The concept of capitalism is as elusive as it is foundational within the social sciences. It is essential because grasping the emergence and development of the modern world requires (at least some) engagement with the concept of capitalism. Yet, it is also elusive: defining capitalism and explaining its origins and development are among the most enduring and thorny questions in the field of historical sociology. Unsurprisingly so, after all, how we define and historicize capitalism produces important consequences for our understanding of the development of social dynamics over time, hence firmly connected to the conventional thematic preoccupations of historical sociology such as the issue of state formation, revolution, and nationalism. Furthermore, different ways of theorizing capitalism’s history uncover starkly different possibilities and visions for future transformation. In other words, how capitalism is defined and historicized shapes the way in which we understand the underlying dynamics of this system, thereby enabling different strategies of political change. Read together, the “transition” to capitalism has been a historiographical, theoretical, and political debate at once.

The transition debate is complex, and competing explanations abound. Different methodological starting points have usually advanced different conceptions of capitalism, which, in turn, have provided a variety of answers to the problem as to how capitalism emerged and expanded at a particular space and time. In this debate, notwithstanding several interpretative differences both within and between different theoretical traditions, one can identify two broad methodological paradigms. The first is the position that sees capitalism (explicitly or otherwise) as a constant developmental tendency in history. In this perspective, capitalism is assumed to be rooted in certain “proto-capitalist” social phenomena such as commercial activity, bourgeois classes, private property, or wage labor; therefore, the rise of capitalism is explained through the gradual liberation of these nascent dynamics from pre-capitalist impediments in history. Obviously, depending on the theoretical lens chosen for research, be it Smithian, Weberian, or Marxian, the empirical focus shifts from one phenomenon to another, and accordingly, different agents and processes are prioritized as catalysts of the transition to capitalism (e.g., Mann 1985; Giddens 1987; North 1981; Wallerstein 1974; Heller 2017). Yet, despite the theoretical diversity, the methodological underpinnings remain more-or-less the same in these approaches, perpetuating the assumption that capitalism was somehow always in the air and that the emergence of capitalism was a constant possibility built into the logic of commercial and productive practices of the past. As a result, the logic of capitalism is read back in history: a methodologically “presentist” approach permeates historical narratives of the transition, generating an analytical tendency to read the past in terms of the present.

The second methodological approach is represented by scholars associated with Political Marxism (PM). Born out of Robert and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s pioneering contributions, PM holds a “non-presentist” view of capitalism. It argues that capitalism did not emerge out of pre-existent social patterns; to the contrary, capitalism was a watershed reversing the logic of the age-old social dynamics that came to govern non-capitalist societies. In this sense, PM does not see the mere existence of profit-seeking, commercial classes, wage labor, or private property as necessary precursors of capitalism in history. All these phenomena, in different yet comparable forms, have existed almost since time immemorial. For example, commercial practices rooted in the logic of buying-cheap-selling-dear are nearly as old as human societies themselves. Likewise, different forms of private property and wage labor existed in the ancient world. Therefore, according to PM, by uncritically associating commerce, bourgeois classes, private property, or wage labor with the existence of capitalism throughout history, one risks transhistoricizing and naturalizing capitalism. Assuming that these elements are inherently tied to capitalism fosters a model of explanation that views capitalism as merely a continuation and amplification of what has always existed. This approach leads to circular reasoning: capitalism’s prior existence is presumed in order to explain its emergence (Brenner 1985a; Wood 2002).

In the Political Marxist perspective, capitalism is not just “more of the same thing”: it is not more trade, more markets, more private property, or more wage labor. Instead, PM sees capitalism as a violent break with the conditions that preceded it. The transition to capitalism cannot be explained with random acts of exchange of surplus product and surplus labor; instead, it required a systematic political and institutional intervention to lay the foundation of a “market-dependent” society. In other words, capitalism would not have emerged and spread unless society-wide political and institutional interventions were made into the customary conditions of social reproduction. These interventions restructure the millennia-old logic of tributary arrangements, customary subsistence rights, and non-market survival strategies in such ways that the market eventually becomes the primary (not the only) institution for maintaining and expanding the means of life. As a result, people lose their ability to reproduce themselves outside the marketplace. The market shifts from being just a space wherein surplus goods and labor were occasionally sold, as it has been for ages, to becoming an “imperative” for the reproduction of both the producing and appropriating classes (Wood 2002; Lafrance and Post 2019).

Clearly, transitions to capitalism did not adhere to a universal pattern. Depending on past socioinstitutional struggles and legacies as well as the timing and international context of capitalist transition, the mechanisms that ensure market dependence take different forms. Yet, the state of “market dependency,” once combined by policies that ensure the continuity, irreversibility, and expansion of commodity production, compels and enables people to perpetually (re)produce the “capital relation”: they are forced and enabled to continuously reduce human beings into “abstract labor,” increase “surplus value,” and “the ratio of unpaid labor to paid.” To put it in non-Marxian terms, to cope up with the dictates of capitalist accumulation, both the laboring and propertied classes begin to transform the conditions of production and subsistence by constantly increasing commodification, competitiveness, productivity, and innovation (e.g., Wood 2002; Post 2013). According to PM, the transition to such a mode of life cannot be explained through the existence and progression of any transhistorical phenomena. Instead, by focusing on the political, geopolitical, and institutional dynamics of the transition, PM shifts from a “presentist” interpretation, which views capitalism as a transhistorically cumulative phenomenon, to a “non-presentist” perspective, recognizing capitalism as a qualitative discontinuity in human history.

In this article, I will utilize a Political Marxist framework to historicize the transition to and development of capitalism in Turkey, starting from the nineteenth century. PM will enable a non-presentist reading, hence a departure from the relevant literature on the transition to modernity in Turkey. The existing narratives of the Turkish road to modernity, albeit empirically rich and theoretically diverse, tend to be underlined by presentist methodologies, as they associate the existence of commerce, market production, and bourgeois classes with capitalism in history. For example, in Weberian accounts, the existence of a “patrimonial state,” alongside what is called a “strong state tradition,” is often invoked to explain the difficulties in developing modern liberal institutions and “entrepreneurial middle classes” in Turkey. It is assumed that, unlike the West, the prevailing form of state and political culture in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey inhibited the rise of a strong middle class, which in turn led to the underdevelopment of liberal political and economic institutions (e.g., Heper 1985; Mardin 2006). Here, the clear inference is that social classes involved in commodity production, such as the middle classes or the “bourgeoisie,” are conceived as classes pre-loaded with capitalist/liberal rationality. Instead of analyzing the bourgeoisie through its relationship with other classes in historically specific contexts of social reproduction, Weberian accounts see the bourgeoisie as the transhistorical carrier of capitalist social relations. Consequently, the entire discussion on the transition to capitalist modernity boils down to finding reasons for the absence or weakness of a transhistorical class agency. This conceptualizes away the very issue that requires most explanation: the fundamental problem of transition from one form of society to another is replaced by an essentialist scheme of historical development led by bourgeois classes programmed to carry out their pre-ordained tasks.

Predictably, Marxian accounts of Turkish modernity have addressed the question of capitalism more directly than Weberian perspectives. In the early contributions to the historicization of capitalism in Turkey, the world-system and dependency theories dominated the debate. According to these scholars, the Ottoman Empire became part of the capitalist world economy as a (semi-) “peripheral” state, due to the intensification of uneven trade relations with Western Europe. This sociospatial unevenness initiated a process of “peripheralization” during which socioeconomic institutions and relations of the classical Ottoman Empire began to be structured according to the requirements of the “core” of the capitalist world economy. Although there were debates among these scholars regarding the precise timing and agents of the Ottomans' incorporation into the capitalist world economy, they shared a presentist tendency that equates international commerce with capitalism on an a priori basis. As a result, they assumed that capitalism existed in the Ottoman Empire (albeit in a peripheral form) from the nineteenth century onward, if not earlier, due to the intensification of commercial relations with capitalist Europe (Islamoglu and Keyder 1977; Wallerstein 1979; Kasaba 1988). What these scholars overlooked is that the pressures of and production for the capitalist world market do not necessarily lead to the development of capitalist social relations. Depending on the relative strength of competing classes and the broader (geo)political configuration of power relations, commercial expansion driven by world market integration may lead to outcomes other than capitalism. Thus, the question of “transition” eventually gets lost in the grand narratives of world market “integration.”

Since these early debates, various criticisms have been directed at the world-system and dependency interpretations of capitalism in Turkey. In particular, several scholars have attempted to address the limitations of these “structuralist” accounts by focusing more on the local dynamics of Ottoman and Turkish society (e.g., Abou-El-Haj 1991; Keyder 1987; Pamuk 1987a; Aytekin 2008; Teoman and Kaymak 2008; Kaya 2015). These scholars have concentrated on identifying the agents, institutions, and relations of capitalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, with a special focus on small producers and large farms (çiftlik). Yet, as I will discuss below, they have shown little, if any, interest in defining and theorizing their very subject matter, i.e., capitalism, and discussing its specificity from a macro historical-sociological perspective. Given this lack of conceptual engagement, even these more nuanced and sophisticated accounts of the late Ottoman Empire have failed to fully challenge the presentist assumptions of the earlier debate. They have continued to see capitalism developing in the interstices of nineteenth-century Ottoman society (if not earlier) based on the existence of commercial agriculture, peasant indebtedness, pockets of dispossession, or just wage labor. Yet, these social phenomena and processes have existed transhistorically. As such, the transition to capitalism in Turkey has continued to be more assumed than explained.

