market in Istanbul.24 A considerable number of them were employed as port workers and in different factories, including the Silahtarağa Power Station.

Silahtarag˘a Power Station The Silahtarağa Power Station belonged to a larger economic complex controlled by the Belgian-based Constantinople Tramway and Electric Company (CTEC). This multinational was founded in 1914 by a consortium dominated by German capital.25 After World War I ended, however, French and Belgian capital dominated CTEC, as the Belgian government confiscated all German and Hungarian capital shares in this company as ex-enemy assets.26 CTEC held financial and administrative control of three important public utility companies in Istanbul: the Dersaadet Tramway Company, the Ottoman Electric Company and the Tunnel Company, which operated the funicular system between Galata

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and Pera, two important commercial districts in Istanbul. It was the CTEC-controlled Electric Company that operated the Silahtarağa Plant, which produced electric power for industrial and domestic consumption as well as the tramway network operating on the European part of Istanbul. CTEC’s subsidiary companies in Istanbul employed a considerable number of personnel. As Table 9.1 shows, this number greatly increased from 1915 to 1921. The personnel who were paid in monthly salaries (maas¸lı memurin) consisted mostly of staff dealing with administrative works as well as the supervisors of services and workers. Personnel working at Silahtarağa, the power grids of the Electric Company and the workshops of the Tramway Company were among those categorized as waged labourers. The personnel of the Electric Company (see Table 9.2) formed a significant proportion of the total number of CTEC employees. In fact, the number of Electric Company employees was higher prior to September 1922; company management terminated the contracts of some 129 temporary workers between September 1922 and May 1923. These temporary workers had been employed in 1921 for construction works at Silahtarağa. Of those dismissed, eighty were categorized as non-Muslim and forty-nine as Muslim.27 The available documents provide little information about the ethnoreligious background of the workers, aside from stating whether they Table 9.1 Employment status of tram, electric and funicular personnel.

Total number of tram, electric and funicular employees December 1915 Salaried Waged 134 1,000 1,134

January 1920 Salaried Waged 444 1,406 1,900

January 1921 Salaried Waged 556 2,109 2,665

Source: Erol Ülker, ‘Mayıs 1920 Tramvay Grevi: Türkiye Sosyalist Fırkası ve İs¸çi Hareketi Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme’, Kebikeç 36 (December 2013), 247. Table 9.2 Religious status and nationality of Electric Company employees, May 1923.

Electric Company employees on 1 May 1923 Muslim 235 41%

Non-Muslim 234 41%

Foreigner 103 18%

Total 572

100%

Source: ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Nafia Vekaleti Dersaadet Komiseri Nafız Ziya Beyefendiye’, Bas¸bakanlık Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivi (hereafter BCA), 230.88.15.10, 26/05/1339, 1–2.

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were Muslim or non-Muslim Ottoman subjects or foreign nationals. We know, however, that there were thirty-three Russian refugees employed at the Silahtarağa Power Station as of December 1921.28 This implies that White Russians formed the majority of foreign personnel at Silahtarağa (see Table 9.3). The Electric Company employed Russian refugees to fill positions that required a certain level of technical and executive expertise. The factory director (Vesselowsky Serge) was a White Russian. So were the chief engineer (Allexandrosky Eugene) and the chief of the mechanical workshop (Ozel Jean). Many other personnel of Russian nationality were employed as supervisors, technicians and electricians, and among them were a carpenter and a gardener as well. The great majority of Silahtarağa’s Russian personnel were accommodated in apartments provided by the company management on the factory campus.29 After September 1922, however, refugee workers at the Silahtarağa factory, too, were exposed to a rising tide of nationalism and anti-Christian euphoria in Istanbul.

Nationalism and Popular Movements after September 1922 Even before the Greco–Turkish War ended, Istanbul had seen inter-communal tensions between the Christian and Muslim elements. When news of the success of the Turkish offensive against the Greek army reached Istanbul at the beginning of September 1922, thousands took to the streets to celebrate.30 The demonstrations, which continued between September and November 1922, reflected the nationalist and anti-Greek euphoria that took hold of the Muslim elements. In some cases, such movements led to aggression against non-Muslims, particularly members of the Greek Orthodox community, who were accused of collaborating with the Allied powers that had occupied the city and of supporting the nationalist project of unification with Greece. Table 9.3 Religious status and nationality of Silahtarağa workers.

Silahtarağa workers, 1 May 1923 Permanent Temporary Total

Muslim 68 44 112

Non-Muslim 11 15 26

Foreigner 17 21 38

Total 96 80 176

Source: ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Nafia Vekaleti Dersaadet Komiseri Nafız Ziya Beyefendiye’, BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/05/1339, 2.

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This nationalist atmosphere was accompanied in Istanbul by the rise of xenophobic attitudes towards the Christian communities of the city. One of the main manifestations of this was Turkish economic nationalism – the policy of eliminating the influence of foreigners and nonMuslim Ottoman subjects from the economy, bureaucracy and the labour market. After the Ankara government dispatched the mission of Refet Pasha to Istanbul in October 1922, this policy was implemented by various means, from official regulations that imposed Turkish as the single language of all business and bureaucratic activities to the de facto pressure exerted on foreign companies to fire Christian personnel and replace them with Muslim and Turkish employees.31 The National Defense Committee (NDC, Müdafaa-i Milliye Tes¸kilatı) operated in this context as the principal organization of the Turkish national movement in Istanbul.32 Formed after the Allied forces formally occupied the city in March 1920, this organization aimed to protect the Muslim population from the occupation forces and the reprisals of the Christian elements.33 The NDC was well organized in the Muslimpopulated neighbourhoods, where its cadres formed armed committees.34 A large number of activists in such local committees were drawn from the staff of the Ottoman army, gendarmerie and police. The NDC was also connected with the artisan and labour unions, including those of porters, dockers, workers in shipment and unloading, bargemen and lightermen.35 The NDC’s commission of economic organizations (Tes¸kilat-ı İktisadiye Encümeni) played a crucial role in the dissemination of Turkish economic nationalism and its evolution into a popular movement.36 This commission was founded on 3 November 1922, the day before the Ankara government declared sovereignty over Istanbul.37 Its mission was to form grassroots organizations uniting all occupational groups under the administration of the NDC. By early January 1923, the commission had established three economic confederations that rallied a considerable number of Muslim workers, guild members and merchants around the common goal of asserting Turkish national control over the economy: the Federation of Istanbul Artisan Associations (FIAA, İstanbul Esnaf Cemiyetleri Heyet-i Merkeziyesi), the Turkish National Commerce Union (TNCU, Milli Türk Ticaret Birliği) and the General Union of Workers (GUW, Umum Amele Birliği).38 The establishment of the GUW signified a transformation in the labour movement.39 During the armistice period, more than thirty labour strikes took place in the capital.40 At the same time, there was a general trend of unionization among workers employed in diverse sectors of the economy.41 The Turkish Socialist Party (TSP) was the main

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organization that led the majority of unionization and strike movements of the period.42 The president of this organization was the famous socialist leader Hüseyin Hilmi, who is also known by his pseudonym İs¸tirakçı (Solidarist).43 Under his leadership, the TSP operated as a confederation of many different labour unions and associations, including those of the tram, tunnel and electric workers. The TSP organized labour actions in the armistice period with almost exclusive attention to the economic demands of the workers. It did not have any agenda to purge Christian workers from the labour force. There were, in fact, non-Muslim workers among the members and leading activists of the unions associated with the TSP.44 Unlike the TSP, the GUW was a nationalist organization that supported the elimination of Christians from the labour market.

