Abstract
This introductory chapter, first, briefly explains why the book focuses on tobacco workers and then reviews the existing scholarship on Ottoman labor and social history. Nacar discusses how the book contributes to recent Ottoman labor historiography and expands discussions about state-society and labor-capital relations in the late Ottoman Empire.
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Notes
- 1.
Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (New York: Routledge, 1993), 37–87; Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 15–33.
- 2.
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 98.
- 3.
Relli Shechter, Smoking, Culture, and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850–2000 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 28.
- 4.
Eugene Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Nadir Özbek, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Sosyal Devlet: Siyaset, İktidar ve Meşruiyet, 1876–1914 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002); Kent F. Schull, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
- 5.
James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51; Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 6.
- 6.
Ahmet Uzun, Tanzimat ve Sosyal Direnişler: Niş İsyanı Üzerine Ayrıntılı Bir İnceleme (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2002); Ussama Makdisi, “Corrupting the Sublime Sultanate: The Revolt of Tanyus Shahin in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 180–208; Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, “A ‘Peripheral’ Approach to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire: Land Disputes in Peasant Petitions in Post-revolutionary Diyarbekir,” in Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915, ed. Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 179–216.
- 7.
On famine in Anatolia, see Yener Bayar, “1873–1875 Orta Anadolu Kıtlığı,” ( master's thesis, Marmara University, 2013); Özge Ertem, “Considering Famine in the Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Framework and Overview,” Collegium: Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 22 (2017): 151–72. Between 1872 and 1875, seven Central and South American (Honduras, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Peru), two African (Liberia and Egypt), and one European (Spain) governments also defaulted on their debts. See Şevket Pamuk, “The Ottoman Empire in the ‘Great Depression’ of 1873–1896,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (March 1984): 114.
- 8.
Murat Birdal, The Political Economy of the Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 15, 131–32.
- 9.
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 53; Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East, 87.
- 10.
Shortly after Bonsack cigarette-making machines were installed in his Durham factory in 1884, the American industrialist James Duke cut the wages of his cigarette rollers by about 65%. Moreover, about one hundred skilled Jewish rollers, who were brought to Durham from New York a few years earlier, were removed from the factory. Likewise, as mechanization of cigarette production gathered momentum in Egypt after World War I, tobacco manufacturers there began to dispense with their rollers. According to official statistics, more than 1000 cigarette workers lost their jobs in 1920. In Spain, the introduction of cigarette-making machines in the early twentieth century did not result in large-scale layoffs, but the company managing the Spanish tobacco monopoly froze new recruitment. Thus, between 1914 and 1930, the number of tobacco workers decreased by about 15%. See Leonard Rogoff, Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2001), 42–45; Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 53; Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East, 90; Lina Galvez-Munoz, “Breadwinning Patterns and Family Exogenous Factors: Workers at the Tobacco Factory of Seville During the Industrialization Process, 1887–1945,” International Review of Social History 42, no. S5 (1997): 116–17; Rosa Maria Capel Martinez, “Life and Work in the Tobacco Factories: Female Industrial Workers in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 135.
- 11.
Donald Quataert, “The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. 2: 1600–1914, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 919; Donald Quataert, “Machine Breaking and the Changing Carpet Industry of Western Anatolia, 1860–1908,” Journal of Social History 19 (1986): 473–89.
- 12.
On port workers in Istanbul, see Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 95–120. On silk workers in Bursa, see Hatice Yıldız, “Parallels and Contrasts in Gendered Histories of Industrial Labour in Bursa and Bombay, 1850–1910,” The Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (June 2017): 464.
- 13.
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 155. For tobacco workers’ activism in other parts of the world, see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 49–57; Mary C. Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 65–69; Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); D. J. O’Connor, “Representations of Women Workers: Tobacco Strikers in the 1890s,” in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, 151–72.
- 14.
Kadir Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler (1870–1922): Çalışma Hayatı, Örgütler, Grevler (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2013), 358–65.
- 15.
Peter Carl Mentzel, “Nationalism and Labor Movement in the Ottoman Empire, 1872–1914” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1994), 87–89; Cevdet Kırpık, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde İşçiler ve İşçi Hareketleri (1876–1914)” (PhD diss., Süleyman Demirel University, 2004), 236; Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 220.
- 16.
Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 105–12. In his study on the coal heavers of Port Sa’id, John Chalcraft similarly demonstrates that the Egyptian state was not always an adversary of worker protest. See John Chalcraft, “The Coal Heavers of Port Sa’id: State-Making and Worker Protest, 1869–1914,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 110–24.
- 17.
Nadir Özbek, “Philanthropic Activity, Ottoman Patriotism, and the Hamidian Regime, 1876–1909,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 1 (2005): 69. See also Özbek, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Sosyal Devlet.
- 18.
Quataert, “Machine Breaking.”
- 19.
Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 263–69.
- 20.
Nader Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 188.
- 21.
Stefo Benlisoy, İstanbul’un Irgatları: II. Meşrutiyet’te Sosyalist Bir İşçi Örgütü (Istanbul: İstos Yayın, 2018), 29–33, 116; Nicole Van Os, “Bursa’da Kadın İşçilerin 1910 Grevi,” Toplumsal Tarih, no. 39 (1997): 7–10; Yıldız, “Parallels and Contrasts,” 466–67.
- 22.
Efi Avdela, “Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in Post-Ottoman Thessaloniki: The Great Tobacco Strike of 1914,” in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, ed. Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), 421–38; Gülhan Balsoy, “Gendering Ottoman Labor History: The Cibali Régie Factory in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 54, no. S17 (2009): 45–68.
- 23.
See, for example, Gila Hadar, “Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context of Social Life and Ethnic Strife,” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, ed. Amila Buturovic and Irvin Cemil Schick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 127–52; Şükrü Ilıcak, “Jewish Socialism in Ottoman Salonica,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 2, no. 3 (2002): 115–46.
- 24.
The Exarchate, a semiautonomous Bulgarian church, was founded by an imperial decree in 1870. Article 10 of the decree stipulated that if two-thirds of the Orthodox population of a given district expressed their will to change their ecclesiastical authority through a local referendum, the Ottoman administration would recognize the change. See Paraskevas Konortas, “Nationalist Infiltrations in Ottoman Thrace (ca. 1870–1912),” in State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey: Orthodox and Muslims, 1830–1945, ed. Benjamin Fortna, Stefanos Katsikas, Dimitris Kamouzis, and Paraskevas Konortas (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77–78.
- 25.
İpek Yosmaoğlu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 193.
- 26.
Sir N. O’Conor to Sir Edward Grey (May 15, 1907) in Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, Turkey No. 3 (1908): Further Correspondence Respecting the Affairs of South-Eastern Europe (Cd. 4076), 27–28.
- 27.
Neuburger, Balkan Smoke, 69.
- 28.
Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement, 89–203.
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Nacar, C. (2019). Introduction. In: Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31559-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31559-7_1
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