Drawing on Political Marxism, this article will attempt to build a non-presentist alternative to these theories, which will lead to a new periodization of the transition to capitalism in Turkey. Over the past two decades, there have been calls from scholars of Turkish capitalism to consider the historiography of capitalist transition in Turkey from the perspective of Political Marxism (e.g. Oğuz 2007). However, while these critical scholars often reference the work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, especially Wood’s writings on capitalism versus democracy, they have never systematically debated or applied their ideas about the transition to capitalism in the context of Turkey. Similarly, the few references to the “Brenner debate” are typically confined to obscure footnotes, pointing to a lack of systematic engagement with this important historical-sociological debate. This article seeks to fill this gap.

My argument will proceed in four steps. In the section titled “From Marx to Marxisms: presentism and the transition debate,” I will provide an overview of the transition debate from the past to the present. In the section titled “Capitalism as a historically specific form of market dependence,” I will present and debate the Political Marxist conception of capitalism. In the section titled “The late Ottoman Empire: “petty commodity production” vs. “çiftlik” route to capitalism?” I will begin to apply the insights drawn from these debates to problematize the conventional accounts of the transition in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. I will argue that there was no transition to capitalism in the late Ottoman Empire, i.e., neither in small farms nor in large estates did the increasing commercialization of Ottoman agriculture result in a qualitative break with pre-existing social patterns and norms. In the section titled “Early Republican Turkey: peasantization and industrialization,” I will argue that during the early Republican period neither land nor factory was organized on the basis of market imperatives. Private property developed, so did the accumulation of private wealth and even industrialization, yet neither of these presupposed capitalist property and capitalist accumulation within itself as a developmental tendency. Quite the contrary, for capitalist property to develop, the dominant relations and institutions of private property would have to undergo a radical transformation. In “Conclusion: re-periodizing the origins of capitalism in Turkey,” I will conclude by summarizing my argument and briefly discussing the conditions and factors that facilitated the transition to capitalism in the 1950s.

From Marx to Marxisms: presentism and the transition debate

Can we explain the emergence of capitalism in a way that does not already assume capitalism’s logic or dynamic as part of historical explanation? Were Karl Marx to answer this question, he would have most probably said both “yes” and “no.” “No,” because, on the one hand, although Marx never embarked on a systematic historical inquiry into the origins of capitalism, he tends to project the logic, relations, and institutions of capitalism back into history in several early texts. For example, in the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, he explains the emergence of capitalism through the “rationalization of division of labour” or the rise of “bourgeois classes” driven by the expansion of the markets (Marx 1975: 8–9, 1976:19). In this conception, capitalism becomes a natural trait of the bourgeoisie and, as a result, the question how capitalism arose is explained through the circular logic of the bourgeoisie and the market. The expansion of markets and division of labor become the cause of the rise of the bourgeoisie and vice versa. Perhaps this teleological tendency is not too surprising a consequence considering especially that the early Marx extensively relied on and appropriated the taxonomies of nineteenth-century liberal historiography, including a “stagist” history driven by the unilinear and transhistorical conceptions of “progress” (Godelier 1986: 99; Comninel 1987: 86, 2019: chapter 5).

Yet, in Marx’s mature accounts, the influence of presentist categories is countered by a consistent emphasis on the historical specificity of class societies and of capitalist society in particular. In the Grundrisse, for example, he accuses liberal political economy of presenting the economy “as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history,” which were “then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (Marx 1993: 87). Likewise, in volume 1 of Capital, he writes that the categories of liberal economy are not eternal but “forms of thought expressing… the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production,” whose validity “vanishes…so soon as we come to other forms of production” in history (Marx 1996: 65). The late Marx, therefore, argues against the eternalization and naturalization of capitalist social relations and economic categories. By implication, he holds a strongly discontinuist view of the transition to capitalism. He stresses the submergence of economic transactions in extra-economic processes (and vice versa), hence the inseparability of the economic and the noneconomic in precapitalist history (Marx 1997: 776–7). Relatedly, he notes that “(t)he original formation of capital does not happen, as it is sometimes imagined, with capital heaping up necessaries of life and instruments of labour and raw materials” (Marx 1993: 507). Put another way, the existence of wealth in the form “merchant capital” and “usurer capital” is “insufficient to explain” and indeed in some circumstances “stands in inverse” relation to the transition to capitalism (Marx 1997: 730–2, 444–50). Commerce and money can have a “solvent effect on traditional economic structures” but, by themselves, do not guarantee and indeed may hinder the development of capitalist social relations. Therefore, the transition to capitalism was not facilitated by economic processes per se; it did not have anything to do with money or market exchange, but it required a radical political intervention and social transformation. What was central to the transition to capitalism was “the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour; this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital” (Marx 1996: 749). Only after such a process of “primitive accumulation” began could the basic categories and assumptions of liberal political economy hold—that is, land and labor could be considered commodities and the assumption of a cost-saving, productivity-maximizing, and labor-saving individual can be introduced into historical explanation as a general typology. In short, it seems that Marx, in his later works, no longer views capitalism as something natural, slowly germinating in the interstices of precapitalist societies, ready to burst forth as the division of labor or the forces of production advance, but as an unnatural discontinuity founded upon an unprecedented reorganization of humans’ relation to land and to one another (Marx 1996: part 8).

This contradiction between the young and old Marx has given rise to two distinct methodological tendencies and relatedly, two distinct and at times entwining modes of historicization of capitalism within Marxism. From the Dobb-Sweezy debate of the early 1950s, to the Brenner debate of the 1970s and then to the more recent historiographies of capitalism, several explanations, involving different doses of presentism and non-presentism, have been advanced to make sense of the question of the transition to capitalism. In the earlier debate, for example, historians such as Maurice Dobb and Rodney Hilton provided a (partially) non-presentist account of the transition by rejecting the assumption that capitalism was a product of the expansion of commerce, urbanization, or the increasing monetization of feudal rents and taxation (Dobb 1946:186). No doubt, feudalism was highly urban and commercial, yet commercial activity by itself generated no corrosive impact on feudalism. The so-called merchant capital “remained always within the sphere of circulation, was never applied either to agricultural or industrial production in any innovative fashion” (Hilton 1976:23). This began to change only after the fourteenth century when the class struggle between lordly and producing classes, combined with the demographic collapse caused by the bubonic plague, generated a momentum toward the abolition of serfdom and urban guilds. Peasantry and artisans, freed from feudal dues and obligations, began to take advantage of commercial opportunities which prompted a shift from the logic of subsistence toward the logic of the marketplace, i.e., increasing competition, output specialization, innovation, productivity growth, accumulation, and dispossession.

Of course, by focusing on class struggle, one of Dobb and Hilton’s main counter-reference points was Paul Sweezy’s trade-based explanation of the transition to capitalism. According to Sweezy, feudalism was not “commercial” enough; that is, in feudalism markets and trade, while not necessarily absent, were too limited to generate “the pressures which exists under capitalism for continual improvements in methods of production” (Sweezy 1976:35). Therefore, the engine of capitalist transformation could not be the internal dynamics of feudal society. Instead, the impetus came from the emergence of big urban centers with potential for long-distance trade, which brought into existence a contradictory and transitional system in which “production for exchange” slowly took over the “old feudal system of production of use” (Sweezy 1976:42). Therefore, from Sweezy’s perspective, the more the (long-distance) trade, the more capitalism.

In comparison to Sweezy’s argument, Dobb and Hilton emphasized the centrality of class struggles to the transition to capitalism, thereby departing from the presentist assumption that capitalism and trade are necessarily related. Yet, it is still debatable if Dobb and Hilton succeeded in delivering a completely anti-presentist narrative of the transition to capitalism. The problem is that their narratives give the impression that whenever serfdom and guilds are abolished, peasants and artisans, by definition, adopt a capitalist logic of action, growing from simple commodity producers into capitalist entrepreneurs. Therefore, for example, it is not clear exactly under what conditions a small stratum of peasants, following the market signals, can give up the “safety-first” logic of agriculture, rise as capitalist farmers, and transform the countryside along capitalist lines. Let me explain.

Safety-first logic of agriculture refers to the risk-averse strategies adopted by peasants to ensure their survival and minimize vulnerability to external shocks, such as adverse weather conditions, market fluctuations, or social and geopolitical instability. Under pre-capitalist conditions, given low levels of productivity, many peasants focused on subsistence farming, producing primarily for their own consumption rather than for the market, which reduced their exposure to volatility of market prices and dependency on external buyers. In particular, peasants had customary rights to possess land, and they did not have access to stable alternative sources of food and credit. Therefore, in order to survive, most peasant farmers were forced and enabled to prioritize subsistence production over production for the market. Clearly, this is not to suggest that peasant did not use the market at all, but simply that they marketed only their surplus product and surplus labor, choosing not to subject themselves to “the dictates of the market and the whole transformation of life that transformation would have entailed” (Brenner 1989: 289). A richer stratum of peasants or even big landowners employing wage labor might still “rise” in this context, but they would not be able to change the sociolegal basis of the “safety-first” agriculture unless a systematic political intervention was made (a) to progressively eliminate the peasantry’s non-market customary access to land and (b) to provide them with alternative sources of food and credit. Put differently, richer peasants and big landowners would not be able to initiate a process of capitalist accumulation unless they were able to change the society-wide “rules of reproduction”.

