Much of the discussion today concerning economic development is confined to the polar opposites of the private market and centralized bureaucratic intervention. The dominant paradigm in economics nowadays bluntly claims that state economic interventionism strangles the economy and hinders the development of productive forces. Such a view leads to the neoconservative fallacy in politics that privatizing the public enterprises and rolling back the frontiers of the state will somehow “unstrangle” the economy.

The persistence of simple commodity production (SCP) in capitalist economies has been a challenge to classical theories of the development of capitalism in agriculture, which considered SCP as a transitional phenomenon, doomed to disappear. SCP has not only persisted under capitalism but has become the predominant form of production in several branches of agriculture both in developing as well as in advanced capitalist countries. In the recent debate on the fate of SCP in agriculture, various observers have pointed out that necessary conditions for the reproduction of simple commodity producing families exist within capitalist formations and as long as these conditions prevail, the persistence of SCP will not be an anomaly (Friedmann, 1980 and 1986; Mann and Dickinson, 1978; Scott, 1986). Pursuing this latter position, this paper attempts to examine the conditions that led to the emergence and consolidation of SCP in Oriental tobacco production, in the Aegean region of Turkey.

Many specialists in comparative farming systems and agrarian social structures have recognized in recent decades the resilience and vitality of non-capitalistic family farming (Harriss, 1982; Shanin, 1987). For Turkey, both the general characteristics and many regional variations were well established by Aresvik (1975). Recent work by Çağlar Keyder (1983) has traced the genesis of modern Turkish rural society back to the Ottoman period and outlined the different trajectories that particular types of community may undergo, utilizing an explanatory framework grounded in political economy. The main thrust of Keyder's argument is that the free peasantry which played an important role throughout Anatolian history has been emphatically consolidated in the Republican period. In particular, the dramatic changes of the 1950s ushered in an era of petty commodity producer domination.

The 1980s witnessed the rise of feminist and Islamic fundamentalist movements in Turkey. In diametrically opposed ways, both movements pushed the debate over women's issues and rights in Turkey into the spotlight of public discussion. The feminist movement made visible, and condemned, acts of physical violence against women, problematized women's lack of substantive rights, and the articles of the Criminal Code that discriminate against women. For the Islamic fundamentalists, on the other hand, women's right to wear headscarves in educational institutions and government offices was a focal and continuous rallying point throughout the 1980s. Less prominent have been campaigns by Islamic groups to segregate men and women in public life, by calling for separate buses, hospitals for men and women. While the feminist movement remained an informally organized, non-parliamentary opposition group, Islamists gained ground within state institutions by virtue of being a vocal constituency of the conservative ruling party in power since 1983. Apparently in response to the heightened debate concerning women's status, in the latter half of the 1980s and especially in the past year the government put legal measures into effect, creating legal obligations at the international level and institutional structures at the governmental level to address issues concerning women.