Monopolies constituted one of the main ways to control the economy from the Ottoman Empire to republican Turkey. Monopolies, which predominantly functioned as a mechanism to provide revenue for the state before the modern era, have gained new functions such as structuring property relations by commercializing the economy and generating revenues for modernization and state-building. Ottoman historians examined smuggling in the Ottoman Empire. What is less known is the smuggling during the early republic. The new Turkish state embarked on radical modernization and state-making projects and financed them with monopoly revenues as well as taxes. This chapter examines the responses of low-income consumers, producers and traders to monopolies and monopoly-like state control of tobacco, cigarette, salt, alcoholic beverages, textiles, sugar and forests through smuggling during the first two decades of the Republic. It argues that most actions labeled as “smuggling” were economic survival methods and were the continuation of practices with a very long pedigree because this is how people coped with the high prices of monopoly products, taxes and profit margins. The chapter shows that this informal economy restricted the republican state’s extractive capacity.

This chapter examines the peasants’ everyday resistance to heavy taxes, particularly the land tax, the livestock tax, the road tax and the wheat protection tax under the single-party regime. It shows that under the authoritarian single-party system, peasants coped with the increasingly burdensome economic demands of the new state and resulting social injustice through everyday and informal means. In contrast to the existing accounts that mostly regard the peasants as atomized under the absolute control of the state, this chapter portrays them as a relatively active social dynamic, which annulled the great part of the taxes in practice and compelled the government to soften its heavy taxes.

The introduction presents and discusses the general characteristics and flaws of the literature on early republican Turkey. It especially criticizes the state- and elite centered approach of both modernist-nationalist and critical accounts and suggests a new perspective to understand the social dynamics of early republican Turkey’s politics and modernization process. This chapter introduces the main theoretical, methodological and conceptual framework the book uses. It also introduces the new original sources this book is based on.

This chapter concentrates on the last resort of the peasantry in the face of the high cost of living and exploitation and coercion by local state agents and dominants. Although direct confrontation was generally avoided, the peasants, when faced with no other alternative, did not hesitate to violate their oppressors. Although historians considered the Anatolian countryside calm and passive due to the rarity of open and massive peasant movements, rural unrest manifested itself through fighting for scarce resources, theft of crops and livestock, attacks on oppressive individuals and the wave of banditry that swept all of Anatolia during the period. This chapter argues that in contrast to the literature, rural crimes and banditry as the most explicit form of rural crimes were predominantly a component of peasants' struggle for survival and their resistance to social injustice rather than a tool of Kurdish nationalist groups or tribal reactions.

The first decades of the republic were very arduous times for low-income wage earners. In Turkey, working people were more heterogeneous than the labor forces of industrial countries were. It encompassed different groups such as skilled and unskilled industrial workers, workers of peasant origin, casual laborers, artisans and their workers and low-wage white collar employees.

This chapter evaluates the longer-term impact of the people’s politics. The existing literature generally presents the superstructure of Turkey’s modernization by focusing on the state, elite and political organizations. This chapter highlights the alternative view, which this book introduces for the first time, by focusing on the deeper dynamics and bases of modern Turkey’s formation, that is, the infrastructure of Turkey’s modernization. This chapter briefly underlines how each chapter evidences the crucial role of the ordinary people’s views and practices in the implementation of the state’s policies and modernization projects. It argues that Turkey’s socioeconomic and political transformation as envisioned and imposed by republican rulers were limited by the people’s active, daily politics. Underlining how the state and society interacted through hitherto unknown bridges between them, in contrast to widely held theses, it argues the republican regime should not be seen as an elitist or rigid but a flexible and responsive system. One of the main conclusions this study draws is that today’s Turkey was formed by the interaction between state and society rather than top-down creation of the republican elite, and this culminated in today’s upsurge of conservative and Islamist politics. Yet, the book also implies that today’s discontented and disadvantaged individuals could continue to challenge today’s Islamist government in similar ways.

