Suchergebnisse

Introduction : toward an infrahistory of republican Turkey -- The price of the republic for the peasants -- Raising voice and rural discontent -- Resisting the agricultural taxes -- Social smuggling : resistance to the monopolies -- Theft, violence and banditry -- The price of the republic for the working class -- Labor discontent -- Survival struggles and everyday resistance -- Violence, protests and walkouts -- The hotbeds of opposition to anti-secularism : mosques, coffehouses and homes -- Informal media vs. official discourse : word of mouth, rumors and placaords -- Neither fez, nor hat : contesting the hat reform -- Negotiating anti-veiling campaigns -- Old habits die hard : tenacity of old lifestyles in new times -- Epilogue : infrastructure of Turkey's modernization.

AbstractAfter the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the building of the modern Turkish Republic was financed largely through the taxes extracted from the agricultural economy. Turkey's economy was largely based on agriculture and accordingly the new state relied heavily on rural resources. Despite the abolition of the tithe, many other agricultural taxes increased remarkably. This paper examines the peasants' everyday resistance to heavy taxes under the single-party regime in interwar Turkey. It shows that under an authoritarian single-party system, poor and small-income peasants used daily and mostly informal means to cope with the social injustice that resulted from the increasingly burdensome economic demands of the new state. In contrast to the existing accounts, which mostly regard the peasants as being atomized under the absolute control of the state, this paper portrays them as an active social dynamic that annulled the greater part of the taxes in practice and compelled the government to soften its heavy taxes. Based on new archival sources, such as gendarme records, politicians' reports, citizens' petitions, and newspaper reports, this paper reveals the peasants' different forms of politics and the direct and indirect impact of such politics on the social and political transformation of the new Republic and on the modernization of Turkey overall.

AbstractThis article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.