Nationalism on the Factory Floor The rise of anti-Christian sentiments among the Muslim workers of Silahtarağa was not independent from the activities of the GUW. As noted above, the GUW was one of the economic confederations founded by the Committee of National Defense towards the end of 1922. Muslim employees of the CTEC-controlled Tramway Company formed one of the first labour groups from which the GUW recruited members.45 Afterwards, a branch of this confederation was established under the name of the Association of Tram, Tunnel, and Electric Workers (ATTEW).46 It was this union that carried out nationalist and xenophobic agitation at the Silahtarağa Power Station. In addition to Armenians and Greeks, the employment of Russian refugees was one of the central issues of this campaign from the outset. The ATTEW’s growing influence in Silahtarağa was closely connected with the efforts of Recep Sadettin (bin Salih) Efendi. He had previously served in the Ottoman gendarmerie and retired as a lieutenant in October 1917.47 Upon his application, he was accepted into the Electric Company in April 1921. Recep Sadettin was one of the aforementioned temporary workers hired for construction work at Silahtarağa. At first he was a porter, but was then promoted to carpenter with a substantial increase in his wage from 100 to 130 kurus¸. In November 1922, he was laid off by the factory administration along with a few other temporary workers.48 Recep Sadettin was hired in the midst of a labour mobilization at Silahtarağa. Silahtarağa workers appear to have unionized at the beginning of the armistice period, threatening the company administration with a strike movement as early as March 1919.49 They struggled for

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higher wages and better working conditions during the armistice period, collaborating towards the same goals with the employees of the Tramway and Tunnel Companies, the subsidiaries of the same multinational holding CTEC, which also held financial and administrative control of the Electric Company. The unions of the tram, electric and funicular workers became part of the Turkish Socialist Party and their cooperation brought Istanbul to the edge of a general strike in August 1921.50 It is not clear whether Recep Sadettin was a member of the labour union associated with the TSP in this phase of the armistice period. What we know for sure is that he became a labour activist in Silahtarağa before he was fired in November 1922. According to a report submitted to the Ministry of Public Works in June 1923, he had taken the initiative in the collective movements of Silahtarağa workers and become involved in their unionization efforts.51 It is also clear that Recep Sadettin had considerable influence among the Muslim workers of the power station, some of whom had reportedly nominated him as their representative.52 Although he was no longer employed at Silahtarağa, he presented himself as a member of the ATTEW’s headquarters representing the Silahtarağa factory and signed petitions in this capacity.53 After he was dismissed, Recep Sadettin launched a systematic campaign against the factory administration, apparently drawing on his ongoing influence at the power station. He reportedly made a scene when he was informed of the company’s decision to fire him, causing the police to intervene, and then induced some of the Muslim workers to meet Refet Pasha to complain about the Electric Company.54 On 27 November 1922, he himself submitted a petition to the Ministry of Public Works. Hence, a commission was appointed to carry out an investigation into the power station. In the end, this commission reportedly made a decision in favour of the company,55 but that decision did not discourage Recep Sadettin, who submitted another petition to the Turkish Grand National Assembly in April 1923.56 In his petitions Recep Sadettin accused the administration of Silahtarağa of favouring non-Muslim personnel over Muslim workers, which was why, he claimed, he had been fired. According to Recep Sadettin, his services were still needed when he was fired, but the factory management, dominated by Russian refugees, employed a Greek, named Pandeli, in his place.57 The executive staff intended to employ more nonMuslims and they elevated Greek, Armenian and other Christian personnel to better-paying positions. Even when Christian workers did not have the necessary expertise, they were very quickly trained, whereas qualified and talented Muslim workers were often employed in ordinary and lower-paid positions that did not require any sort of technical

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expertise. There was also discrimination in the distribution of housing constructed on the factory campus for Silahtarağa employees. Muslim workers received fewer apartments, and the conditions of the apartments they were offered were often poorer than those offered to non-Muslim and refugee personnel. Recep Sadettin’s severe criticism of the attitudes of the White Russians is to be highlighted at this point. It is important to note that the existence of Russian refugees in Silahtarağa was not being objected to for the first time. In fact, even when the TSP had dominated the labour movement, the union of Silahtarağa workers had raised this issue, asserting in May 1921 that the Electric Company had no right to employ foreigners in the power station.58 Union representatives had referred in particular to Russian refugees in this respect.59 They had argued that the employment of Russians contradicted the terms of the contract between the company and the government, and they put a specific article about this issue into their list of demands from the company administration. This approach had something to do with the workers’ concern that the Electric Company would use White Russians as strikebreakers. By August 1921, negotiations between the tram, funicular and electric workers and the company representatives, which had started around January 1921, had come to a halt, and a strike movement seemed unavoidable. Thus, the Electric Company was looking for new personnel to be employed in the event of a strike.60 In this context, Russian refugees seemed to be potential replacements, which became clear at the end of September 1921 when the Tramway Company hired a group of Russian refugees as apprentices to be trained by experienced conductors. Yet the conductors affiliated with the TSP perceived these White Russians as potential strikebreakers who would undermine their bargaining power, and they therefore went on a spontaneous strike for a day to prevent their employment.61 There was a fundamental difference between this attitude and that of Recep Sadettin. Neither the TSP headquarters nor the tram workers who went on strike seem to have resorted to a xenophobic discourse about the refugee workers, who later stated in the newspaper Presse de Soir that they had had no intention of supporting the company against the tram workers or of sabotaging any possible strike movement.62 Recep Sadettin, on the other hand, framed his petitions from an anti-Christian and xenophobic point of view. This becomes clear in his petition to the National Assembly, in which he vehemently complained that in its administration of the Silahtarağa Plant, the Electric Company relied on Greeks, Armenians and foreigners.63 He spoke, in particular, of Russian refugees occupying key positions in the factory administration, such as

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the factory director or the chief of the electric workshop, who were supporters of Tsarist Russia and enemies of the Turks and Soviet Russia. In its response addressed to the Ministry of Public Works in May 1923, the Electric Company rejected all of Recep Sadettin’s accusations.64 First, it was emphasized that the dismissal of Recep Sadettin did not evidence discrimination against Muslim workers: 129 temporary workers had been laid off since September 1922, as the company no longer needed their services, and Recep Sadettin was only one of a group, the majority of whom were non-Muslim. Although the factory administration and technical staff did sometimes scold the workers, such acts were unavoidable and had nothing to do with the nationality of the workers. According to the company, there was no bias towards any nationality or religion at Silahtarağa, and the employment of a few Russians was a result of migration from Russia to Istanbul under extraordinary conditions. Furthermore, there was no injustice in the distribution of housing. Muslim workers received half of the total number of sixty-eight apartments on the factory campus, and many of them preferred to live in neighbourhoods of their own choosing anyway. Of course, this response did not solve the problem. It is evident that the petitions submitted by Recep Sadettin aimed to persuade the government to exert pressure on the Electric Company to eliminate non-Muslims, foreigners and refugees from the factory. This strategy was in line with the GUW headquarters advising the tram and electric workers to establish unity among themselves to be able to benefit from the government’s policy of Turkifying the companies.65 In the end, Recep Sadettin succeeded in getting the government to appoint a new commission of investigation. This commission, which had three members, completed its report in May 1923.66 To examine the validity of Recep Sadettin’s claims, it conducted interviews with workers’ representatives Ahmet Salih and Ömer İrfan. Two other workers, named Mesut Fevzi and Ali Hamdi, volunteered to give interviews as well. Based partly on the statements of these workers, the commission contradicted some of Recep Sadettin’s points about the factory administration. Concerning his claim that he had been fired because of discrimination, for example, the commission referred to Ömer İrfan’s testimony.67 According to him, Recep Sadettin had been only temporarily employed and had been dismissed when his tasks had ended. Ömer İrfan also implied that Recep Sadettin’s more general accusation of discrimination against Muslim personnel was exaggerated, as there were opposing examples. One Abdullah Efendi, for instance, had initially been given ordinary duties when he had started working at the power station, but was a machinist at present. Recep Sadettin himself had been

