The first labor code of the Turkish Republic was enacted in 1936 and became effective in 1937. The most significant feature of this code was the time taken by the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) to legislate it. Negotiations began in 1925 with discussions of the Service Code draft bill. In the course of fifteen years TGNA discussed five draft bills and in 1936 a final draft was accepted. Between then and 1950, when the Republican People's Party (RPP) lost the election to the Democrat Party (DP), the scope of the labor code was extended without any alteration in its ideological content.

My intention in this article is to read Nazlı Eray's works in terms of her revision of the role and function of the Turkish intellectual. Eray's revision also serves as a critique of the Western notions of the intellectual, not only because Turkish definitions are influenced by Western debates, but also because she deliberately situates her writing in an international and cosmopolitan context. This article falls into three parts. The first part presents a general sketch of the tendency to particularize the universalist definitions of the intellectual in the West. From the 1920's to the present, the Western conception of the intellectual has moved towards a demystification and deprivileging of the intellectual's function and contribution to society. His image is reduced from an idealist and selfless leader who thinks in terms of the whole to a highly specialized expert in a limited field. In the second part, I show that the dynamics of defining the role of the intellectual in the Turkish context works conversely. From the 1920's to the present, the intellectual has been the spokesperson and implementor of specific ideologies, party or class politics. As embodied in İlhan and Batur's discussions of the intellectual, this is viewed as a problem in the Turkish context. The answer they propose to the supposedly blind and self-interested particularity of the Turkish intellectual is to push him toward a more universalist vision. I focus in this section on Atilla İlhan and Enis Batur because they have been vocal in the recent discussions of the role of the intellectual in Turkey. They are also symptomatic of the Turkish tendency to elevate the place of the intellectual. In other words, they are representative of the position undermined in Nazlı Eray's works. The last part of the article focuses on the ways in which Nazlı Eray deconstructs both the Turkish and Western narratives of the intellectual in order to reconcile a universalism of wide human definitions with the particularity of specific contexts and actions.

In this paper I will construct separate time series for the wage levels of agricultural and unskilled (and non-factory) urban workers in nineteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia. An earlier study (Boratav et al. 1985) was able to construct an annual time series for urban wage levels by utilising a weighted average of the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Production of a time series for agricultural wages, on the other hand, is important for seeing the wage variations in rural and urban areas in the nineteenth-century Anatolian context and is crucial for understanding the peculiarities of the Ottoman (and later Turkish) economic development. These variations, at least to a degree, were responsible for the differences in labor costs in various parts of the empire and thus determined the peculiarities of the Ottoman incorporation into, world-economy (Ergene 1995).

How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an online community? Taking up a socio-technical (STS) approach to online communities and computer mediated communication, this study introduces and explores the communication culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) active in Turkey between 1995 and 1996. In the first part of the study, the researcher provides a brief history of BBS networks worldwide and of pre-Internet communication networks in Turkey. In the second part, using a sample from a privately owned archive of correspondences from Hitnet, a national-scale FidoNet-style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996, the study documents how some of the technical constraints on the level of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction (HCI) influenced the communication culture of the Hitnet community. At the same time, the study pays especial attention to the workarounds devised by community members to work around these constraints.

Nicknaming is a social practice that presents an area for comparative historical research. From a communal perspective, nicknames can be evaluated as markers of status in social hierarchy. On a personal level, they play a crucial role in defining personal identities. This article evaluates some examples from Ottoman archival documents from these perspectives. It focuses not only on the impact of dynamic elements on local community, as in cases of migration and conversion, but also on the question of how social prestige in a local setting could be perceived through the prism of nicknames.

By focusing on the Armenian homeland associations (hayrenakts‘akank‘) established in Istanbul in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article examines the migrants’ activism and their achievements—facilitated by affective bonds based on shared origins. It outlines the Istanbul-based homeland associations’ development chronologically and discusses their cultural and economic goals in their home regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article then focuses on their durability and ability to adapt to the needs of the communities in the series of great political and demographic changes in the late Ottoman Empire from mid-1890s to their reconstruction after the end of World War I. The homeland associations established in the post-genocide period reflect the persistence of local belonging as a basis of solidarity and they fulfilled important functions as information networks and intermediaries between the survivors and the community administration. The article argues that Armenian homeland associations constituted a space in which agency of the migrants and their interaction with broader social and political developments could be observed in the late Ottoman Empire. They were one of the most durable and institutionalized forms of migrant solidarity which render migrants’ agency visible in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire.

This study is part of a larger project on the Landscapes of the Eastern Question, contextualizing the architecture of diplomacy in İstanbul as a symbolic and material refraction of changing power balances and representational strategies. In Beyoğlu, where most of the main diplomatic residences were located, the embassies were originally Ottoman wooden konak structures, but, in time, the increasing influence of Russia, Great Britain and France fostered their monumentalization and the adoption of European academic classicism. By contrast, the summer embassies on the European shore of the Bosphorus remained largely local in terms of technology, image, materials, and spatial layout until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The paper argues that, for many diplomats, a stately winter residence representing national identity, along with a summer house in the spirit of the local traditions, would be used as a communicative and performative resource in the drama of European-Ottoman relations. It also evaluates foreign settlement on the northern shore of the Bosphorus as conforming to a strategy of surveillance and control in keeping with the strategic relevance and contested status of the straits.

Late Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

A Bourdieusian analysis of gender relations within political organizations is highly instructive. This kind of analysis might provide insight into the intertwinement of gender and politics by illuminating the construction process of gendered political identities. Drawing upon memoirs written by the members of the left-wing organizations in Turkey and interviews conducted with them, this article argues that the narratives of members of the Turkish left reflect the multidimensional nature of what Pierre Bourdieu called masculine domination.

This article aims to explore the conditions and roles of Gypsies in the economy of Turkey through a focus on street flower sellers in two central districts of İstanbul, Şişli and Taksim. It proposes a multidimensional analysis that demonstrates different dynamics of social exclusion, socio-economic and political relations, and agency positions. After first reviewing several approaches to Gypsies’ roles in non-Gypsy economies, Gypsies’ conditions in Turkey are then examined in relation to their roles in the economy. Finally, their positions in the flower-selling sector in the two districts, Şişli and Taksim, are analyzed through working conditions, socioeconomic dynamics, social exclusion, and perceptions of Gypsyness.

The advent of democracy in Turkey has been far from tranquil. Since the transition to multiparty politics in 1946, democracy has been interrupted by three military interventions (in 1960, 1971, and 1980)- unless we count as the fourth intervention the more recent incident, euphemistically labeled “the 28 February Process,” in which the military played a crucial role in forcing the resignation of the governing coalition led by the Islamist-oriented Welfare Party (WP). Not only has Turkish democracy followed a cyclical pattern in which breakdowns and transitions succeeded each other, the degree or the quality of democracy that was in place never ceased to attract bitter criticism.