Dissertation | Tobacco workers in the late Ottoman Empire

Mavi Boncuk |

Photo: Ottoman Tobacco Monopoly “Π”, Xanthi, October2005 

Tobacco workers in the late Ottoman Empire: Fragmentation, conflict, and collective struggle 


Dissertation 


Author: Can Nacar 


Abstract: This dissertation is a study of tobacco workers in the Ottoman Empire between the early 1870s and the outbreak of the First World War. The study first demonstrates that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, demand for tobacco grown in the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia rapidly increased both in domestic and export markets. As an outcome of this development, thousands of Ottoman and foreign workers coming from different social backgrounds began to earn their livelihoods in tobacco factories and warehouses located in the Empire's various Anatolian and Balkan provinces. Secondly, it examines social relations on the shop-floor level. By providing snapshots from different work departments in tobacco factories and warehouses, it draws attention to power relations not only between workers and their employers but also among the workers themselves. Following this framework, the study argues that tobacco workers' ethnic, religious and gender identities found their material expression in the asymmetric power relations on the shop floor level. This dissertation also reveals that workplace rules and hierarchies were often subject to negotiation and challenge. It pays special attention to a specific form of negotiation among workers and their employers, strikes. In the period between 1891 and 1912, workers in the imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, and the towns of Kavala, Iskeçe and Samsun organized strikes to challenge their employers' wage and recruitment policies, and to seek a greater voice in issues concerning the organization of the shop floor. This study argues that complex negotiation processes involving workers, their employers, and Ottoman government officials determined the evolution and outcome of the strikes. While exploring these negotiation processes, it highlights fragmentations and solidarities among workers in a given town and workplace. In so doing, it challenges the dominant approach in Ottoman labor historiography conceiving of striking workers as a homogeneous group. Finally, contrary to the studies emphasizing Ottoman workers' lack of class consciousness and their ignorance regarding political issues, this dissertation shows that tobacco workers in the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia played important roles in local politics especially after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908.