Refugees, Foreigners, Non-Muslims 321

promoted from porter to carpenter and his wage had been raised on the basis of this promotion. Nevertheless, the commission concluded that too many personnel of foreign nationalities, and especially Russians, were employed at the Silahtarağa Power Station.68 There were a great number of unemployed workers and craftsmen in the country and, thus, the administration’s preference for the employment of Russians was not acceptable. The company was allowed to hire foreign nationals only for positions that required a certain expertise and specialization that could not be found among Turkish subjects. Another commission was therefore necessary, and this one, which was to include delegates from the government and the company, was to decide which personnel should have been replaced by Turks and which positions should have been allocated to Turkish workers. Two of the Russian personnel (Aleksandrofski and Korva’lof[?]) needed to be fired immediately, even before the establishment of such a commission.69 The commission members were evidently much more cautious in their approach to the employment of non-Muslim personnel than Recep Sadettin, whose petitions targeted Greek and Armenian personnel as much as Russian refugees. They limited themselves to the question of foreigners, and proposed a method of eliminating them in cooperation with the company. But the report they prepared also provides a clue about the de facto methods of eliminating Christian personnel. It points out that with the initiative of some of the workers, three employees were removed from the factory on grounds of their Greek nationality. Although the details of how that happened are not accounted for, this point brings forth an important question: to what extent did Recep Sadettin’s attitudes represent the approach of the Muslim workers of Silahtarağa towards non-Muslim personnel and executive staff? The company addressed this question in its aforementioned report responding to the accusations, highlighting that Recep Sadettin was not, in fact, a true representative of the Silahtarağa workers, as he presented himself.70 There were three representatives elected by the workers, and both the government and the company recognized their authority to act as mediators and deal with the complaints and demands of the workers. Recep Sadettin was not one of those labour representatives, all of whom had been elected from among the Muslim employees of Silahtarağa. By this statement the company obviously implied that Recep Sadettin did not reflect the attitudes of all Muslim workers towards non-Muslim staff and personnel. It also implies that the ATTEW’s influence among Silahtarağa workers was limited. The leading figure of the campaign launched against the company and its non-Muslim staff was no longer

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employed at the Silahtarağa factory and, it seems, none of the three elected labour representatives was supporting it. There is certainly an element of truth to the points that the company raised in its report written in April 1923. As was highlighted in another governmental report written in June, Recep Sadettin was not, indeed, one of the three labour representatives approved by the government and the company.71 These were Ömer İrfan, Ramazan, and Ahmet Salih. In his testimony to the commission in April, Ömer İrfan stated that the factory administration showed favour to Russian refugees because the director himself was Russian, and thus, added Ömer İrfan, it was natural that he should protect Russian personnel.72 Then, however, Ömer İrfan provided counter-examples of discrimination, referring to how the factory administration realized the talents of a Turkish youngster named Hulusi Efendi and appointed him to a higher position in the factory. Similarly, one Ekrem Efendi had been initially employed as a sweeper (süpürgeci), but was now a ‘second-class machinist’. It is apparent that Recep Sadettin was much more radical than the official worker representative Ömer İrfan in terms of his anti-Christian and xenophobic attitudes. Although the latter, too, criticized the White Russian executive staff for treating his co-nationals better than Muslim workers, he made this point without resorting to an explicit anti-Christian discourse and without referring to Greek or Armenian workers from such a point of view. As indicated above, he also took issue with Recep Sadettin’s claim that he was fired because of discrimination against Muslim employees. There were clear parallels between the report of the commission and the testimony of Ömer İrfan, which seems to support the company’s argument that Recep Sadettin’s petitions did not represent the attitudes of Muslim personnel in general. However, the attitudes of Muslim workers would soon begin to change. In the second half of May 1923, foreign companies in Istanbul, including the Electric Company, gave in to the pressure of the Turkish government and sent representatives to Ankara in order to renegotiate the terms of their concessions with the Ministry of Public Works. The companies signed the new agreements by the middle of the following month. The agreement between the Ministry and the Electric Company was signed on 12 June 1923 and the Council of Ministers approved it on 14 June.73 One of the provisions of this protocol was that within six months all employees of the Electric Company should be Turks.74 A new petition was submitted on the same day that the Ankara government approved the protocol, that is, 14 June.75 This time it was handed directly to the Electric Company, not the S¸ehremaneti (Istanbul municipality), the Ministry of Public Works or any other state department. More

Refugees, Foreigners, Non-Muslims 323

importantly, the new petition was submitted by Ahmet Salih Efendi, not the ATTEW member Recep Sadettin.76 As noted above, Ahmet Salih was officially recognized as a labour representative. He signed the petition in the name of the ‘Muslim workers of the Silahtarağa factory’, which evidently stood for a broader representation than the ATTEW. The Electric Company attempted to downplay the importance of this difference by underlining that Ahmet Salih was only one of the three labour representatives and he was the brother of the troublemaker Recep Sadettin, who, allegedly, had written the petition. Despite this, the company was obliged to address the concerns of the Muslim workers. I was unable to obtain the petition in question, but the company’s response to it provides important insights into its content.77 The response addressed to the workers makes it clear that the petition was focused, again, on the issue of discrimination against Muslim employees. The company objected to this accusation, stressing that Muslims formed the absolute majority of temporary and permanent workers, at 65 per cent, and this proportion would progressively increase. As the number of specialists who had experience of steam turbines and electric plants in the country was limited, the workers themselves accepted the necessity of employing foreign staff. The chief engineer reportedly promoted Muslim workers when he could, and the dismissal of Greek, Armenian and foreign workers had already resulted in the promotion of Muslims within certain departments of the power station. Some of the temporary Muslim workers had been given permanent status as well. This detailed document demonstrates that the Electric Company was now more concerned with the attitudes of Muslim workers than it had been before. Up until then, the petitions had come primarily from an outsider, Recep Sadettin, who was no longer an employee of the company. In this case, however, the protest came from inside the power station and it was supported by some of the Muslim workers, although the company seemingly denied this connection, attributing the petition to the initiative of Recep Sadettin. Even if it is true that Ahmet Salih submitted the petition under the influence of his brother Recep Sadettin, this development is important because it demonstrates that the ATTEW could mobilize a group of Muslim Silahtarağa workers to directly confront the factory administration. In any case, it is clear that the pressure on the Electric Company for the Turkification of its labour force increased around the time that it signed the aforementioned protocol, which included a specific article about the employment of Turkish personnel. Two weeks after the petition signed by Ahmet Salih on behalf of Silahtarağa’s Muslim workers, on 28 June 1923, the GUW delivered a memorandum to the Electric

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Company.78 The headquarters of this nationalist confederation felt confident enough to state that, in order to avoid a labour crisis, the company should have asked its staff who were in touch with the workers to act with compassion, strictly observing the terms of the existing regulations. Meanwhile, Recep Sadettin was still busy sending out petitions. On 15 August he wrote to the Ministry of Public Works, complaining that the factory administration was reluctant to apply the provision of the Ankara protocol related to non-Turkish personnel.79 Recep Sadettin proudly stated that he had thus far succeeded in having a few Greeks fired with his successive applications to the government as a labour representative. Despite the Ankara agreement, however, because of the arbitrary actions and administration of its director, the Silahtarağa Power Station had not yet acquired a Turkish character.

Concluding Remarks This chapter has provided a micro-analysis of how the nationalist policy of Turkifying the labour force was implemented in Istanbul during the course of transition to Turkish national rule. I have attempted to offer insights into the grassroots dynamics of this policy by examining the ways in which the labour union ATTEW, which was associated with the nationalist labour confederation GUW, sought to mobilize the Muslim workers of Silahtarağa against refugee and non-Muslim personnel. This campaign was launched around the time that a nationalist euphoria took hold of Istanbul’s Muslim population and when the national government in Ankara gradually seized control of the city through the mission of Refet Pasha. The nationalist campaign initiated by the ATTEW – more specifically its representative Recep Sadettin – preceded the government’s policy of Turkifying the labour force that was systematically implemented in the early republican period. One of the important findings of my research is that the ATTEW was much more radical in its hostile attitudes towards Christian employees than the commissions appointed by the government to investigate the validity of Recep Sadettin’s claims against the company administration. The basic strategy pursued by Recep Sadettin was to push the government to adopt a more aggressive stance against the employment of Russian refugees, Greeks and Armenians at Silahtarağa. The crux of this strategy was to persuade the national government to put pressure on the company to fire its non-Muslim personnel and replace them with Muslims.