This chapter scrutinizes the last resorts of the workers in the face of extreme exploitation and oppression. Although the organized labor movement declined with the state’s increasing power from the second half of the 1920s, this did not mean that the working-class protests, violence and even informal and spontaneous strikes in the form of walkouts ended. On the contrary, the working people resorted to more informal and individual daily strategies such as intimidation tactics, threats, fights and attacks when laborers felt exploited. It also examines collective protests and walkouts beyond the few well-known strikes of the time. This chapter shows that despite the lack of trade unions and organized movements, such methods were not inconclusive in negotiating working conditions and wages.

This chapter examines how the peasants who were discontented with the state policies, taxes, monopolies, local exploitation and oppression expressed their criticism and made their voices heard through letters to the press, petitions to official authorities, placards, rumors and folk culture. It traces the peasants’ complaints about agricultural prices, agricultural loans, interest rates, landlessness, taxes, monopolies, enclosure of forests and grazing lands, bureaucratic malfeasance, exploitation and oppression by large landowners, village headmen and gendarmes. It also evaluates how popular demands and complaints influenced the state’s decision-making.

First, this chapter analyzes the non-elite socialization places in which anti-secular opinions were produced and expressed such as mosques, Qur’an courses, houses and coffeehouses. It shows the people’s insistence on their religious practices by receiving secret Qur’an courses or by disobeying the Turkish call to prayer. Second, it outlines a wide range of ways people expressed their critical views, ranging from seditious conversations, rumors, placards and anonymous critical letters to authorities, to writing on walls, doors and trees. Third, this chapter examines the rhetoric and discursive strategies anti-secular talks used. Fourth, it reveals how those social groups or individuals who had lost their authority or economic advantages due to secular reforms or those people who were discontented with economic conditions took part in the production and dissemination of anti-secular and anti-regime discourses. This chapter also shows how the non-elite daily socialization places contested the state’s secular propaganda and socialization spaces such as People’s Houses and Rooms.

This chapter introduces the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of the working class. Industrial workers, artisans and wage earners in the service sector and low-income white collars and retirees constituted the largest proportion of the urban population. In contrast to the existing literature reducing the working class to factory workers, this chapter also covers all of these groups. It gives the backdrop against which they struggled. That is, this chapter describes how these groups experienced the social and economic policies and conditions of the first decades of the republic. This chapter especially underlines the low wages, problems with payments of salaries, paucity of social security measures, high cost of living and the urban masses’ material deprivation.

The republican rulers promoted positivism and tried to eliminate spiritual and traditional beliefs and practices by banning the systematic acts of visiting sacred tombs, faith healing, sorcery, Islamic tariqas, and sacred tombs. Besides, the new Civil Code, adopted in 1926 from the Swiss law, forbade polygamy and equated women with men. This chapter shows that despite this major legal reform and the government’s effort to eliminate existing spiritual and traditional beliefs and practices, the established ways of life and patterns of relations between men and women survived even in the big cities. This chapter also underlines the social and economic factors that underpinned the survival of these beliefs and practices.

The secularizing reforms of Turkey undoubtedly comprised one of the most comprehensive cultural reconstruction processes in world history. Both nationalist-secularist and critical accounts portray them as uncontested, uncompromising and top-down imposition. The role of Atatürk and republican intellectuals also cannot be denied. Partially for this reason, the literature about this period abounds with studies focusing primarily on the republican rulers, their ideological and political agenda and their legal and administrative changes. Owing to the splendor of the republic’s reforms, the implementation of the policies and people’s complex daily interactions with them have been generally underestimated. The projection of the later political rivalry between the RPP and the conservative-right parties in the historiography has reduced everything that happened during the early republic to a clash between secularism and religion. Works on opposition and protest tend to consider a few open uprisings and intellectual opposition as forms of resistance motivated solely by religious sentiments. Political Islamism especially enjoyed amplifying how Muslims and Islam were suppressed in this period.

The peasantry, which underwent a decline in developing countries, declined so slowly in Turkey that it persisted until the mid-1980s. As is well known, this was partially due to the structural limitations of Turkey’s industrialization and modernization. This part has revealed another important but lesser-known reason – that is, the peasants’ struggle to survive and the resulting social conflicts that further delayed the dissolution of the peasantry. Well aware of the unpopularity of the government, especially among the rural population, the decision makers tried to contain rural discontent through social and economic schemes as well as coercion. The result was the preservation of the peasantry and agriculture despite steady industrialization.