This article traces the struggle of the people of Vranje to unseat their governor, Hüseyin Pasha, in the 1840s. It situates this struggle within the context of the Tanzimat reforms, one primary objective of which was to use financial and legal means to bring powerful local governors under the control of the central government. The case of Vranje, this article shows, provides a particularly colorful example to observe the disrupting effects of the center’s intervention in the provinces, to investigate the various dynamics and difficulties the center confronted in its attempt to control the periphery, and to understand the ways in which the new political discourse of the Tanzimat shaped local resistance. This article also traces the stages of political mobilization and dissent through the various strategies the people of Vranje employed, from petitioning to armed resistance, in order to fight perceived injustices.

This paper explores modes of autobiographical writing by female authors in the early republican period. Women's autobiographies draw a strict distinction between the narration of the private and the public self, as they promote the narration of the undomestic, professional self at the expense of the private. Ironically, even if the autobiographers in question were politically active in suffrage, women's autobiographies either do not represent the authors' involvement in such campaigns, or praise state feminism for granting emancipation. “Personal is political” only becomes a maxim for a later generation of women writers, with autobiographies and autobiographical novels of the post-1970 period underscoring the importance of exploring the subjectivity of the adult woman/narrator. More recent examples of auto/biographical writing blur the boundaries between private and public and narrate gendered accounts of republican history.

The aim of the present study is to reconsider and reconstruct the economic history of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat period. Scores of scholars have already interpreted the decay in terms of imperial expansion. The decay paradigm is part of empire histories. Therefore, it is strongly imprinted with political discourse.

Below, I will argue that the Ottoman case would be better understood if viewed within the context of a more dynamic process of change versus inertia rather than decay, and that such an approach to Ottoman economic and social history would be less tainted with political concerns.

The ultra-nationalist approach to Ottoman economic history, has always blamed the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty for the “under-development” or “dependency” of the late Ottoman Empire. This scenario with a xenophobic hint and backed by Marxist as well as nationalist historiographies, finds the main scapegoat of modern Ottoman-Turkish economic history in the 1838 Treaty.

Human smuggling is a complex process. Made up of actions both organized and chaotic, it compels migrants to deal with different structures and agents of power, among them smugglers, the state(s), and migrants’ own social networks. The current literature on human smuggling provides a detailed analysis of the different phases of this process, within which discussion of the structure and operation of this “business” can be situated. However, only minimal attention has been paid to migrants’ agency in the smuggling process. Engaging with recent perspectives in migration studies, which emphasize the need to conceptualize human smuggling by focusing on the interdependencies between the different actors involved, the analysis developed in this article aims to explore the different phases of the human smuggling process by focusing on the multilayered relations between smugglers and undocumented people. Drawing upon qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted with migrants on the Turkish-Iranian border, the article examines how the physical and sociopolitical conditions of border crossing affect people’s ways of thinking, behavior, and engagement with different structures of power. In doing so, the article attempts to further our understanding of how smuggled migrants mobilize their agency in such a way as to manipulate and challenge the system, as well as of how this process transforms migrants’ capacity to simultaneously recognize and unsettle state bordering practices.

The main objectives of this article are to delineate the economic activities of the port of İzmir in the eighteenth century and to show that İzmir, during the course of the century, developed into the most important port in the import and export trade of the Ottoman Empire with western Europe. The French, operating out of Marseilles, were the principal trading partners of both İzmir and the Ottoman Empire at the time. Among the other most important western European communities that did business in İzmir were the British and the Dutch. İzmir was also the centre of complex and diverse financial transactions that were as important as trade and sometimes even more. Furthermore, this study shows the key role that non-Muslims played in the economic activities of the city-port. İzmir's close commercial relations with major western European economic centres makes the city-port of great importance for the study of Ottoman economic history in the eighteenth century.

Widely recognized by nationalists, Islamists and conservatives as the heroine of the Turkish Right in the twentieth century, Sâmiha Ayverdi influenced the renaissance of right-wing politics in Turkey as an important leader of the Rifaȋ order, a prolific author, an unyielding anti-communist, and finally as an institution-builder for right-wing causes. This article focuses on the apparent paradoxes in Ayverdi's long career, such as her modernist interpretation of Islam, her relationship with her sufi master, preference for memoirs, and her unabashed elitism. Such characteristics defy clichés associated with the stereotypical conservative/nationalist/Islamist intellectual in Cold War Turkey. Our in-depth study of Ayverdi's works thus reveals the complexity of right-wing identities, and the fact that our protagonist is an outspoken woman intellectual also adds an important twist to the story.