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In fact, this strategy was not specific to Silahtarağa; it was adopted by the GUW headquarters as a general labour policy. On 16 August 1923, the confederation’s secretary general S¸akir Rasim organized a public meeting at the GUW’s central bureau with the participation of delegates from among the tram and funicular employees.80 The aim of this meeting was to draw public attention to the employment of a large number of non-Muslims by foreign companies, like the Electric Company. In addition to the managements of the foreign companies, the labour delegates accused officials who represented the government in its relations with the public utility administrations of not sufficiently protecting Muslim and Turkish employees against non-Muslims and foreigners. The GUW was no doubt a nationalist labour confederation which since its formation had been organized exclusively among Muslim workers.81 When it was founded, however, it was foreign companies that constituted the main target of its nationalist rhetoric. It was highlighted that the GUW was intended to challenge foreign companies that pursued their own selfish economic interests at the expense of labour rights. There was no class conflict between Turkish merchants and workers.82 It was foreign capital owners, not Turkish merchants, who represented the real capitalist class in Turkey. But the public meeting on 16 August made it clear that the GUW had shifted the focus of its nationalist agitation from foreign companies to non-Muslim workers. Foreign companies were now criticized for employing non-Muslims, not for exploiting workers. The national government was urged to protect the interests of Muslim workers by Turkifying the labour force. This proved to be an effective strategy. As noted above, the Electric Company signed a new contract with the Ankara government in June 1923 according to which all electric employees should be Turks within the next six months. Table 9.4 demonstrates that the largest number of non-Muslims and foreigners lost their jobs at the Electric Company during this period, ending in January 1924. Table 9.4 Religious status and nationality of Electric Company employees, 1923/1924.

Electric Company employees in 1923 and 1924 Date 1 May 1923 1 Jan 1924 5 Oct 1924

Muslim 235 41% 432 73.5% 422 78%

Non-Muslim 234 41% 101 17% 76 14%

Foreigner 103 18% 56 9.5% 43 8%

Total 572 100% 589 100% 541 100%

Source: BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/05/1339, 1–2; BCA, 230.27.21.8, 07/09/1924; Koraltürk, Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde, 241.

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Based on these figures, it is not possible to determine exactly how many Silahtarağa employees were fired between May 1923 and January 1924. It is clear, however, that the total number of non-Muslim and foreign electric employees declined from 337 in May 1923 to 157 in January 1924, which means that more than half of them lost or quit their jobs. It is thus safe to suggest that a significant number of workers fired during this period had been employed at Silahtarağa. What this chapter has argued is that a nationalist segment of the labour movement played an important part in this outcome, exerting pressure on the Electric Company to carry out the terms of its contract with the government related to the employment of Turkish personnel. The contract did not define the category of Turkish mentioned in Article 11. However, it was clear that for the nationalist labour activists this category was broader than citizenship. They considered Christian Ottoman subjects, above all Greeks and Armenians, as non-Turkish elements who needed to be eliminated from the labour force along with workers of foreign nationalities, including White Russians. It was this interpretation, which excluded non-Muslim subjects from the category of Turkishness, that would mark the state policies of nation-building in the years to come. Erol Ülker is a faculty member at Is¸ık University, Department of International Relations. Ülker obtained his BA in International Relations from Istanbul University (1999), and holds two MA degrees from the Political Science and International Relations Department of Boğaziçi University (2003) and the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University (2004). He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation entitled ‘Sultanists, Republicans, Communists: The Turkish National Movement in Istanbul, 1918–1923’. His research interests include nationalism, migration, labour politics and social movements in the Middle Eastern, Ottoman and Turkish context.

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Notes  1. Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations (Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies, 1974), 106.  2. Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve Türkles¸tirme Politikaları (Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2001); Murat Koraltürk, Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Ekonominin Türkles¸tirilmesi (Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2011).  3. In addition to the aforementioned studies by Alexandris, Aktar and Koraltürk, see Rıfat N. Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri: Bir Türkles¸tirme Serüveni, 1923–1945 (Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2001), 196–240. For a recent study on this subject, see also Asaf Özkan, ‘Milli Mücadele’den Sonra ve Cumhuriyet’in İlk Yıllarında Yabancı Sermayeli S¸irketlerde Türkçe Meselesi’, Belleten LXXVIII(283) (2014), 1135–56. The literature on the labour history of the late Ottoman and early republican periods also deals with the Turkification of the labour force. Kadir Yıldırım, for example, refers to the ethno-religious heterogeneity of the Ottoman labour force and its nationalization process; see Kadir Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İs¸çiler (1870–1922): Çalıs¸ma Hayatı, Örgütler, Grevler (Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2013), 73–83.  4. Koraltürk, Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde, 229.  5. Ibid., 231.  6. An increasing number of Ottoman labour historians problematize the ethno-religious heterogeneity of the Ottoman labour force and relations between the workers from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Pioneering work in this respect is due to Donald Quataert: see, for example, Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: New York University Press, 1983). One of the important researchers discussing the ethno-religious profile of the Ottoman labour force in Istanbul is Cengiz Kırlı, ‘A Profile of the Ottoman Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul’, International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 125–40. The impact of migrations on the ethnic and religious diversity of Istanbul’s workers has been problematized as well. See, for example, Florian Riedler, ‘Armenian Labor Migration to Istanbul and the Migration Crisis of the 1890s’, in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 160–76. For a concise evaluation of the recent historiography on the ethno-religious identities of the Ottoman workers, see Gavin D. Brockett and Özgür Balkılıç, ‘The Ottoman Middle East and Modern Turkey’, in Handbook Global History of Work, ed. Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018), 202–9.  7. There is a large body of historical and contemporary research dealing with the impact of xenophobia, chauvinism and racism on workers. For a pioneering study on this subject, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991). See also Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, eds, Racism and the Labor Market: Historical Studies (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995); John Kulczycki, The Foreign Worker and the German Labor Market: Xenophobia and Solidarity in the Coal Fields of the Ruhr, 1871–1914 (Providence: Berg Publishers, 1994). For a more recent study problematizing the impact of chauvinism and racism on workers, see Zak Cope, Divided World, Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labor under Capitalism (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2012).  8. This brief discussion on the postwar context of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul’s political conditions and the ethno-religious composition of the city’s population is based on Erol Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement, Mass Mobilization, and Demographic Change in Istanbul’, in Contemporary Turkey at a Glance II: Turkey Transformed? Power, History, Culture, ed. Meltem Ersoy and Esra Özyürek (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017), 177–78.

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 9. For the formation of these local movements, see Bülent Tanör, Türkiye’de Kongre İktidarları (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002). For the CUP’s influence in this process, see Eric Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1908–1926 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984). 10. Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement’, 177. 11. Ibid., 177–78. Nur Bilge Criss provides a comprehensive account of the social and political conditions of Istanbul under occupation; see Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 1918–1923 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999). 12. For a review of the statistics produced on the population of Istanbul until 1921, see Clarence Richard Johnson, ed., İstanbul, 1920 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2008), 24–27. This book was originally published in New York in 1922 under the title Constantinople Today or the Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople: A Study in Oriental Social Life (New York: Macmillan Company, 1922). It was based on field research conducted by a group of American scholars and directed by the sociology professor of Robert College, Clarence Richard Johnson. For more information on this survey, see Zafer Toprak, ‘Preface’, in Johnson, İstanbul, v–xiii. 13. Criss, Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 20. 14. According to a booklet prepared by the National Congress in 1919, there were 700,000 Muslims, 180,000 Greeks and 65,000 Armenians in Istanbul; see L’Asie Mineur et ses Populations: Pour la Défense des Droits Légitimes de la Nationalité Turque (Lausanne: Imprimerie A. Bouvard Giddey, 1919), 5. However, these statistics, framed for propaganda in Europe, are far from reliable. 15. Cem Behar, Osmanlı İmparatorlug˘u’nun ve Türkiye’nin Nüfusu (Ankara: Bas¸bakanlık Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 1996), 71, 74. 16. Johnson, İstanbul, 180. 17. Ibid. 18. Bülent Bakar, Esir S¸ehrin Misafirleri Beyaz Ruslar (Istanbul: Tarihçi Kitabevi, 2012), xi. 19. Ibid., 33–39. 20. Ibid., 132. 21. Johnson, İstanbul, 180. 22. Bakar, Esir S¸ehrin Misafirleri, 136; Mehmet Temel, İs¸ gal Yıllarında İstanbul’un Sosyal Durumu (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları – Kültür Eserleri Dizisi, 1998), 130. 23. Oya Dağlar Macar and Elçin Macar, Beyaz Rus Ordusu Türkiye’de (Istanbul: Libra Kitap, 2010), 94–110. 24. Ibid., 84–89. 25. Jacques Thobie, ‘European Banks in the Middle East’, in International Banking, 1870– 1914, ed. Rondo Cameron and Valeriĭ I. Bovykin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 431–34; Erol Ülker, ‘Emperyalizm, İs¸gal ve İs¸çi Hareketi: Konstantinopol Tramvay ve Elektrik S¸irketi’, in Emperyalizm: Teori ve Güncel Tartıs¸malar, ed. Ahmet Bekmen and Barıs¸ Alp Özden (Istanbul: Habitus, 2015), 318–24. 26. Ibid., 325. 27. Ibid., 1. 28. See Figure 9.1, İETT Archives, ‘List of the Russian Nationals Working at the Silahtarağa Central Factory’, 20 December 1921. 29. See Figure 9.1. 30. Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement’, 180–83. 31. Ibid., 183–84. 32. For a more detailed account of the formation and activities of this organization, see ibid., 179–90; Asaf Özkan, İs¸gal İstanbul’unda İstihbarat ve Eylem Mim Mim Grubu (Erzurum: Salkımsöğüt Yayınevi, 2015). 33. According to its bylaws, issued in April 1922, one of the NDC’s primary objectives was to counteract the actions and associations of the Greeks pursuing the goal of Megali