Therefore, Dobb overlooks that, for peasant households to turn into “petty commodity producers,” a qualitative change in the rules of accessing land had to occur, which would compel and empower rural households to initiate and generalize the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. Without broader sociolegal changes, rural households, regardless of the degree of prior economic differentiation, would remain as producers who prioritize production for subsistence, who do not have to compete in the market to survive, and who are not empowered to accumulate land at the expense of less competitive peasant producers. As such, depicting (rich) peasants as “proto-capitalist” falls back into the trap of presentism. Dobb presumes and extrapolates back in time the logic and imperatives of capitalist accumulation in order to make the case for a “farmer-led” capitalism. This perpetuates the presentist/transhistoricist conception that human beings, given the chance, are naturally prone to capitalism, and capitalism comes into being unless something is to prevent it.

Indeed, in many respects the transition debate of the 1970s started precisely from where the Dobb-Sweezy debate was left off in the 1950s. In the two seminal articles that constituted the heart of the “Brenner debate,” Robert Brenner took issue with the “commercialization” and “demographic” models of the transition to capitalism, the former emphasizing the spread of markets, and the latter stressing the importance of long-term demographic trends as the engine of the transition. Brenner does not dismiss the importance of either factor, yet argues that both the commercial and demographic models assume that actors would respond to commercial and demographic pressures as if they were driven by a transhistorical economic rationality. Both models, therefore, overlook that

“the specific forms of socio-economic behaviour that individuals and families will… choose will depend on the society-wide network of social relationships – society-wide constraints and opportunities – in which they find themselves. These constrains present themselves to individual economic agents as unchangeable givens, because they are sustained by collective socio-political action” (Brenner 2007: 58).

This is to say that the impact of demographic and commercial changes is filtered through the “property relations” prevalent in a given context. The institutions and relations of property shape the extent and manner in which demographic and commercial changes impact long-term trends in income distribution and economic growth—rather than the other way around (Brenner 1985:11–2). By implication, unless we have a firmer understanding of the spatially and temporally varying property relations, according to Brenner, we will not be able to explain why similar commercial and demographic trends generated radically different political and economic outcomes, leading to divergent developmental paths across Europe. The relatively uniform and pan-European processes of commercial boom and demographic collapse from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries resulted in highly divergent socioeconomic forms. The similar economic and demographic pressures were filtered through different property relations marked by historically distinct forms of lordly solidarity, traditions of peasant resistance, collaborative agricultural practices, and so on. Thus, different property relations, under similar population and commercial pressures, generated different possibilities and constraints for the future trajectory of socioeconomic development.

In post-feudal England, for example, they set off a process of transition to capitalism. Following the social and demographic convulsions brought about by the Black Death (1340s), lords began to lose their extra-economic powers in the face of heightened peasant resistance/flight. As a result, they had to increasingly rely on the king’s legal authority to maintain their incomes and rule over the peasantry. In this context, peasants were able to change their conditions of servitude, yet they were not able to gain property rights to the lands that they customarily occupied. Taken together, from the 1450 s, a new sociolegal order began to emerge in England, in which lords owned the land, yet they were unable to tap peasant surpluses through extra-economic measures. Combined with their geopolitical losses on the continent, lords had no option but to increasingly resort to market-based measures to appropriate peasant surpluses and maintain themselves as lords. As such, they initiated a process that was to transform the millennia-old rules of accessing land. Lords, sometimes in cooperation and sometimes in conflict with the monarchy, began to systematically change the manorial custom, subjecting peasant tenants to competition for market-determined leases (Brenner 1985a: 49). This signaled a departure from the subsistence logic of agriculture toward a society-wide political-economic transformation, during which both the direct producers and the appropriators of their surplus became market-dependent. They were progressively compelled and enabled to specialize, accumulate, invest, innovate, and maximize productivity and output in order to survive the market imperatives and to pay rents at market rates. Capitalism was thus born (Dimmock 2014; Zmolek 2013).

In England, therefore, social actors “acted to reproduce themselves as they were,” and while doing so, this led to a contingent or unintended process of creating a market-dependent society (Wood 2001: 58)Footnote 1. Elsewhere in Western Europe, no similarly contingent development of capitalism occurred during the early modern era. In France, for example, lords did not lose their extra-economic powers of surplus appropriation, nor did peasants lose hereditary possession of their lands. Given the persistence of peasants’ customary rights over land, only political leverage within the state, rather than production per se, could secure and advance commercial and financial interests. Likewise, landlords pushed back the extent of peasant holdings, consolidating big commercial farms by “squeezing” the land directly held by peasants. However, this “urban colonization of the countryside” did not initiate a capitalist growth dynamic (Parker 1996: 53). For the expropriation of land did not translate into the systematic expropriation of customary rights (Gerstenberger 2007: 456). Agrarian production and prices continued to be bound by the subsistence requirements of peasant holdings (Brenner 1985b: 313; Comninel 1987: 189–90). Impoverished by the rent and tax demands of the ruling classes, a massive class of land-hungry peasants emerged, which severely restricted the expansion of the home market beyond the consumption of luxury items. Of course, not all peasantry was poor: just as in England, in France too there was “a middle peasantry on relatively quite large holdings” that could potentially respond to market imperatives by investing in and transforming the conditions of production (Brenner 1985b: 300). Yet, even in the most affluent parts of France, such as in the Paris Basin, where most of France’s commercial farms with wage labor were concentrated, no change occurred in the rules of accessing land, which could have otherwise forced, enabled, and permitted peasant family units and big landlords to produce competitively, reorganize production, release labor, and systematically transform the conditions of production (Brenner 1985a: 62–3; 1985b: 300–2; Miller 2012: 153–4). In short, no market-dependent society emerged from the interstices of the old. In its stead, capitalism began to spread to France and the states of continental Europe only from the nineteenth century onward and as a protracted process compelled (directly or indirectly) by the geopolitical pressures engendered by the “success” of Britain’s capitalist economy (Wood 1991: 159–60).

PM thus counters methodological presentism more powerfully than Dobb and Hilton. By emphasizing the contingent emergence and geopolitically driven expansion of capitalism in history, PM breaks with the tendency to transhistoricize and naturalize capitalism. As such, it not only provides new insights into the differentiated developmental paths in Europe but also registers historical specificities with greater precision. This latter aspect becomes even clearer when one compares the narrative above with Immanuel Wallerstein’s historical sociology. For Wallerstein (1974), profit-seeking, markets, and commercial classes are by and large synonymous with capitalism; therefore, sociospatial specificities (modes of labor control, type of state, etc.) enter Wallerstein’s historical narrative only as spatially differentiated versions of an all-encompassing conception of capitalism, such as “core capitalism,” “peripheral capitalism,” and “semi-peripheral capitalism.” A region’s role in the international division of labor, which is determined by the rates of profitability and the timing of its incorporation into the world economy, defines its historical specificities (with little attention paid to how historical specificities themselves could impact a region’s “mode of incorporation”). As such, Wallerstein tends to overlook the possibility of alternative developmental paths, obscuring the multilinearity of world historical development (for a critique, see Brenner 1977).

Of course, unlike Wallerstein, most historical materialist approaches today begin from a denial of any notion of transhistorical economic rationality. But even here there is a tendency to beg the question in various ways. For example, Neil Davidson, in his analysis of bourgeois revolutions, rejects the teleological view that capitalism is the outcome of the “unimpeded” growth of wealth, trade, and commercial actors. Yet, it is quite debatable to what extent his “consequentialist” interpretation of bourgeois revolutions is able to avoid the logic of presentism. Revisionist historiography of the past 50 years has shown that even in the “classical” cases of revolutionary transformation, such as in France, the bourgeoisie was not as capitalist as traditionally assumed and capitalist development massively deviated from what was previously held to be the norm. Davidson acknowledges these widely held empirical dissatisfactions with the conventional interpretation of the concept of bourgeois revolution. He argues that bourgeois revolutions should be disassociated from the image of a “revolutionary” bourgeoisie overthrowing feudalism and a clear-cut ascendant capitalism. For the bourgeoisie’s rise to power was complicated by social and geopolitical factors connected to the historically specific circumstances of the transition to capitalism in each milieu. Therefore, it is, in fact, futile to look for the involvement of a capitalist bourgeoisie in order to identify bourgeois revolutions; instead, bourgeois revolutions should be conceptualized more flexibly, judged only according to their long-term developmental consequences, that is, according to the degree to which they led to the building of “an autonomous centre of capital accumulation” (Davidson 2012: 487).

According to the consequentialist interpretation, therefore, it is (long-term) outcomes, not agents or causes, that identify a revolution’ socioeconomic character. From this angle, revolutions are capitalist as long as they launch a long-term process of removing obstacles to the development of proto-capitalist indicators, such as the introduction of private property, abolishment of guilds, or the existence of wage labor. Yet, the problem is that the property rights, the abolishment of guilds, and wage labor alone are hardly an indicator of the character of socioeconomic relations prevalent in a given context. For example, in France, the introduction of property rights did not necessarily lead to a systematic transformation of customary rights on land at least until the late nineteenth century. Likewise, in urban centers, artisans and workers, despite the formal abolition of guilds in 1791, persistently “interpreted the revolution as a complete overthrow of the old labour regime,” as an assurance of their customary rights and autonomy at the workplace (Lafrance 2019: 117–18; Lafrance and Miller 2024: chp.2). As for wage labor, there was no systematic pressure for market competition in manufacturing until the critical tariff reform of 1860; therefore, in the absence of relative factor mobility and market competition, it is very hard to assume that appropriating classes in France, no matter how industrious, were under compulsion nor able to systematically increase specialization, improve labor productivity, reorganize labor processes, reinvest in production, and accumulate at the expense of less efficient producers (Lafrance and Miller 2024: chp.3). In other words, they were neither allowed nor compelled to transform “labor power” into “labor,” systematically increase the “organic composition of capital,” and reduce the “socially necessary labor time” involved in appropriating “surplus value.” In such conditions, no surplus value, absolute or relative, can be realized and no appropriating class could transform into a “capitalist,” that is, a “supervisor and director of the (labour) process, as a mere function, as it were endowed with consciousness and will, of the capital engaged in the process of valorising itself” (Marx 1996: 1022).

The implication is that the consequentialist readings of the transition to capitalism tend to freeze the social content and meaning of revolutionary processes with an overdose of a priori logic of capitalist development. To be sure, in Davidson’s consequentialist account, class struggle is still central to the transition process, but it operates above all as a means of eliminating barriers to something that is already present (cf. Wood 2001). In other words, the narratives of the transition, propelled by a consequentialist mode of explanation, allow social agents to act only in the shadow of a (distant) capitalist future (Teschke 2005: 5–6; Duzgun 2017; 2018). In this sense, consequentialism is a form of presentism: it reads capitalism backward by overburdening the agents of revolutionary change with a pregiven conception of capitalism.

Capitalism as a historically specific form of market dependence

What transpires from this brief synopsis of the transition debate is that the presence of trade, wage labor, or private property cannot be taken as necessary precursors of the emergence of capitalism. Of course, capitalism increases the volume of production, commerce, and the size of a commodifiable workforce, yet, taking these as necessary and transhistorical indicators of the beginning of capitalism would simply collapse capitalism’s consequences into its causes. Also, the unqualified equation of capitalism to trade, wage labor or dispossession results in too static conceptualizations of capitalism, failing to capture the historically and spatially changing dynamics of the transition to capitalism. Identifying capitalism with wage labor, for example, tends to obscure the fact that under certain sociolegal and international circumstances non-wage forms (such as commodity production based on non-waged family labor) “can and have permitted a more or less direct transition to capitalism” without widespread dispossession of the workforce (Brenner 1977:52; Wood 2001:176–7). Similarly, equating the transition to capitalism with dispossession on an a priori basis is problematic. For instance, in late feudal and early modern England, the progressive dispossession of the peasantry was not a cause but rather a consequence of the broader process of reorganizing the customary rules governing access to land. In other words, “primitive accumulation” or “enclosure” was not a mere quantitative engrossment, nor a technical process of fencing of land. Rather, it involved a radical transformation of the socio-legal foundations of millennia-old “custom”, which subsequently led to a process of dispossession (Thompson 1991: 238–9; Comninel 2000: 31–2). Furthermore, another important implication is that preconceived notions of capitalism tend to lead hierarchical readings of world history. When histories are framed around a fixed concept of capitalism, societies are evaluated based on how well they align with or deviate from this predefined model. Therefore, a priori conceptions of capitalism tend to posit certain societies as ideal types and evaluate other societies based on the extent to which they conform to or diverge from a pre-given logic/norm of capitalism.

Read together, we need a definition of capitalism that (a) avoids circular explanations of capitalism’s origins and (b) captures the internationally interactive and historically changing conditions of the transition to capitalism (Duzgun 2019, 2022). In other words, we need a conception of capitalism that is both historically specific and historically dynamic. Political Marxism (PM) is able to provide precisely such a specific and dynamic conception of capitalism by drawing attention to the “political” and the “international” of the transition to capitalism. As for capitalism’s specificity, PM understands and defines capitalism in a manner that does not assume the logic and dynamics of capitalism as part of historical explanation. In this view, in precapitalist societies, markets did not have an inherent tendency to lead to capitalism, nor could commercial classes be viewed as transhistorical carriers of a capitalist logic. Instead, markets in precapitalist class societies were organized along non-capitalist principles and rules. For example, “elaborate reciprocal obligations determined…by kinship” or tributary arrangements based on “the authoritative appropriation [and redistribution] of surpluses” constituted the core of what was considered to be “economic” relations (Wood 2001:21). It was impossible to imagine the economy having an existence on its own; for the means of subsistence and production were allocated according to non-capitalist criteria. In this context, most market actors sought not to change, but to elevate themselves within tributary channels of redistribution. Relatedly, even when there was economic competition, this did not generate a constant compulsion to create capital relation. Economic competition was not won by continuously improving the conditions of production via productivity increases and cost-cutting measures. Nor did it generate any compulsion to systematically commodify land and labor. Instead, economic success depended on the mobilization of extra-economic privileges, such as by establishing commercial and financial monopolies, which were backed by political and military power (Wood 2001:77).

Thus, PM contends that the transitions to capitalism cannot be understood as the quantitative extension of any “economic phenomena”; instead, it sees the transition as an epochal discontinuity in human history, made possible only through systematic political and institutional interventions into the millennia-old rules governing access to the means of life. More precisely, all transitions, in principle, presuppose a strategic political intervention into the conditions of access to land and the elimination of non-market survival strategies (Brenner 1985a: 20).Footnote 2 The resulting condition of “market dependence” facilitates the emergence, generalization, and deepening of capitalism when it is coupled with society-wide policies aimed at producing and perpetuating the “capital relation” (Wood 2002). In other words, what is at stake is not just any form of market dependence—such as those seen in various pre-capitalist contexts—but a historically specific and dynamic one. For market dependence to foster capitalism, it requires a diverse array of dissuasive and stimulating conditions and policies that ensure the continuity, irreversibility, and expansion of commodity production. For the generation, widespread adoption, and deepening of a capitalist momentum, several factors must be in place, including, for example, closure of access to free land, relative mobility/disposability of labor power, extension of credit for the introduction of cash crops, provision of fertilizer and machinery, strategic compensation of risks related to market competition, and stabilization of the conditions of food supply (e.g., Post 2013).

By focusing on the political/legal/institutional moment of the origin of capitalism, therefore, PM diverts our attention from transhistorical phenomena usually considered as “preconditions” to the birth of capitalism. Capitalism as market dependence does not presume capitalism to be there from the very beginning but explains capitalism’s rise through the interventions into the political and institutional structure governing social reproduction. It is only when both the producing and appropriating classes are systematically forced and enabled to depend on the marketplace, they can be expected, at least in principle, to change the conditions of life by continuously increasing commodification, specialization, productivity, innovation, and accumulation at the expense of less competitive producers.

What is more, PM emphasizes the “international” of the transition to capitalism. PM insists that there can be no “transhistorical laws” governing the path to capitalism, because of the changing inter-societal context of capitalist transformation as well as the variations in social reactions from “below.” For “once breakthroughs to ongoing capitalist economic development took place in various regions these irrevocably transformed the conditions and the character of the analogous processes, which were to occur subsequently elsewhere” (Brenner 1985b: 322). Thus, by recognizing the cumulatively changing character of international relations, PM defies transhistorical interpretations of “market dependence.” This implies that while market dependence signifies the minimum sociolegal prerequisites to the existence of capitalist social relations, its focus cannot be on any static phenomena/policy. Depending on past socioinstitutional legacies and the timing and international context of capitalist transition, the mechanisms that ensure market dependence take different forms. The socioinstitutional content of market dependence is not fixed, but cumulatively changes. As a consequence, PM neither sets up pre-given norms for the transition to capitalism, nor does it treat subsequent transitions as counter models to privileged ideal types. In sum, PM has a potential to save history from the straitjacket of ever-present and static conceptions of capitalism, thereby providing a deeper understanding of the social content, tempo, and multi-linearity of world historical development. In the remainder of this chapter, I will utilize these insights to reinterpret and re-periodize the development of capitalism in the Ottoman Empire and TurkeyFootnote 3.

The late Ottoman Empire: “petty commodity production” vs. “çiftlik” route to capitalism?

Most historical sociological analyses of the origins of Turkish capitalism have focused on identifying the key drivers of capitalist transformation in the late Ottoman Empire. This debate has largely been divided into two main camps. On one side, a group of scholars has concentrated on the role of large commercial farms (çiftliks) in the institutionalization of capitalist social relations in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. In explaining the formation of çiftliks, they have paid particular attention to the processes of peasant indebtedness, landlessness, and sharecropping, hence placing the question of “production relations” on these farms at the center of their analysis (e.g., Kaya 2021; Terzibaşoğlu 2022; Hadjikyriacou 2025). On the other side, another group has argued for a “petty commodity production” route to capitalism in the Ottoman Empire. They have contended that, alongside the emergence of large landholdings cultivated by sharecropping peasants, small family farms remained the dominant institution in agriculture. In this view, the majority of agricultural producers, who were previously subsistence farmers, transitioned into “petty commodity producers” over the course of the nineteenth century. Therefore, it was these petty commodity producers, rather than a commercially oriented landed elite, who became the primary catalysts for the rise of peripheral capitalism in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey (e.g., Keyder 1987; Pamuk 1987a). That said, despite their differing views on the key institutions and agents of capitalism, both camps have converged on the assumption that a capitalist transformation was well underway in the Ottoman Empire from the nineteenth century onward (if not earlier).

In explaining the “petty commodity production” route to capitalism, the criterion used to identify (peripheral) capitalism, in many ways, boils down to “production for the market.” For example, Şevket Pamuk writes that the unequal relations between peasant and merchant that involve market processes are “capitalist” by definition (Pamuk 1987a: 86). Based on this assumption, Pamuk argues that the intensive commercialization of Ottoman agriculture paved the way for the capitalist transformation of the Ottoman countryside in the nineteenth century. However, so the argument goes, the Ottoman state was reluctant to initiate a full-scale dispossession of the peasantry for political reasons. Therefore, commercialization on the one hand and the central state’s endeavor to preserve peasant holdings on the other led to the consolidation and expansion of smallholding peasants as the primary agents of agrarian capitalism in the Ottoman Empire (Pamuk 1987b: 185). Similarly, for Çaglar Keyder, what facilitated “the long duration of peripheral transition to capitalism” in the Ottoman Empire (and then Turkey of the 1920s) was the character of “merchant capital” as well as the specificity of the Ottoman political institutions. While merchant capital “expand(ed) its area of operation within existing social relations,” the Porte tried to uphold its “redistributive precapitalist concerns,” which together “conditioned and influenced the pattern of installation of commodity production” in the form of petty commodity producers (Keyder 1981: 127, 1–3; 1987: 30–1). In this view, the majority of the rural population did not lose their land but instead became market-dependent small producers, i.e., the main agents of “peripheral” capitalist transformation in the Ottoman countryside. Likewise, in the early Republican period, the state promoted the further enrichment of a middle stratum of market-oriented peasantry (as well as big landlords), which not only fostered the production of crops necessary to industrialization, but also created a stable base for the deepening of the internal market (Keyder 1987a: 129). While the political support extended to the middle peasantry generalized the relations of “petty commodity production” in agriculture, it also checked the rapid development of capitalist social relations in the countryside, thereby sanctioning a highly mediated articulation with capitalism. In short, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, partly driven by world market conditions and partly by state support programs, the level of “marketization” increased on middle holdings, ultimately leading to a “petty commodity production” route to capitalism, hence the consolidation of “an autonomously functioning economy” ruled by market imperatives or the “law of value” (ibid: 128). A form of “state capitalism” and an authoritarian/statist modernization project eventually prevailed under the rubric of Kemalism (ibid.: 105).

Clearly, depending on the larger socioinstitutional context, the existence of small producers, sharecroppers, and sharecropping landowners may not necessarily preclude the development of capitalist social relations (e.g., Friedman 1980; Post 2011). For this, however, two conditions must be present. First, the reproduction of productive units organized as small family farms must increasingly depend upon commodity production. This requires progressively eliminating non-market access to land, establishing a legal framework that would force and enable more competitive farmers to expand their land at the expense of less competitive ones, and promoting policies that would allow the peasantry to increasingly shift the majority of their labor time from subsistence-first agriculture to commodity production (through, for example, provision of credit, stabilization of food supply, building of irrigation networks, transport facilities).

Second, under a sharecropping system, peasants (sharecroppers) work a landowner’s land in exchange for a share of the crop produced. The landowner typically provides seeds, tools, and sometimes credit to the sharecropper. This system often leads to peasant indebtedness because the sharecropper often needs to borrow money to meet immediate needs or to purchase inputs for cultivation. High levels of indebtedness in turn makes peasants more dependent on the landowner, hence increasing landowners’ control over sharecroppers’ mobility and labor process. Therefore, in short, in a context of labor scarcity and peasant indebtedness, peasant production in sharecropping arrangements provides large landowners with a low-cost option for securing harvest labor. And indeed, when the sharecropping unit is relatively large and the land-to-labor ratio is relatively high, one can expect that, in addition to producing for their subsistence, sharecropping peasants would be consistently involved in commodity production (Post 2011).

Despite extensive participation in the market, however, for sharecropping to be considered a (proto)capitalist form of social labor, the landlord and sharecropper, in principle, must be able and willing to organize the labor process according to the dictates of capitalist competition and accumulation. For example, they must be willing and able to increase labor productivity (and the organic composition of capital) through a variety of methods including the use of labor-saving tools. This, in turn, requires the introduction of a variety of restrictive and disciplinary measures. Most importantly, the landlord class must maintain a monopoly over land. It is this monopoly, and the resulting restriction of access to free or inexpensive land, that compels sharecroppers to cooperate more willingly with landlords. This pressure drives sharecroppers to increasingly specialize and fully engage in commodity production. If there is no landlord monopoly over land, i.e., if land clearance is a viable option for the sharecropper, higher yields that could be produced by increased utilization of labor-saving tools and techniques would not only benefit the sharecropping landlord but would also help sharecroppers pay off their debts and become “independent” peasants again. In short, with no monopoly over land and no access to an alternative labor market, the sharecropping landlord would be more likely to choose not to invest in the means of production that could otherwise cause him to lose his only source of labor. In such a context, therefore, sharecropping put definite limits on the transformation of the labor process, deterring the introduction of labor-saving techniques and the capitalist reorganization of production.

Therefore, for petty commodity production and sharecropping to be considered (proto)capitalist forms of social labor, we need to be able to show that the social reproduction of agricultural units must increasingly depend on their willingness and ability to reorganize the labor process according the requirements of capitalist competition and accumulation. How successful were the Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey at reorienting the peasant strategy of production for subsistence toward that of production of commodities? As mentioned earlier, peasant smallholdings prevailed in most areas of the Empire as the basic unit of taxation and seem to have remained remarkably stable during the commercial boom and bust of the latter nineteenth century. According to one estimate, for example, of all cultivable land in 1859, 82 percent entailed smallholdings, with the average farm size somewhere between 6 and 8 hectares and roughly the same proportions applied in 1900 (Pamuk 1987a: 91). In Anatolia, the “majority of private plots were less than 5 hectares” and “even such small plots were likely to be fragmented into tiny parcels of land in a number of different places around the village” (Owen 1981: 208). In Western Anatolia, which was one of the most commercially oriented areas of the empire, the average size of a peasant landholding varied from 1.2 to 8 hectares (Issawi 1980: 203; Pamuk 1987a: 100). Given the size of their land and the low levels of productivity, most peasants were extremely vulnerable to unfavorable weather conditions and taxation, which also rendered usury and peasant indebtedness a widespread and chronic phenomenon. Whatever was left after the tax collector and the usurer had taken their shares was hardly enough for subsistence. “The small producers frequently had to struggle to survive from one year to the next,” with no prospect of “capital improvements in land and implements” (Pamuk 1987a: 89).

If access to land had been mediated through the market and had cheap credit been sufficiently provided, the combined pressure of taxes and debt might have generated a capitalist growth dynamic in the Ottoman countryside by compelling and enabling a richer stratum of the peasantry to break the cycle of indebtedness, improve productivity, market ever larger portions of their subsistence, and to eventually oust the less competitive producers from the land. And in fact, especially during 1850–1873 (and then 1896–1908), high world market demand for agricultural goods, together with the relative improvement of rural security and the establishment of modern means of transport, encouraged peasants to extend production and participate in the market. Population growth, the sedentarization of tribes, the settlement of immigrants, and the availability of cultivable land also contributed to the expansion of agricultural output, especially for grains, tobacco, raisins, and cotton (Issawi 1980: 6; Quataert 1994: 844, 847). How much of these grains were marketed? Despite the relative absence of reliable data especially for the period before 1900, Issawi estimates that in the Ottoman Empire “even during the 1863 cotton boom, by far the greater part of the land was planted to wheat, barley and other grains, which were mostly consumed on the farm” (Issawi 1980: 200). Quataert similarly notes that although “enormous changes over time occurred in the agrarian sector,” in 1900 most cultivators still “possessed small landholdings, engaging in a host of tasks, with their crops and animal products mainly dedicated to self-consumption” (Quataert 2005: 130–1).

Implied here is the persistence of the peasants’ “subsistence logic.” Perhaps more importantly, however, in a given year and place “peasants may have any proportion of subsistence to cash crop production, including complete specialization” and still this may not indicate the existence of market-dependent “petty commodity producers.” That is to say, the transition from subsistence-first production to “petty commodity production” cannot be grasped in quantitative terms only, but depends on qualitative changes in the rules of accessing the factors of production, especially land (Friedman 1980: 167). After all, it is not commodity production per se, but the sociolegal mobilization of land, labor, and credit that forces, enables, and permits peasant family units to produce competitively, reorganize production, and accumulate land in the face of their less competitive neighbors.

With this qualification in mind, we need to recall that even in the most market-oriented areas, such as Western Anatolia, “uncultivated marginal lands were always available for purchase from the state at nominal prices or in return for regular payments of tithe for ten years” (Pamuk 1987a: 87). In addition, it is true that the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 made promises for the productive utilization of property, yet it hardly amounted to “enclosure.” That is, it did not expropriate peasant’s customary rights on land. While taking steps toward privatizing and individualizing property in land, it involved several affirmative references to the age-old custom that legalized peasantry’s right to use the land (Çakır-Kantarcıoglu 2018: 134). This political ambiguity was an ongoing tendency which would find its clearest expression in the first Ottoman Constitution (1876) that explicitly prohibited the elimination of usufruct rights (İslamoglu 2000:40).Footnote 4 In other words, while the land code sought (even if vaguely) to guarantee the right to property, the constitution ensured the security of possessors by prohibiting dispossession, thereby turning (minimum) subsistence into a constitutional right.

Furthermore, although some attempts were made by the state to extend low-interest credit to induce market production, these were far from satisfactory, as most of the agricultural support targeting the land-hungry and technologically backward peasantry was siphoned off by bureaucrats, local notables, and big landlords (Quataert 1994: 871–2). Considering their relatively uninhibited access to marginal lands and lack of credit, peasants were neither under compulsion nor willing to devote the majority of their labor time to commodity production. Despite their participation in the market, “basic subsistence considerations [remained] paramount and accordingly most decisions betray(ed) risk-avoiding behaviour” (Keyder 1983: 136). In other words, small family farmers, already distressed by their subsistence, chose not to subject their generational security to the uncertainties of the market. Instead, they were “ready to exert and be content with very low levels of consumption which made it easier for them to retain their holdings” in the face of the tax collector and the usurer (Pamuk 1987a: 101; Ortayli 1998: 226–7; Hansen 1991: 298). Even when peasants were encouraged by high cash-crop prices, their involvement in the market was sporadic. Tobacco production, for example, which became especially popular among small producers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was carried out by peasants who were “only marginally” involved in and “were able to withdraw from the market” (Koç 1988: 65–71).

The persistence of customary rights on land resulted in chronic labor shortages, undermining the capitalist investment climate in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. For example, there were massive inflows of foreign direct investment into land in Western Anatolia following the Land Code of 1867—according to one estimate, a third of cultivable land belonged to the British in 1868—and yet foreign investment totally retreated in the subsequent decades because of labor-power shortages, low effective demand, high wages, and, above all, the reluctance of the Ottoman state to transform agrarian relations (Pamuk 1987a: 39, 68). Almost all foreign investment funds went into infrastructure projects, which gave “quick, high or at least secure returns,” rather than flowing to production (Hershlag 1968:33). As a result, an “extensive” economic development based on peasant squeezing, land clearance, and settlement of seminomadic groups set in during the nineteenth century with no prospects for “intensive” development based on (re)investment and increases in labor productivity (Güran 1992: 233; Quataert 1994: 843).

Relatedly, with no monopoly over land and no access to an alternative labor market, most çiftlik owners did not develop any systematic interest in supervising and improving the labor process. Large estates, producing mainly cotton and cultivated almost exclusively by sharecropping peasants, experienced no systematic improvements in the means of production (which would otherwise help sharecroppers pay off their debts, thereby causing landlords to lose their only source of labor supply). Sharecropping peasants were overburdened by taxes, rents, debt, and even labor services in some parts of the empire such as Kurdistan and the Balkans, yet, regardless of the size of the landholding, they began and completed the production cycle themselves; “free cultivators accounted for most agricultural production and exports, even on the largest estates” (Quataert 1994: 864; also see Keyder 1991: 12; Pamuk 2008: 389).

Furthermore, eviction in a case of default was rare, but even when a landlord evicted a sharecropper (which would definitely be a prize for some sharecroppers), the latter always had the option of accessing marginal lands owned by the state in exchange for taxes (Keyder 1983). No landlord/merchant monopoly on land therefore developed, which otherwise might have facilitated the subsumption of sharecropping peasants to the market imperatives. Of course, we can safely assume that due to their rent and tax obligations, sharecroppers who suffered from extreme indebtedness were hugely vulnerable to the uncertainties of the marketplace (e.g., Aytekin 2008: 295). Yet, it is also reasonable to assume that under conditions of extreme indebtedness, most of their product was transferred to the sharecropping landlord, which depleted the peasant funds otherwise available for the “improvement” of the land.

Similarly, given that land was often expandable and divisible by the peasantry, and peasant indebtedness was the primary source of labor supply, sharecropping landlords had little incentive to invest in improving the means of production. As discussed earlier, for landlords, permanent indebtedness and usury provided an opportunity both to appropriate a larger share of peasant surpluses and to secure tenants for their land (Pamuk 1987b: 186). Yet, investing in the means of production and improving the land could have increased sharecroppers’ ability to pay their debts and become independent peasants again, hence causing the disappearance of the only pool of labor power exploited by the sharecropping landlord. Therefore, most landlords remained as “absentee” landlords, i.e., landowners disinterested in production and investing in land. Of course, a stratum of landlords employing sharecroppers or even wage laborers might still accumulate wealth in this context (e.g., Kaya 2021), but they would not be able to initiate capitalist growth dynamic given their inability to change the sociolegal basis of the “safety-first” agriculture and their inability to systematically mobilize land, labor, and credit (Brenner 2007:87). Furthermore, even when there is a pool of dispossessed population, there are myriad risks associated with market competition that historically deterred big landowners and merchants from supervising and organizing the labor process, introducing labor-saving technology and so on. For, increasing involvement in the production process is likely to lock appropriating classes into economic competition, thereby rendering them vulnerable to the ups and downs of the market. From this angle, for the Ottoman propertied classes, remaining free from competitive constraints could be perfectly rational due to (a) the absence of institutions that would drive market competition by mobilizing land, labor, and credit and (b) the fact that most of them likely did not need to compete in the marketplace to sustain their incomes and status (e.g., Veinstein 1991:51–2). A systematic political intervention was therefore necessary for the capitalist transformation of the Ottoman countryside. However, the Ottoman state was reluctant to pursue such a transformation due to social and geopolitical reasons, which are beyond the scope of this paper (see Duzgun 2022).

One exception to the persistence of non-capitalist property relations on large estates seems to be the region of Çukurova. As elsewhere, in Çukurova, commercialization and the formation of large landholdings did not necessarily result from or result in dispossession of peasant producers and was largely based on sharecropping arrangements. Unlike other commercial regions, however, sharecropping seems to be accompanied by successful mobilization of labor power. From the 1890s, the Ottoman government accomplished a relative constancy and regularity in seasonal labor supply in Çukurova thanks to the forced settlement of nomadic tribes with no agricultural skills. This, in turn, must have encouraged sharecropping landlords (who were mainly non-Muslims with limited eligibility to acquire state office) to introduce labor-saving techniques and machinery into the labor process (Toksöz 2010: 144, 173), thereby enabling them to break away from the productivity-hindering nature of sharecropping arrangements. Given the increasing mobility of labor power and if everything had remained the same, sharecropping in the Çukurova region, therefore, could have been seen as a “transitional” form—that is, a form that permitted “a more or less direct transition to formally capitalist class relations... under the pressures of competition on the market” (Brenner 1977: 52ff.). That said, the balance of social forces shifted with the turn of the century. The new era of class and geopolitical struggles, along with the expulsion of the non-Muslim landlord class after 1909, allowed the old sharecropping relations to reassert themselves in the region until the 1950s (Keyder 1987: 138).

Read together, neither the sharecropping peasant nor the sharecropping landlord, despite their extensive involvement in the marketplace, had the ability to initiate a capitalist growth dynamic in the Ottoman countryside. As a result, the engrossment of commercial landholdings, which occurred partly as a response to rising world market prices (especially of cotton), and often to the detriment of small peasant holdings, did not lead to a qualitative transformation from subsistence to market-dependent agriculture. Landlords responded to market competition by increasing exploitation on the old basis; consequently, productive forces remained primitive, domestic investment scarce, and productivity rates unchanged (Quataert 1994: 853).

In short, peasant production and sharecropping relations in the late Ottoman Empire remained inherently inimical to the development of capitalist social relations, representing non-capitalist forms of social labor. Peasants and sharecropping landlords were not becoming market-dependent. Their incomes were not dependent on their ability to “improve” production according to the market imperatives and to maintain and expand their lands at the expense of less competitive households. In this regard, Çaglar Keyder’s argument that in the Ottoman Empire “an autonomously functioning economy where the law of value reigned had begun to grow in importance ever since external trade (and merchant capital) became significant” is mistaken (Keyder 1981: 128). Instead, it would be better to conclude that no “petty commodity production” developed, and in fact, as Charles Post (2013: 88) hints at in a different context, the so-called merchant capital was not capital at all.

Moreover, in urban centers, the state “compromised endlessly on the issue of guilds’s position in the Ottoman economy” (Quataert 1992: 215–16). Although general price ceilings were lifted (except on important subsistence goods such as bread and meat), which was an important step toward undermining artisan solidarity, the state, afraid of social unrest, continued to recognize the monopolistic privileges of many artisan guilds throughout the nineteenth century (Ortaylı 1978: 125; 1998: 208–9). Given the persistence of peasants’ and artisans’ customary rights, it is scarcely surprising that Ottoman factories, few in number and despite considerable efforts to fund and sustain them, faced chronic labor shortages and extremely high turnover rates, which eventually frustrated the appetite for investment in manufacturing (Clark 2012: 769). Only a handful factories in the Ottoman Balkans, with relatively better access to sources of labor power, seem to have persisted during this period, but the question if this labor was more-or-less permanent and to what extent the workers were subjected to capitalist imperatives at these factories remains unanswered given the lack of reliable data (Lapavitsas and Cakiroglu 2019: 227–232).

Early Republican Turkey: peasantization and industrialization

How much of this picture changed during the early Republican period (1923–1950)? Approaching the 1920s, land ownership was so concentrated in the Anatolian countryside that, according to one estimate, 87 percent of the rural population occupied only 35 percent of the cultivable land, and 8 percent were totally landless (Ahmad 2002: 43). Regardless of regional differences, the overwhelming majority of the land-hungry population was heavily indebted to the landlord class, thus subject to relations of usury and involved in sharecropping to be able to meet their subsistence needs (Silier 1981: 15). “Middle farmers,” who were able to produce for their subsistence as well as for the market, were a “very thin” strata of the rural population (ibid: 14). Peasant indebtedness and (near) landlessness was the major source of labor supply for sharecropping land owners, who remained as “absentee” landlords, i.e., landowners disinterested in production and investing in land (Silier 1981: 15–16; Tezel 1986: 338–9).

By enhancing the status of private property, the first Republican constitution (in 1924) facilitated the legal consolidation of large estates. Landlords obtained full legal title over their lands. Also, through the 1920s, the state reduced agricultural taxes, distributed some state-owned lands to the landless, and injected substantial loans into the agricultural sector with the hope that the small landholdings would increase production for the market and reduce their extreme dependence on the big landlords and usurers (Hershlag 1968: 49). Yet, neither the constitution nor the new civil code (in 1926) took any measures to prevent the morcellization of land. Ottoman laws prescribing partible inheritance remained in full force and effect (Tezel 1986: 340–341). More importantly, “the greatest difficulties were encountered in applying the rules relating to land”; consequently, arable land continued to be created and transferred without official registration (Versan 1984: 250). This means that there was no political attempt to establish landlord/merchant monopoly over land. Marginal lands of little or no cost continued to be readily available (Keyder 1981: 24).

From 1923 to 1929, Turkish agriculture experienced exponential growth under conditions of an open economy (Keyder 1981: 37). The state agricultural bank injected substantial loans into the agricultural sector with the hope that the small landholdings, based on collateral guarantees, would obtain access to official credit channels, thereby enabling them to increase production for the market and mitigating their extreme dependence on the big landlords and usurers (Hershlag 1968: 49). Furthermore, from 1923 to 1934, the state distributed about 5 percent of the gross cultivatable area to immigrants and landless peasants, which somewhat increased the portion of lands under the control of small holdings (Hershlag 1975: 172). Under these circumstances, it seems safe to assume that at least some parts of the peasantry, unburdened by tax-farming and to some extent supported by the state, responded to favorable world market prices by increasing their level of production and surplus taken to the market. Yet, it is mistaken to interpret the peasants’ increased production for the market as necessarily leading to a persistent and “qualitative” transformation of their relation to land and production. For one thing, the more favorable socioeconomic conditions of the 1920s rapidly deteriorated during the Great Depression. Most Anatolian peasants gave up commodity production all together, reverted to subsistence farming, fell into further debt and increasingly became sharecroppers (Akçetin 2000: 93–8). Furthermore, the state’s attempts at breaking the relations of usury bore no fruit in the countryside: land distribution was too limited to generate a qualitative impact on the peasantry as a whole (Tezel 1986: 345), and the plots distributed to a limited number of cultivators were “far less than was required to maintain a family” (Hershlag 1975: 172). Likewise, most of the state-provided credit was used up by landholders with large holdings (Silier 1981: 44–45). Even when the peasantry obtained some access to these funds, they mainly used them “to pay off their debts, instead of investing the money in equipment, fertilizer and irrigation” (Hershlag 1968: 113). In these conditions, it would be very hard to assume that peasants increasingly gave up subsistence agriculture, devoted the majority of their labor time to commodity production, and reorganized their labor process according to the dictates of market competition.

Clearly, as Keyder assumes, there must be a segment of the peasantry able to produce commodities relatively independently of the relations of debt and usury. Yet, a closer look at this so-called middle peasantry, which was engaged especially in wheat, tobacco, and hazelnut production, shows that it was barely able to accumulate any surpluses (Tezel 1986: 436). This was the case because foreign and domestic merchants, organized in monopolies and trade associations, were able to collectively dictate prices to the peasantry that were much lower than the world average (Silier 1981: 30–31; Tezel 1986: 358–359). All in all, throughout the 1920s the continuing relations of usury and monopoly, combined with the relative availability and divisibility of land, eventually led to a pattern of agricultural development that was not conducive to the consolidation of petty commodity production. Partly driven by increases in population and partly thanks to the improvements in security and transportation, peasants extended and divided the area under cultivation, yet remained unable or unwilling to develop a capitalist logic of social reproduction. In other words, increases in commodity production were generated not by an intensive growth underlined by a qualitative transformation of the peasants’ labor process and increasing dependence on the market, but by an extensive growth based on the expansion of the peasants’ traditional survival strategies alongside their limited and occasional engagement with the market (Tezel 1986: 340–341, 434–435; Hershlag 1968: 112). Furthermore, given that there was no alternative source of labor supply and that the land was expandable and divisible by the peasantry, sharecropping landlords did not develop any systematic interest in supervising and improving the labor process on large estates. On average, 90–95 percent of the land within big estates was left uncultivated (Silier 1981: 16). Relatedly, sharecropping arrangements on big estates were governed by the same logic of reproduction that prevailed on small peasant holdings (Tekeli and Ilkin 1988: 40, 89).

If the Republic of the 1920s was not able to initiate a capitalist growth dynamic in the countryside, it was even less able to do so in the towns. For the inability/unwillingness of the state to transform agrarian property relations, together with the wartime exhaustion and exodus of local populations, rendered precarious the already feeble supply of industrial workers. Most industrial production could be carried out only through temporary and seasonal peasant workers, who came to industrial sites for a month or two at the end of the harvest season in order to supplement their household income (Makal 2007: 121). That is, given the lack of a skilled and permanent workforce, industrialists had little incentive to invest in labor-saving technology, organize and manage the production process “efficiently,” or to increase extremely low wages, which could otherwise have helped to stabilize the supply of labor power (Hershlag 1968: 119). From the 1920s, therefore, “efforts at reviving industrial production were largely hampered by difficulties securing workers and labor scarcity discouraged investments in new industrial enterprises” (Arnold 2012: 371).

However, despite all these organizational and productive inefficiencies, easy profits could still be made by the nascent bourgeoisie. During the 1920s, besides continuing to seize properties that belonged to emigrating/deported minorities, the bourgeoisie, domestic and foreign, received extensive support from the new state eager to create a domestic market and promote industrialization. How successful was the state at compelling and encouraging private actors to invest in and improve productive forces? Despite government support, private actors invested mainly in industries in which there was virtually no or little competition from imports despite low tariffs (Boratav 1981:168–169; Hale 1984:157). Furthermore, political measures aimed at strategically utilizing subsidies largely failed as local manufacturers circumvented regulations: “companies of paper acquired subsidized goods and sold them to other companies at a profit and then never began production” (Arnold 2006: 87). With easy access to political rents and no compulsion to compete, manufacturers’ social reproduction hardly depended on successful commodity production and extending/deepening their hold over scarce reserves of labor power (Tezel 1986: 112). “The rent of protection (…) appropriated by the local industrial bourgeoisie (…) constitute(d) the basic source of accumulation” (Boratav 1981:176). The industrial bourgeoisie reacted in 1931 to policies that aimed to condition the protection of the internal market to the bourgeoisie’s ability to sell in the international market (Kuruç 1987: 88–89), forcing the resignation of the then economics minister and the overhaul of economic policy in conformity with bourgeois interests (Tekeli and İlkin 2004: 217–218).

In short, during the 1920s, the state was neither able to generalize “petty commodity production,” nor to initiate a sociolegal transformation that would release labor for permanent absorption in industrial activity. Relatedly and ironically, the state’s ability to induce the reorganization of industrial activity according to market imperatives was by and large undermined by the growth of a non-capitalist industrial bourgeoisie whose relation to production was handicapped by chronic shortages of labor and the contraction of international markets. Because the “nascent” bourgeoisie did not invest and comply with developmental regulations, and due to the emergence of new external challenges and opportunities, the state was to directly engage in production from 1932 onwards.

By the end of the decade, the state emerged as an important, if not the leading, investor and producer in iron, steel, cement, utilities, and mining. It nationalized all the previously built railroads, established state banks and investment agencies, and took back most of the state monopolies which had been run by private actors since the 1920s. All this, however, hardly means that “the private sector was hurt by the expansion of the state sector” (Owen and Pamuk 1999: 19). Although some distributional tensions inevitably existed between the two sides, protection of and incentives for private investment became even more generous than in the previous period (ibid.). Much more importantly, the state simultaneously gave in to business demands for internal monopolies and external protection (Tekeli and İlkin 2004: 219–220). Ever since the 1920s, industrialists attempted to “organize in cartels in order to prevent overproduction or in order to safeguard the high profit rates they enjoyed” (Keyder 1987: 103). What changed with etatism is that the state, previously unable to prevent business circumvention of productivist policies, began to deliberately encourage monopoly business practices. Etatism “responded positively to (business) demands and permitted the formation of sector-based associations which openly sought to fix prices and avoid competition” (ibid.). The state therefore encouraged monopolization of large industrial enterprises. Yet at the same time, almost contradictorily, the state imposed additional taxes on mechanization as well, thereby limiting competition and preventing the dissolution of primitive manufacturing enterprises (Aydemir 1979: 454; Tekeli and Ilkin 1987: 5). The overall expectation from this seemingly contradictory bundle of economic policies was that rapid industrialization could be achieved without the social costs associated with capitalist industrialization. This was also expected to promote growth and stabilization in the countryside by creating an internal market for raw materials and food, for which demand and prices had fallen since the international crisis.

One may argue that reducing competition and granting privileges to the industrial sector in Etatist Turkey was hardly an extraordinary measure, a common practice across the capitalist world. What is striking, however, is that as the Turkish state froze competition and secured profits for industrialists, it did nothing to “intensify” industrialists’ control over the labor process by trying to increase the permanent labor supply. Despite the enactment of highly authoritarian labor regulations and penal laws, the state took virtually no measures to close the land frontier and overturn laws of partible inheritance. Peasants could still clear the land at little or no cost and indeed “the government aided this trend by actually distributing the land in small plots” (Birtek and Keyder 1975: 454). Furthermore, pace Keyder, instead of promoting the rise of a middle stratum of petty commodity producers, which would have increased productivity and gradually released labor from agriculture, state support of agriculture seems to have aimed at the consolidation of the “peasantry.” For one thing, price support programs addressing especially wheat-producing peasants, which Keyder sees as the pioneer of the so-called petty commodity producers, in fact remained “limited, not exceeding 3 per cent of the wheat crop in any given year” (Owen and Pamuk 1999: 22). In other words, “the adverse terms of trade for wheat in the early 1930s were kept more or less constant until the war” (Boratav 1981: 184). In contrast to wheat, tobacco was indeed a major crop, for which the state, through its tobacco monopoly, provided relatively generous price support programs and credit (ibid.: 185). Yet, the state monopoly on tobacco did not attempt to replace powerful commercial agents that were able to dictate much lower prices on the peasantry. Big private actors, buying cheap from the peasantry and selling dear to the state, therefore became the primary beneficiary of the state’s encouragement of tobacco production (Silier 1981: 86–88). Unsurprisingly, there was no productivity growth even in major commercial crops produced by the peasantry, such as wheat and tobacco (Tekeli and Ilkin 1988: 56–64; Koç 1988: 86). Also, beneath the surface of agricultural growth, sharecropping remained rampant. The sharecropping landlord, producing mainly cotton and beet, made huge profits thanks to state credit and price support programs (Silier 1981: 88), which were in turn spent on luxury consumption, rather than invested in production (Tezel 1986: 439). Relatedly, with peasant surpluses largely accrued to commercial agents and sharecropping landlords, “villagers did not become significant consumers of urban manufacturers” and “the national market (outside the urban areas) … [remained] both narrow and thin” (Keyder 1994: 152).

In short, the development of capitalism in the Turkish countryside seemed neither feasible nor desirable. The flipside of this is that the overall occupational structure in Turkey remained roughly the same till the end of the 1940s. About 80 percent of the economically active population continued to be employed in agriculture which indicates the persistence of chronic labor shortages in industrial towns (Hershlag 1968: 119). Monopolization and protection of business on the one hand and the unavailability of a permanent work force on the other ultimately created an industrial structure in which “several enterprises continued to exist only thanks to government support and an artificial price structure” (Hershlag 1975: 190). Despite the enactment of highly authoritarian labor regulations and penal laws, industrialists were either unable or unwilling to intensify their control over the labor supply and the labor process. As a consequence, in industries approved for state support, “investments incurred created additional jobs, but no real progress was made in the level of productivity”: “the relative increase of output and labor was almost equal” (Hershlag 1968: 106). Productivity being stagnant, there was no ground to offer higher wages to workers. Even in state factories, where better wages could be offered, wages were not high enough to retain workers. “Extremely high” turnover rates consequently prevailed in both state and private factories: workers often quit their jobs simply because they could easily return if they chose. This rendered ineffective employers’ control over labor which could otherwise have been exercised through recruitment practices. Relatedly, in a context where workers could easily exit and re-enter the labor market, the deskilling of labor and the scientific management of the labor process could backfire. Despite the preparation of several reports on how to increase productivity, there was, therefore, no compulsion or willingness to supervise the labor process (Özden 2022:234). “Workers were not fired even after they were fined for absenteeism at various times,” and in many industrial plants, there was no well-defined wage policy in place, no clear and accessible system of remuneration that would reward more productive workers, and, in some factories, not even proper bookkeeping (Akgöz 2012: 93–111). Under such conditions, neither “absolute” nor “relative” surplus value could be realized, and no industrialist could evolve into a “capitalist.”Footnote 5

Conclusion: re-periodizing the origins of capitalism in Turkey

In this article, I have considered the implications of Political Marxism for a re-reading of the first hundred years of modern transformation in Turkey. I have taken issue with the common view that the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey transitioned to capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have argued that despite commercialization of agriculture, introduction of private property, and the accumulation of mercantile and industrial wealth, no capitalism, peripheral or otherwise, developed in Turkey until the 1950s. Neither land nor factory was organized on the basis of market imperatives. Despite important changes in the form of state and economy, the broader social and institutional architecture governing social reproduction remained inimical to the development capitalist property relations. For capitalism to develop, the dominant relations and institutions of private property would have to undergo a radical transformation.

The 1950s witnessed the beginning of structural transformation in the Turkish countryside with peasants slowly turning into petty commodity producers, i.e., farmers whose relation to the means of subsistence was increasingly determined by their capability to maintain landholdings with recourse to commodity production. Three factors were important in enabling this structural transformation. First, after more than a hundred years of modernization, Turkish elites finally found the (geo)political breathing space in which capitalist property relations could be established without the imminent threat of foreign intervention and domestic rebellion. While the growing US recognition of Turkey’s geopolitical importance in the newly emerging bipolar world assured Turkey against foreign military pressure (especially that of Soviets), it also allowed considerable leeway for the state to initiate structural transformation in agriculture without being much concerned about the masses that would be dislocated as a result of this transformation.

Second, if the emergence of a bipolar world order laid the (geo)political foundations for capitalist development in Turkey, foreign economic assistance and favorable state policies indirectly galvanized the process of transition during the 1950s by undermining sharecropping relations and encouraging petty commodity production as the new norm in agriculture. Throughout the 1950s, the peasantry was freed from most wartime taxes and gained access to state-provided cheap and long-term agricultural credits (which were made possible by the Marshall aid in the first place). Favorable credit conditions gave peasants the opportunity to buy/rent agricultural machinery and draft animals without incurring too much debt. In this respect, the intensification of credit relations between the state and the peasantry not only increased peasant production and relative living standards but also protected them against relations of debt and usury. Combined with the state provision of floor prices, distribution of state-owned land, and infrastructural investment, most landless peasants ultimately broke the cycle of debt-sharecropping: the number of owner-occupied farms increased by 30 percent between 1952 and 1963, while landlessness declined from 16 to 10 percent of the rural population between 1950 and 1960 (Keyder 1987: 131). As small holdings reached an economically feasible size and peasants were provided credit and price support, they became consumers as well as suppliers of the domestic market for the first time in Republican history (Keyder 1988: 164). This increasing market orientation was further supported by US food aid, which contributed to the peasants gradually losing their ability to revert to subsistence production and their increasing specialization in cash crop production.

Third, during the early 1950s mechanization, good world market conditions, government price/credit support, and population increase enabled the rapid opening up of previously uncultivated lands (including meadows and pastures). The area under cultivation increased by 67 percent over the decade, reaching nearly the same amount of land that is cultivated today (Ahmad 1977: 135; Yıldırmaz 2009: 100). However, the extensive limits of profitable cultivation began to be tested from 1956 onwards (Hansen 1991: 260, 341–4). Producers expanded agricultural frontier as much as possible while yields remained almost stagnant (Owen and Pamuk 1999: 107–8). The result was repeated foreign exchange crises in the latter half of the 1950s which foreshadowed the increasing inability to import tractors and the end of the expansion of the agricultural frontier (Hansen 1991: 344, 439). This decade-long expansion and eventual closure of cultivable land, combined with the state’s implementation of a stricter land registration system (Zurcher 2004: 227), had an important implication on the structure of agrarian relations, which made the 1950s a prelude to the intensive capitalist development that was to take place in the following decades. That is, “with the frontier reached in the 1950s, agricultural growth became almost exclusively dependent on increased yields (real GDP per hectare) through intensification of cultivation” (Hansen 1991:357), which eventually made the peasantry increasingly market-dependent for their production and consumption. From this angle, it is no wonder that during the 1960s and 1970s agricultural productivity and yields increased, in line with increases in the use of industrial tools and products in agriculture (Hale 1981: 178). Combined with low agricultural taxes and provision of floor prices to agricultural producers, rural settlements rose as important centers of consumption for domestic industries such as agricultural machinery, textiles, processed food, consumer durables, and cars (Aydın 2005: 154–5).

Furthermore, given the peasantry’s increasing inability to meet the new standards of subsistence without recourse to the market, it is not surprising that the 1950s witnessed the first permanent mass migrations from the countryside to the towns. Chronic labor shortages, which haunted the earlier attempts at industrialization, thus began to be overcome with the continuous flow of a permanent labor force. Relatedly, the scientific management of the labor process began to take root in factories, which involved the introduction of piece-rate pay systems, new measures to avoid loss of time, and new methods to minimize workers’ ability to negotiate the pace and sequence of the labor process (Özden 2011: chapter 4). Lastly, the emergence of a stronger labor (and consumer) market significantly contributed to the smooth transformation of sharecropping landlords into capitalist entrepreneurs. With the structural makeover of labor markets and alluring prospects for productive activity (both in agriculture and manufacturing), the sharecropping landlords began to find it feasible and profitable to reorganize the labor process by driving off sharecroppers and improving their holdings (Keyder 1987: 138; Zurcher 2004: 227–8). From then on, capitalism did not instantly abolish existing social relations or homogenize them as it expanded. Instead, it gradually imposed its logic on the social reproduction of both the producing and appropriating classes. This marked the beginning of the protracted development of capitalism in Turkey (cf. Aydın 1987).

The overall point of this article is that the origins of capitalism in Turkey must be sought not in the nineteenth century but in the 1950s. But why does all this matter? For one thing, a non-presentist reading of the origins of capitalism has the potential to release the first hundred years of Turkish modernization from the cage of capitalism. It enables a radical departure from one-dimensional narratives of the transition to modernity, offering a new starting point to rethink what Ottoman/Turkish modernization was actually about, beyond its assumed connection to capitalism (e.g. Duzgun 2022). Furthermore, the pre-existent social relations, institutions, and values rooted in the Ottoman and early Republican experience with modernity would greatly complicate the development of capitalist social relations in Turkey. For example, after the 1950s, the property relations that characterized the original Kemalist project would be often invoked by different classes to limit and contest as well as to produce capitalism. Therefore, asserting the non-capitalist legacy of the first hundred years leads to a new historical narrative of the subsequent development and consolidation of capitalism in Turkey (ibid.). Finally, and more broadly, by countering presentism, the paper serves as a reminder that capitalism in Turkey (and elsewhere) was not a natural culmination of history: capitalism was not rooted in age-old practices of exchange, nor was it simply more of the same thing. This must be the first logical step toward de-naturalizing and ultimately transcending capitalism.