Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
Like in other parts of Europe and, indeed, the United States, early initiatives in the Ottoman Empire for higher education in business date back to the second half of the 19th century. After a number of aborted attempts, the opening of a commercial school in İstanbul (Hamidiye Ticaret Mektebi) in 1883 under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade marked the beginning of business education in the Empire, purportedly, at the “higher” level. The Commercial School was closed down in 1890 and re-opened in 1894, attached this time to the Ministry of Education. It went through a restructuring in 1915 that led to a demarcation between an upper and a junior division. The School served as the sole provider of business education till it was inherited by the Turkish Republic and remained so for more than another decade. From the second opening until the founding of the Republic, it had an average of around 12 graduates per year, which increased to about 24 in the period up to the mid-1930s.
As some readers would suspect, the first part of the title was inspired by Sergio Leone's 1966 film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. It is not my intention, of course, to suggest a match between the order in which I list the foreign influences on Turkish business education (which is chronological) and the sequence in the title of the film. Nevertheless, as the article will show, proponents of different models in Turkey have quite often tended to see the others in the not so positive terms in Leone's title.