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34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Idea, that is, unification with Greece. The NDC was intended to promote the solidarity of Muslim-Turkish subjects to struggle against all anti-national forces receiving support from the occupiers and foreign powers. A full-text transcription of the National Defense’s bylaws has been published by Nazım H. Polat, ‘İstanbul Müdafaa-i Milliye Tes¸kilatı ve ‘Talimatname’si’, Tarih ve Toplum 13(77) (1990), 282–85, and Bülent Çukurova, Kurtulus¸ Savas¸ı’nda Haberalma ve Yeraltı Çalıs¸maları (Ankara: Ardıç Yayınları, 1994), 192–98, appendix 2. Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement’, 180. According to a report by the French intelligence service in Istanbul, the number of men associated with the NDC was 18,500. They consisted, reportedly, of the following elements: 3,500 porters, 1,000 coachmen and chauffeurs, 300 bakers, 5,000 firemen, 2,000 boatmen and coal heavers, 400 policemen, 700 gendarmeries, 2,000 soldiers. Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (hereafter SHAT), 20 N 1103, 38/1–796, 2 October 1922. Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement’, 184–85. Türkiye İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü Ars¸ivi [Institute for the History of Turkish Revolution Archives] (hereafter TİTE), 43/8, 3 November 1922. It seems that preparations for the establishment of both the FIAA and TNCU were begun before November 1922. On 24 October, Refet Pasha accepted two separate missions representing the coalitions of the city’s Muslim artisans and merchants. ‘Refet Pas¸a Hazretleri Amele ve Esnaf Heyetleri Arasında’, Vakit 1, 25 October 1922. For more information on the activities of the NDC’s commission of economic organizations, see Erol Ülker, ‘Solcularla Mim-Mim’cilerin İlis¸kisi Üzerine Yeni Bilgiler’, Toplumsal Tarih 249 (September 2014), 70–71; Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement’, 183–90; Özkan, İs¸gal İstanbul’unda İstihbarat ve Eylem, 234–55. For the GUW and its activities, see Mete Tunçay, 1923 Amele Birlig˘i (Istanbul: Sosyal Tarih Yayınları, 2009); Ülker, ‘Turkish National Movement’, 188–90. Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İs¸çiler, 294. Erol Ülker, ‘Mütareke İstanbul’unda Tramvay İs¸çileri Hareketi: Türkiye Sosyalist Fırkası, İs¸gal Makamları ve Radikaller’, in Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türkiye İs¸çi Sınıfı Tarihi, 1839–2014: Yeni Yaklas¸ımlar, Yeni Alanlar, Yeni Sorunlar, ed. Y. Doğan Çetinkaya and Mehmet Ö. Alkan (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2015), 206–9. Oya Sencer, Türkiye’de İs¸çi Sınıfı (Istanbul: Habora Kitabevi, 1969), 271–76. According to the Comintern representative Magdeleine Marx, eight thousand workers were organized under the TSP; see Magdeleine Marx, İstanbul 1921–Ankara 1922: Makaleler Anılar (Istanbul: Sosyal Tarih Yayınları, 2007), 46. In April 1921, the contemporary newspaper Alemdar reports that the number of TSP members increased to seventeen thousand, cited by M. S¸ehmus Güzel, Türkiye’de İs¸çi Hareketi: Yazılar-Belgeler (Istanbul: Sosyalist Yayınlar, 1993), 104. Foti Benlisoy and Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, ‘Erken Dönem Müslüman/Türk Sosyalizmi ve İs¸tirakçi Hilmi’, in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düs¸ünce, vol. 8, Sol Düs¸ünce, ed. Murat Gültekingil (Istanbul: İletis¸im Yayınları, 2007), 165–83. See, for example, the list of the tram, tunnel and electric workers who were fired because of their involvement in the TSP and the tram strike of January–February 1922. Tunçay, 1923 Amele Birlig˘i, 20. Eight of twenty-two workers fired by April 1922 were non-Muslims. The GUW was first organized among a group of tram workers recruited by the commission of economic organizations by mid December 1922; TİTE, 42/53, 13 December 1922. This report by the economy commission speaks of a tram workers’ union to be formed within several days. The GUW’s first branch was founded on 1 January among the tram workers of the Aksaray depot and the second in the S¸is¸li depot of the Tramway Company. Tunçay, 1923 Amele Birlig˘i, 25.

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46. See ‘İstanbul Umum Amele Birliği Meclis-i İdaresinin 22 Tes¸rinievvel 339 Senevi Kongresinde Kıraat Edilmek Üzere Tanzim Edilen Rapordur’, in Tunçay, 1923 Amele Birlig˘i, 54–55. 47. See the report of 17 May 1923 prepared by government representatives in BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/5/1923. 48. Recep Sadettin notes in a petition he addressed to the Ministry of Public Works that he worked at the Silahtarağa Plant until 31 November 1922. BCA, 230.27.20.2, 12/7/1923. But according to a certificate of good conduct (Hüsn-ü Hal Varakası) provided by the Ottoman Electric Company for Recep Sadettin, he worked there until 20 December 1922. Ibid. 49. SHAT, 20 N 421, 310/5, le Chef d’Escadron Ceccaldi, Cdt. Les Forces Prévôtales du C.A.A. à M. le General [S.A. ?], 16 March 1919. 50. The tram, tunnel and electric workers received the support of workers of the ferry companies S¸irket-i Hayriye and Seyr-i Sefain in this period. ‘Amelenin Umumi Grevi Mümkün müdür?’, İkdam, 10 August 1921, 3. 51. ‘…ve bilahare su-i ahvali görüldüğü ve fabrikada müstahdem bazı amelenin önüne düs¸erek cemiyet tes¸kilatıyla is¸tigal ettiği…’, in ‘Nafia Vekaleti Celilesine’, BCA, 230.27.20.2, 12/7/1923, 1. 52. BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/5/1923. 53. The exact title in Turkish that he used in a petition in April 1923 was ‘Tramvay, Elektrik ve Tünel İs¸çi Cemiyeti Merkez-i Umumi Azasından Silahtarağa Murahhası Recep Sadettin’, BCA, 230.27.19.5, 20/4/1923. 54. ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Nafia Vekaleti Dersaadet Komiseri Nakız Ziya Beyfendiye’, BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/5/1923. 55. Ibid. 56. ‘Büyük Millet Meclisi Riyaseti Cenab-ı Aliyesine’, BCA, 230.27.19.5, 25/4/1923. 57. ‘Ankara’da: Nafia Vekaleti Celilesi Canib-i Aliyesine’, BCA. 230.27.20.2, 12/7/1923. 58. ‘Elektrik Amelesinin Metalibi’, İkdam, 19 May 1921, 3. 59. ‘Nafia Vekaleti Celilesine’, BCA, 230.27.20.2, 12/7/1923, 4. 60. ‘Grev İhtimaline Kars¸ı’, İkdam, 5 August 1921, 3. 61. For a more detailed account of this spontaneous strike action, see Ülker, ‘Mütareke İstanbul’unda Tramvay İs¸çileri Hareketi’, 220–22. 62. Bakar, Esir S¸ehrin Misafirleri, 161–62. Bakar notes that Presse de Soir was printed partly in Russian and, in a way, it represented the White Russian refugees. 63. ‘Büyük Millet Meclisi Riyaseeti Cenab-ı Aliyesine’, BCA, 230.27.19.5, 25/4/1923. 64. ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Nafia Vekaleti Dersaadet Komiseri Nakız Ziya Beyfendiye’, BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/5/1923. 65. Tunçay, 1923 Amele Birlig˘i, 55. 66. BCA, 230.88.15.10, 17/5/1923. The report was signed by Muzaffer Bey, the S¸ehremaneti’s (Istanbul municipality) Commissar of Companies, Mustafa Hulusi Bey, the Director of the S¸ehremaneti’s Department of Machine Industry, and Hüsnü Bey, the Istanbul Governorship’s Inspector of Industry. 67. ‘Murahhaslardan Ömer İrfan Efendinin Beyanatıdır’, BCA, 230.88.15.10. 68. BCA, 230.88.15.10, 17/5/1923, 2. 69. Ibid. 70. ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Nafia Vekaleti Dersaadet Komiseri Nakız Ziya Beyefendiye’, BCA, 230.88.15.10, 26/5/1923. 71. ‘Nafia Vekaleti Celilesine’, BCA, 230.27.20.2, 4/6/1923. 72. ‘Murahhaslardan Ömer İrfan Efendinin Beyanatıdır’, BCA, 230.88.15.10. 73. BCA, 030.18.1.1/7.20.14, 14/6/1923. 74. See Article 11. Ibid., 4.