This article makes use of two different data sets on Turkey to explore the relationship between the tax structure and issues such as democratic representation, citizenship rights, and poverty and social exclusion. The first of these data sets is the extensive Household Consumption Survey (2003) by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT). This extensive survey data allows a very comprehensive quantitative analysis of the tax burden on the consumption baskets of households in different income groups, as well as in different regions of Turkey. The second data set incorporates qualitative data on Turkish citizens' views and attitudes towards different aspects of the Turkish tax system—such as its fairness (justice), transparency, and efficiency in generating funds for public activities—obtained through focus group meetings and in-depth interviews conducted with citizen groups and various stakeholders in cities in different regions in Turkey. The quantitative findings presented in the study clearly reveal that, if anything, taxes are expected to exacerbate the problem of inequality and poverty in Turkey. Heavily relying on regressive consumption taxes results in the poor paying a disproportionate amount of their income as indirect taxes, more so for those in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia where poverty is more extreme. On the other hand, the qualitative part reveals that ordinary citizens find the current tax system highly unfair and feel that they receive very little in terms of public services in return for the taxes they pay. In spite of the merits attributed in theory to taxation as a means to provide services and thereby legitimize the state, the payment of taxes is met with considerable reluctance. Most of this reluctance is attributable to factors such as the citizens' inability to pay, and a lack of clarity with respect to the obligations and reasons for paying. It also emerges that the unwillingness to pay is a protest against the degradation of public services and the perceptions of unfairness, corruption, and other administrative failings.

This paper aims to propose a political economy framework to analyze environmental problems in Turkey. A political economy approach seems to be the appropriate way of investigating environmental issues, as not only are economy and the environment interwoven entities, changes in one affecting the other, but also collective actions are almost always required in dealing with such problems. With this integrated approach one can thus better understand the causes of such a degradation and subsequently search for the economic and political conditions that are conducive to halt environmental degradation.

Despite its theoretical and implementational problems, conventional economic theory has a well developed body of tools for examining environmental degradation, i.e. pollution and overuse of natural resources. But the theory assumes the existence and competence of a rather sterile political authority which enforces corrective measures. The corollary of this assumption is that the enforceability of these measures will become lax should there exist various forms of government failures. This paper will focus on Turkey as an example of a country where such government failures have been a priori accepted.

In the present paper, we deal with traders who crossed the border between the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These merchants are at once a topic of much scholarly debate and virtually unknown. Little trace has survived of their everyday activities, but they are repeatedly mentioned in Niels Steensgaard's well-known work on pedlars and European companies, in which he has analyzed the activities of merchants who confronted two great “protection-producing” and “redistributive” empires, namely the Ottoman and the Safavid, and who also needed to cope with competition from the European regulated companies (Steensgaard, 1974, pp. 22-59). Larger capital resources, advance knowledge of markets, and a commercial organization which enabled traders to take advantage of seasonally low prices were the companies’ advantages, while peddling merchants had but limited resources and were therefore vulnerable.

Peasant migration was the subject of careful regulation in the Ottoman Empire. The government tried to control peasant movement in order to ensure the supply of agricultural labor; peasants, on the other hand, used migration as one weapon against government abuses. This article examines Ottoman policy towards migration and recorded instances of peasant migration in sixteenth-century Palestine.

Peasant migration is most commonly considered in the context of seasonal labor movements, responding to large-scale agricultural enterprises or temporary labor shortages. Alternatively, migration may occur as a result of some disaster: war, famine, drought, or flood. Temporary migration suggests a short-term move, wherein people pull up stakes for a denned period and retrace their steps after some months or years. This article, however, examines migration as the action of individuals who appear to have left their former homes permanently.

Ottoman society and its medical system of the early modern period and the nineteenth-century demonstrate the marriage of medicine and power. I present the view from the imperial center and focus on the aims and wishes of the Ottoman elite and imperial authorities in İstanbul as they were embodied in state activities, such as formal decrees and policies meant to be implemented all over the empire. For the Ottoman elite, medicine was always a significant imperial tool, but it was neither the only tool of control, nor the most important one. The extent to which the Ottoman elite used medicine in its social policies changed over time. A comparison between the Ottoman use and distribution of health and food from the early modern period until the nineteenth century illustrates this point. It was especially during the nineteenth century that medicine was intentionally-and successfully-implemented as a mechanism of control in the Ottoman Empire.

This study applies the proactive/reactive state framework to the transformation of Spanish and Turkish finance capital in a comparative perspective. It concludes that the “proactive” policies pursued by the Spanish state and the strategic coalition established between political elites and the integrationist segments of finance capital resulted in the heterodox internationalization of Spanish firms, whereas the “reactive” state policies in Turkey, designed in line with orthodox neoliberal dictums, paved the way for an incomplete internationalization. The 2007/2008 crisis, however, demonstrates that the same state may be both proactive and reactive across various policy fields over time. The recent Spanish financial crisis and Turkey's regulatory success after 2001 illustrate this point.

