Shifting labor relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey 1500–2000: An Introduction

Abstract

This special section can be seen as part of a tradition of special issues of International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) and the International Review of Social History (IRSH) that comment on the state of the field of Ottoman labor historiography, describe its achievements and caveats, and set the agenda for future research. The late Donald Quataert, pioneer of Ottoman labor history, started this tradition in 2001, when he edited this journal's special issue Labor History in the Ottoman Middle East, 1700–1922. Touraj Atabaki and Gavin D. Brockett followed in 2009 with their special issue of the IRSH Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History. With the current special section we aim to add to this tradition. In the first section of our introduction, we will provide a brief overview of the main conclusions of the first two special issues, and shed some light on what happened after 2009. In the second section, we will discuss what we hope to add: an approach based on the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations that can help us to reconstruct the development of labor relations in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. We describe this approach and results of the project worldwide so far. The third section starts with a brief overview of the Ottoman/Turkish Republic branch of the Collaboratory that focuses mainly on Anatolia and its views on sources and methodologies. It will describe the article by Karin Hofmeester and Jan Lucassen in this special section as result of these activities and the articles by Hülya Canbakal and Alpay Filiztekin and İrfan Kovidas and Yahya Araz as results of other projects that link up perfectly with the Collaboratory approach. Special attention will be devoted to the town of Bursa and its hinterland from the sixteenth until the twentieth century, putting the developments in this city in the broader perspective of Ottoman-Anatolian and Turkish labor history.