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75. We learn about this petition dated 2 July 1923 from a note sent by the company management to the Ministry of Public Works. İETT Archives, ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Nafia Vekaleti Dersaadet Komiseri Nakız Ziya Beyefendiye (To Nakız Ziya Bey, the Istanbul Commissar of the Ministry of Public Works of the Turkish Grand National Assembly)’, Tr No: 457, No: 2569, Doss: 2802. The translation of this document in French is dated 5 (12) July 1923. This document was found in the file Electricité, entrée le 21 Juil 1923, No: 2713, dossier: 2180, classée le 4 Sep 1923. 76. The name of the labour representative Ahmet Salih is mentioned in the company’s response to the petition of the Muslim workers. İETT Archives, ‘14 Haziran 1339 [1923] Tarihinde Fabrikanın Müslüman Amelesinin İta Eyledikleri İstidanameye Cevaptır (Response to the Petition Submitted by the Factory’s Muslim Workers on 14 June 1923)’. This document was found in the file Electricité, entrée le 21 Juil 1923, No: 2713, dossier: 2180, classée le 4 Sep 1923. 77. Ibid. 78. İETT Archives, ‘Dersaadet Anonim Elektrik S¸irketi Müdür-ü Muhteremine (To the Honorable Director of the Ottoman Electric Company)’, 28 June 1923, 861/236, 3 July 1923. 79. ‘Ankara’da: Nafia Vekaleti Celilesi Canib-i Aliyesine’, BCA, 230.27.20.2, 15/08/1923. 80. ‘Türk Amelenin S¸irketlerden Haklı S¸ikayeti’, İleri, 17 August 1923, 1; ‘S¸irketler Müslüman Amele Kullanmalıdırlar’, Vakit, 17 August 1923, 1; ‘Tramvay ve Tünel S¸irketlerinin Milletimize Hakareti’, Tevhid-i Efkar, 17 August 1923, 1. 81. Tunçay, 1923 Amele Birlig˘i, 34. 82. ‘İstanbul Umum Amele Birliğinin Milli Türk Ticaret Birliğine Sunduğu Rapor’, in A. Gündüz Ökçün, ed., Türkiye İktisat Kongresi, 1923-İzmir: Haberler – Belgeler – Yorumlar (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Yayınları, 1981), document no: 56, 161–63.

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Part III

Labour Market and Emotions in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 10

‘Fatherly Interest…’

Industrial Paternalism, Labour Management and Gender in the Textile Mills of a Greek Island (Hermoupolis, Syros), 1900–1940

Leda Papastefanaki

The term ‘industrial paternalism’ means the provision of various nonwage benefits by an enterprise to its employees. Such benefits may include pensions, medical care, funeral expenses, housing, schools, cultural and sports activities, or even forms of profit-sharing. The aim of these benefits on the part of the enterprise is to reduce labour turnover and to generate ‘harmonious’ industrial relations through fostering workers’ loyalty. Although the terms ‘industrial paternalism’ and ‘industrial welfare’ are frequently used interchangeably in the literature, paternalism here is taken to be the non-systematic provision of services which depends upon the initiative of the employer or the manager. This chapter confines itself to the study of some aspects of the paternalism that was manifest among certain industrial enterprises in a small industrial city on a Greek island, up to 1940. ‘Paternalism’ is a difficult concept to pin down, sometimes seeming to be a ‘loose descriptive term’ without much historical specificity.1 Other historians have also critically examined the term, attempting to provide a definition that is more specific regarding ideology, culture, and the employer’s practices and techniques as designed to manipulate the labour force.2 Paternalism, according to the study of many cases in Western Europe and the United States, was a totality of practices based on a metaphor of the family, in which the employer was the head and

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father, and the employees – both men and women – the children dependent upon him. The various paternalistic practices involved a wide range of benefits to the workers, as well as rituals. In the early days of the factory system, paternalistic practices were linked with the imposition of industrial discipline and the immediate handling of the problems of production.3 Their purpose was the creation among employees of feelings of obligation and gratitude, and the production of harmonious labour relations, which promoted cooperation and consensus-building between capital and labour,4 the ideological legitimization of capitalist relations of production, and the creation of a mechanism of class control by employers.5 Apart from ideological legitimizations, paternalist practices also had certain basic economic objectives which involved binding the workers to the enterprise, and ensuring stability and continuity at work. Paternalism took many different forms, related in each instance to the needs of production and the features of accumulation.6 The ‘economic origins’ of paternalism can be located chiefly in non-urban areas where the supply of labour was not plentiful, or in workplaces in which occupational specializations had distinctive effects on the productivity and effectiveness of labour;7 in some of the latter contexts there were gender-related practices of staff management (such as in the organization of the work, the recruitment of the workforce, the system of remuneration or mode of paternalism) that, on the one hand, organized workplaces along gender lines, and, on the other, generated cultural meanings in connection with the gendered power relations between workers and employers. Feminist and gender historians have enriched the analysis of labour and management by showing how strategies of management in factories consisted of a totality of patriarchal practices.8 American methods of production and management, which were widely and significantly diffused in the interwar period, have also been studied in European historiography. It has been demonstrated that in the majority of cases where ‘Taylorism’ was adopted, the ‘scientific organization of labour’ was apprehended almost exclusively as a tool for the management of personnel, while the application of Taylorism in European employers’ practices met with a strong negative reaction on the part of the workers. After the interwar period, most European industries systematically adopted policies of benefits and various recreational and sports activities as a function of the wider debates on productivity, and in conjunction with their increasing familiarity with American management theory.9 The aim of this chapter is to examine the relationship between paternalistic employers’ practices and gender in the workplace. By using gender as a tool of analysis in economic and social history, I shall argue,

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like Sonya Rose, that ‘industrial capitalism was made up of a complex set of interdependent practices that cannot be explained by purely economic factors’.10 This does not mean that I deny the importance of economic factors such as wages, competitive advantage or capital accumulation. Rather, my main questions are: how and why was gender, as a dynamic social process, incorporated into economic activities and the business culture? How and why was gender related to the aims of management regarding the reduction of occupational mobility, the subjection of the workers and the reproduction of the social hierarchy? And how did gender discrimination affect the organization of labour and the ways in which industrialists managed their businesses? There is no clear quantitative evidence for the number of enterprises that adopted paternalistic practices in Greek industry. Certainly, employers did not all have the same ideas about workforce management practices. Some were probably indifferent to benefits for the workers, but most must have adopted some measures piecemeal and ad hoc. The press, particularly the local press, contains frequent references to the philanthropic conduct of businessmen and their wives. Historical research has drawn attention to these philanthropic activities as a generalized attempt at the improvement of the morals of the poor, as well as their better social integration in the cities – an effort also pursued through the setting up of institutions through municipal or private initiative.11 In industry, the provision of dowries for female workers, funeral expenses for good workmen and economic support for the widows of employees are some of the ad hoc measures taken by certain industrialists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. More comprehensive versions of paternalistic policy are chiefly to be found in isolated industrial or mining areas, a fact that can be explained by reference to the limitations of the local labour markets.12 A review of the Greek engineering press from the interwar years reveals an enduring concern with scientific management and the introduction of the scientific organization of labour into Greece.13 Yet as far as we know at the moment, it does not seem that the introduction of Taylorist methods into the large factories of Greece went beyond the establishment of pay incentives and bonus pay systems (for production, long service and so on). This chapter examines an early twentieth-century example of paternalistic management drawn from the declining industrial city of Hermoupolis, on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea. The sources used are taken from the General Archives of the State in Hermoupolis, the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece, and the press (local and national press, engineering journals). The analysis is based

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mainly on the source material from the business archive of the Karellas Textile Mill S.A. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I present the economic and social crisis in the declining industrial city of Hermoupolis and the problems of the labour market. In the second, the focus is on a detailed description of the Karellas textile mill and the labour force in this workplace. In the third, I refer to some specific paternalist practices in the Karellas factory in Hermoupolis. Finally, I draw some conclusions.

Hermoupolis: A Declining Industrial City in the Aegean Hermoupolis is a port city on Syros, an island of the Cyclades, in the centre of the Aegean and not far from Athens. After 1830, Hermoupolis became the great commercial and maritime centre of the Aegean, at the crossroads of the Eastern Mediterranean, and an important industrial city. The importance of the port city and the abundance of archival sources for Hermoupolis and Syros island have engendered an extensive academic literature within Greek historiography.14 Hermoupolis was created as a new town after the 1821 War of Independence and the arrival of refugees (from Chios, Psarra and other areas of the Aegean) from that war. The foundation of the Greek state, the transfer of the capital to Athens and the general transformations in the economy gave an impetus to the growth of new port cities. Hermoupolis (together with Piraeus and Patras) was to become a centre for the reception of industry, with the initial incentive of developing external trade.15 This new town had plenty of available labour in the form of men and women who had been uprooted from their homes, a clear social stratification and a developed market with wellestablished relations of production. Processing (tannery, textile, food manufacture, ship construction) was of particular importance, even before the mid nineteenth century. Around the middle of the century, 1,000–1,500 labourers worked in the Hermoupolis shipyards and in related jobs, while a decade later eight hundred people were working in the Syros tanneries.16 Small machine workshops had been established in Hermoupolis before the end of the nineteenth century, when it was on the way to becoming an industrial and maritime centre, and the largest facilities were then expanded to serve shipping, forming the Neorio shipyards. As an industrial town, Hermoupolis specialized in textiles, and new textile industries were opened in the late nineteenth century. Although such activities as shipping and tanning may have had ‘archaic’ characteristics,17 it cannot be overlooked that wage labour (in

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its various manifestations) was a social reality on the island from early on and shaped social relations. After the period of expansion in 1822–89, the town fell into demographic stagnation. From 22,100 inhabitants in 1889, the population had decreased to 18,000 by 1920. Numbers rose temporarily after the Asia Minor disaster, with the arrival in this insular town of three thousand refugees, but by 1940 Hermoupolis had only 18,925 inhabitants.18 Clearly there was a significant reduction in the number of workers in the period from the late nineteenth century up until 1940: people were emigrating to find better fortune elsewhere. Economic decline on the island was marked in the interwar years. Traffic in the port fell drastically, while most of the productive branches of the economy saw reductions in their volume of business and personnel, so that the figures for underemployment and unemployment were high. The decline in shipping affected those who worked in the shipyards and at sea. The turnover dropped in the tanneries of Syros, as the enterprises were faced with the loss of their foreign markets and sharp competition at home, while the gradual introduction of modern tanning methods entailed a reduction in manual labour.19 In the 1930s, the shrinkage of activity in the machine shops and tanneries led to unemployment among the boilermakers and tannery workers,20 while seamen were also stricken with unemployment.21 The interventions of local agencies such as the Syros Chamber of Industry, and of members of parliament, are mentioned frequently in the local newspapers, their purpose being to facilitate support for branches of the Syros economy by relief on duties payable,22 arranging favourable contracts for orders or enlarging the premises of the island’s productive industries.23 As the references multiply to the ‘critical conditions’ for the Syros economy and to the increasing unemployment and poverty of the population, so do the references to charitable activities, the organization of soup kitchens and collections by private philanthropic associations and the municipal authorities ‘in aid of the impoverished classes’.24 In the 1930s, the phenomena of conservatism, nationalism and anti-communist propaganda manifested themselves in Hermoupolis society.25 A section of the island’s bourgeois class, moreover, maintained that the workers’ demands must stop, in order that the ‘flare-ups’ and extremism in the relations between capital and labour should be overcome, and the country emerge from the economic crisis.26 Undoubtedly, the social and economic crisis of the interwar years was experienced more intensely in peripheral cities such as Hermoupolis, which also had to cope with the competition from the developing Athens–Piraeus complex.

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The only branch of the Syros economy that had some capacity for survival in the interwar years was cotton thread and textile manufacturing. During the interwar period, the Greek textile industry in general was marked by quantitative expansion and rapid development (in the 1920s), and by a slackening in productive expansion, a tendency towards capital concentration and structural changes (in the 1930s). The rapid expansion of the sector was manifest in the establishment of numerous small enterprises all over the country, being favoured mainly by the expansion of the domestic market and by the overwhelming labour on offer after the arrival of refugees from Asia Minor in 1922. Also during this period, the renewal of equipment remained very slow, and the intensification of the exploitation of the workforce in the spinning and weaving mills continued, with low and lump-sum remuneration, lengthening working hours and overtime. It is noteworthy that the cotton industry was characterized by strong geographical concentration: Piraeus, Hermoupolis, Volos, Patras, Naoussa and Thessaloniki were the centres of the cotton industry.27 Despite the interwar expansion, the greater part of the textile industry equipment was old, inefficient and expensive. Most of the enterprises did not have suitable machinery to manufacture thin thread and textiles of high quality, and few factories were equipped with modern machines. The small size of the Greek textile industrial enterprises hindered them from keeping up with technological developments, and greatly restricted – when it did not indeed frustrate – the technical division of labour. The technological modernization attempted by certain industries was of small ambition. This low technological level left the Greek textile industry only one alternative: the exploitation of the redundant workforce through squeezing the cost of labour and prolonging working hours. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the arrival of refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, the main competitive advantage of the Greek textile industry was cheap labour, not technology.28 Although the sources contain many references to the import of machinery by the textile firms in interwar Hermoupolis, it seems that a lot of the spinning machines were second-hand and inefficient, having been bought from European factories that had renewed their equipment.29 The key to understanding the development of spinning and weaving in the textile manufacturing industry of Hermoupolis is the cheap labour provided by the women of the island. Within this framework – of the specific possibilities for development through the low remuneration of labour – must be inscribed certain efforts by the employers to control the mobility of the workers. Thus, the thread and textile industrialists of Syros concluded a contract in 1921 to the effect that:

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none of the contracting parties may engage in his factory a male or female worker from among those working in a factory of those who are parties to the present agreement before the elapse of a four-month period from the departure or dismissal of the worker from the factory in which he serves, or from any removal of him.30

And it is within the same context – of ensuring cheap hands for the development of thread and textile manufacture – that we should understand the demands of the Commercial and Industrial Chamber of Syros to the government for the settlement on the island of ‘suitable’ refugee families who had probably been out of work in other regions of the country,31 and the fact that some industrialists provided houses free of charge for the establishment of refugees and ensured their employment on the island.32 At a time when the island was experiencing signs of economic decline, with unemployment/underemployment in the branches that employed male labour (machine shops, tanneries, shipping), the efforts to attract a refugee workforce must have exclusively concerned the thread and textile branches – where, that is, it was possible for women to work, as well as children from a very early age. In this context, the Commercial and Industrial Chamber of Syros argued that although the thriving local textile industry needed only a female workforce, at the same time the city should also retain some male occupations (like the Naxian emery warehouse in the port), in order to keep the necessary female workforce on the island.33 The generalized unease expressed by the chamber and the local press in 1924–27 as to the ‘shortage of working hands, particularly female’ is not consistent with the pictures of poverty, unemployment and begging that the very same local press conveys on its other pages. Thus, here we have a typical example of the parallel operation of two different local labour markets: one labour market (in tanneries, machine shops, shipyards, boatbuilding and merchant marine) employed ‘specialized’ male labour on the basis of a hierarchical and fixed system of apprenticeship; the other (in the thread and textile mills and knitting factories) chiefly employed women and children, whose labour was regarded as ‘unskilled’ and ‘flexible’, and was low-paid. The former market was hit in this period by a drop in turnover, while in the latter there was a demand for labour, because that branch was seeing an upward trend. While the labour demand in the major urban centres (Athens, Piraeus, Thessaloniki) was met by the inflow of refugees, in the regional industrial towns such as Hermoupolis, the fact that refugees did not settle there made it impossible to expand thread and textile manufacturing businesses, which were based on the exploitation of a ‘suitable’ workforce – that is, the workforce of women.

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The Karellas Textile Mill and the Labour Force The Karellas textile mill had operated in Hermoupolis since 1889. In the 1920s the mill was expanded in Neo Faliro, in Piraeus district, by the creation of a new weaving plant and a spinning mill, while the family firm had been converted into a société anonyme by 1927.34 The evolution of the Karellas textile mill can be seen in Table 10.1. Despite the expansion, both second-hand and new machines were still in use in the Hermoupolis plant in 1929 and productivity was rather low,35 while the plant’s output comprised cheap and rough products to be consumed by the country’s peasant and labour strata.36 Investments in machinery were directed almost exclusively to the new textile mill unit, not in the Syros factory but in Faliro (near Piraeus).37 In 1937, the Neo Faliro factory was equipped with 350 looms, whereas the unit on Syros had only 69–70 looms and 2,650–3,000 spindles.38 Thus, in the interwar years, the Karellas enterprise developed through two units with entirely different characteristics of production. The Syros factory was a small verticalized unit (thread mill and textile mill) with old and second-hand equipment, and consequently low yields and productivity: in the 1930s, it produced just sixty thousand packs of thread Table 10.1 Evolution of the Karellas textile mill, 1895–1937.

Year

Looms Spindles

Horsepower Workers (men)

1892

8

10

1895

26

10

1900

42

50

1928 1937–38

2,656 69–70

Workers Total (women) workers 70 120

120

20

170

190

40

120

160

2,650–3,000

Sources: Foreign Office (FO), Diplomatic and Consular Reports, Report for the Year 1892 on the Trade of the Cyclades (London, 1893), 11; FO, Diplomatic and Consular Reports, Report for the Year 1895 on the Trade and Commerce of the Cyclades (London, 1896), 13; FO, Diplomatic and Consular Reports, Trade of the Cyclades for the Year 1900 (London, 1901), 10; General Archives of the State – Archives of the Prefecture of Cyclades (GAS-APC), Karellas Business Archive, file 177; Organismos Vamvakos, Ta pepragmena tis protis eptaetias tou Organismou Vamvakos (1931–1937) (Athens, 1938), 68, 70; Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece (HANBG), General Studies, Section of Business Studies and Financing, Survey ‘Ai klostoyfantourgikai epicheiriseis tis Syrou, Ianouarios 1940’, f. 0-098.

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per annum (working two eight-hour shifts each day).39 The Neo Faliro factory, on the other hand, was a large up-to-date textile mill unit with newer mechanical equipment and higher productivity, supplied with raw materials by the large VELKA thread mill. Furthermore, it benefited from the advantages of its proximity to the capital, and above all from the existence of an extensive labour market in Piraeus. The creation of reserves of the enterprise’s products as well as their limited marketing, observable in the years 1929–36,40 must have been due on the one hand to an increase in the productivity of the Neo Faliro unit, and on the other to the economic crisis and the keen domestic competition that was a mark of the branch. In the interwar years, the Karellas textile mill employed a staff of approximately 150 to 180 persons in its Hermoupolis factory. The composition of the workforce by age and sex is presented in Table 10.2. By 1920, 76 per cent of total female workers were aged 15–29, 22 per cent were aged 30–54, while only 2 per cent were over 55. Among male workers, 64 per cent of the total were aged 15–29 years, 28 per cent aged 30–54, and 9 per cent aged 55–69. It can be concluded that women workers were mainly young (up to 29), while male workers, although less numerous than women in the plant, had a balanced distribution of ages, being spread evenly over all the categories from 14–17 to the over 45s. The highest percentage of male participation in the workforce is in the 15–19 bracket (44 per cent men, 24 per cent women). The increased percentage of male workers in the 15–19 bracket was linked to the inclusion of young boys in some kind of informal system of apprenticeship, with boys of this age listed simply as ‘workers’ or ‘greasers’. From the age of nineteen, the men acquire skills: ‘spinner’, ‘boilerman’, ‘dyer’, ‘blacksmith’. The system of apprenticeship for the acquisition of a male skill in the factory was clearly designed according to a ranking, and was structured on the basis of age: foremen, gatekeepers and engineers were over forty years of age. With the women, the hierarchy of occupations and the structuring of skills were not as clear-cut as they were with the men. The women workers had specializations in the manufacture of thread or textiles (‘bench’, ‘spool’, ‘shuttle’, ‘bobbin’, ‘tackle’), but no strong linkage is apparent between the specialization and the age of the women workers and their remuneration.41 This does not mean that women’s work in the production process of the thread and textile industry was ‘secondary’, ‘ancillary’ or ‘unskilled’, as the sources and the bibliography usually characterize women’s work.42 Gender played a key role in determining the level of skill and the level of payment in the cotton industry. The association of female labour with low skills, an absence of qualifications

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and training, and low pay was not a new phenomenon exclusively associated with the development of mechanized production. We are also provided with a picture of the composition of the staff at the Karellas factory on Syros by the Staff Register of 1947. In that year, 252 female and 50 male workers are recorded on this register. Of the female workers, 63 are weavers and 189 are thread mill workers, while of the men, 22 work in the thread mill and 28 work as weavers. Of the 63 women weavers employed up to 1947, more than half (60 per cent) were engaged in the period 1945–47, whereas the rest were taken on prior to 1940. More specifically, 6 per cent were engaged before 1919, 7 per cent in 1920–29, 20 per cent in 1930–39, and 6 per cent were taken on in 1940.43 The age at which individual female weavers were engaged at the Karellas factory is shown in Table 10.3. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the greater percentage of women weavers started work at the Karellas factory aged 14–24 (57 per cent), while 3 per cent started work prior to age 14. The proportion of female weavers who entered the factory between the ages of 25 and 34 was 15 per cent, while 18 per cent of new workers were aged 35–50. Table 10.2 Composition of the workforce in the Karellas textile mill by age and sex, 1920.

Age (years)

Men (number)

Men (%)

Women (number)

Women (%)

15–19

16

44%

28

24%

20–24

1

3%

39

33%

25–29

6

17%

23

19%

30–34

2

6%

8

7%

35–39

2

6%

5

4%

40–44

3

8%

3

3%

45–49

3

8%

6

5%

50–54

-

-

3

3%

55–59

1

3%

1

1%

60–64

1

3%

-

-

65–69

1

3%

-

-

>70

-

-

1

1%

Without age reference Total

-

-

1

1%

36

100%

118

100%

Source: GAS-APC, Karellas Business Archive, Katalogos prosopikou [Staff Register], 4 February 1920.

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Table 10.3 Age of entry into the textile mill for women weavers.

Age (years)

Weavers (number)

Weavers (%)