Throughout the Ottoman Empire, land was always the major source of revenue and surplus and thus inevitably a major source of contention. Myriad property-rights disputes were recorded in the registers of the local kadı courts and archives of the various ministries in Istanbul. Conflicts over the agricultural surplus revealed in such documentation demonstrate, for instance, that peasants in the sixteenth century not only contested taxes imposed on them but also opposed the illegal transfer of land titles by the sipahis (İnalcık 1997, p. 72). By the middle of the sixteenth century, the practice of selling state-owned miri lands–which by legal definition could not be bought or sold–had become widespread, sometimes even confirmed by the rulings of the local kadı courts. The stamp of şeriyye implicit in the kadı's ruling meant in effect that the land subject to sale was taken out of the miri land regime and placed in the legal category of freehold mülk lands (İnalcık 1997, p. 112).

When introducing this survey, it is necessary to say a word of justification about the time limits adopted. The year 1500 has been selected as an approximate starting point, because only during the reign of Sultan Bayezid II (1481-1512) do Ottoman tax registers become frequent enough to allow even approximate conclusions with respect to agricultural production. However when dealing with certain regions of the Empire, we need to adopt an even later starting point. After all, part of this paper deals with ‘Syria’ in the broad sense of the word, that is, the region bordering the eastern Mediterranean between Anatolia and Egypt; and this area was only conquered by the Ottomans in 1516. As to Tunisia, to which the present paper will also refer, this country only became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1533 or 1570.

This paper is about the process of constituting public memory and subjectivity in the context of post-colonial transformation. It hopes to raise a number of questions about the context in which memory is produced and how context affects the way such memory is then transmitted. It argues that the process of memory cannot be truly understood without including emotions in the analysis. I will attempt to show that, when memory is considered in conjunction with emotions, what gets told might often become destabilized by what gets transmitted. I will show, firstly, that memories recounted in life story interviews become part of the process of generational transmission and, secondly, that these memories are anchored to emotions which become the main content of transmission. And yet, because of the way emotions circulate in discourse, emotions get separated from the objects they were attached to in the original discourse and thus destabilize the process of transmission.

This article analyzes the reemergence of the film industry in İstanbul since the mid-1990s. In exploring the industrial and spatial dynamics of this process of reemergence, we employ the perspective of path dependence, conducted with the aid of historical analysis and in-depth interviews with the key actors of the sector. By zooming in on the details of this industry’s reemergence, we uncover the specifics of the process of revival in terms of both the industry itself and of location. Analysis of the industry reveals the impact on the revival of İstanbul’s film sector of system-wide developments, the key roles played by the advertising and television sectors, and entrepreneurial initiatives. Analysis of location, on the other hand, reveals that, following the collapse of Yeşilçam—the historical center of İstanbul’s film industry—two new clusters have emerged, one located in the vicinity of the old center (Beyoğlu) and the other in a rising commercial district (Levent).

The aging population and, along with it, increasing long-term care needs create pressure globally on the social and health care spending of governments under the constraint of shrinking tax bases. The common tendency of governments is to minimize the cost by transferring the elderly care burden to families. However, care provision comes with penalties for caretakers in the form of potential income losses and a rising, unpaid workload that requires a gender-based assessment. These impacts intensify with additional demographic trends that impose new challenges. Increasing longevity accompanied by decreasing fertility and delays in having children in Turkey have contributed to the growth of the “sandwiched generation” which encounters the care needs of their elderly as they care for their children. This study investigates whether and how caring responsibilities can be associated with the caregivers’ economic participation in Turkey, where the retreat from institutional provisioning of elderly care services is concealed with a neoconservative family-oriented rhetoric. Using the 2014–2015 Time Use Statistics compiled by TurkStat, we analyze the relationship between informal elderly care provision and employment hours, taking into account the potential impact of providing elderly care on labor force participation, focusing on sandwiched- generation women.

Focusing on queer-identified amateur football teams, this article investigates the potentials of the mobilities and alliances of gender non-conforming footballing people to disrupt the seemingly effortless structure of the football field. While football is arguably one of the sports with the strongest discriminatory attitudes toward gender non-conforming people, it has also become a site of resistance for queers in Turkey as of 2015. How political opposition groups relate to the football field, which is mostly considered as a male-dominant and heterosexualized space where social norms are reproduced, are classified into three groups in my research: resistance through, against, and for football. I give particular attention to the category “resistance for football” as a distinctive way for gender non-conforming people to inhabit the field. I discuss how the link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity, and I explore what these teams offer in order to exceed spatial and sexual boundaries. Lastly, I present recent queer interventions in the value system of the game through which I reflect upon the concept of “queer commons” and the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities.