Abstract
This chapter takes issue with the common view that the Ottoman Empire and Turkey transitioned to capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on Political Marxism, I argue that there was no transition to capitalism in Turkey until the 1950s, that is, the late Ottoman Empire (1839–1918) and early Turkish Republic (1923–1945) followed a non-capitalist (and non-socialist) path to modernity. Furthermore, while the process of capitalist development began in the 1950s, the newly emerging agrarian/industrial classes and institutions remained either unwilling or unable to expand and deepen capitalist social relations. However, in the period after the 1950s, another group of capitalists, excluded from state-based rents and organized in the Islamic “National View Movement” (NVM), began to rise in the political scene, advocating a purely capitalist development strategy. Contesting the conventional interpretations of NVM, I show that the movement, albeit unsuccessful electorally from the 1970s to the 1990s, provided the blueprint for a novel capitalist modernity, which would be taken up by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in the new millennium.
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Notes
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Erbakan, Külliyati Vol. 5, 53–55.
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Erbakan, Külliyati Vol. 2, 402.
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Necmettin Erbakan, Erbakan Külliyati Vol. 3 (Istanbul: MGV Yayinlari, 2013), 127.
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Erbakan, Külliyati Vol. 5, 70–71.
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Ibid., 52.
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Erbakan, Külliyati Vol. 1, 102.
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Ibid., 105.
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Erbakan, Külliyati Vol. 1, 104–106.
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Biddle and Milor, “Institutional,” 57.
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Ibid., 6.
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Duzgun, E. (2019). The Political Economy of the Transition to Capitalism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Towards a New Interpretation. In: Lafrance, X., Post, C. (eds) Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_11
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