This article analyzes the practice of suretyship (kefalet), surveillance and taxation in early nineteenth-century İstanbul. It deals with how the practice of suretyship functioned to achieve social control; it provided shelter for some but at the same time marginalized others with little or no social status. This article also analyzes the extent to which the state maintained order through suretyship. In this way, it intends to capture where and how state and society interacted through social and state control mechanisms. To this end, this article takes into consideration two particular events, the Greek uprising of 1821 and the abolition of the Janissary Corps in 1826, and demonstrates a growing tendency towards impersonal relations in terms of governmental practices of surveillance. Briefly, it illustrates how suretyship changed over time and how a gradual transition took place from personal to impersonal relations as well as within governmental practices. Furthermore, this article provides examples of similar practices by focusing on an institutional development that involved the government systematically accumulating knowledge about the population. Finally, it explores taxation practices by the government in order to. show how the pre-modern (contractual) and the modern (statutory) state were not substitutes for each other, but rather shaped each other.

This article examines an important attempt at the political engineering undertaken in Syria during the Great War. It focuses on the experience of the Arabs exiled to Anatolia by Cemal Pasha to redesign Syrian society in line with the Committee of Union and Progress’ idea of empire, which imagined an authoritarian regime. The members of the Arabist parties were removed from Syria to eliminate their contemporaneous and future resistance to the emerging despotic regime. The article sets out to analyze what the exiles experienced in Anatolia using their memoirs in Arabic and the Ottoman documents describing their conditions in Anatolia, and to what extent the aims could be realized. It argues that the purpose was to put a politics of “normalization” into practice by depoliticizing the Arab notable families through “relocation” to Anatolia, although the resistance of the exiles and varying attitudes in Ottoman bureaucracy significantly differentiated outcomes. It also uncovers many untold stories with regard to the daily life of the exiles and adds much to our knowledge on the experience of Arab exiles in Anatolia. It is the first serious examination of the experiences of the Arab exiles using their own texts and narrative.

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 helped transform the time-honored Ottoman petitioning system. The reinstatement of parliamentary life, the reintroduction of the suspended constitution of 1876, and the lifting of the ban on the press and political action all generated profound political and social changes. Subjects’ petitions reflected these changes vividly and in often surprising detail. As the sultan became a figurehead with little actual power, petitions which hitherto had been addressed to the sultan either directly or through the grand vizier and had requested his benevolence and mercy, while also granting him much needed legitimacy, now began to be sent instead to the Council of State (Şura-yı Devlet), the parliament, and various government ministries. Their content changed as well, as will be shown in this article through an analysis of dozens of petitions from Ottoman Palestine. Petitions now sought to obtain political rights and ensure civil equity and constitutional rights. In focusing on rights, the rule of law, and the deficiencies of the former system, the petitions echoed changes in popular discourse and mirrored the transformation from justice as a sultanic prerogative to constitutional and civil law.

The Balta Limam Treaty of 1838, the Nanjing Treaty of 1842, and the events that led to them have epochal significance in the history of Britain's involvement in the Ottoman Empire and China. In addition to stipulating the principles according to which commercial relations were to take place between England and the Ottoman Empire and China, these treaties became the first in a series of international and domestic measures that marked a turn toward free trade and informal empire as distinct from the widespread use of formal methods of control that had characterized British policies in previous periods. As such, the treaties are also regarded as having a global significance. Furthermore, unlike previous unilateral grants by the Ottoman and Chinese governments that restricted the commerce and the residence of foreigners, the Balta Limam and Nanjing documents were drawn up as bilateral agreements that greatly expanded the foreigners’ ability to trade and reside in the Ottoman Empire and China.

Since the mid-1990s we have been witnessing the emergence of a “new Turkish cinema.” A number of young directors, among them Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviş Zaim, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Serdar Akar, and Nuri Bilge Ceyhan, made their first feature films during this period and have proved to be quite prolific since then. Acclaimed by critics in Turkey and abroad, recent Turkish films have received invitations from major international festivals and have won prestigious awards. The new Turkish cinema has also generated its own brand of audience. While Turkish films had largely disappeared from theaters for most of the 1980s due to severe economic adversities in the film industry, local viewers had, in any case, distanced themselves from Turkish cinema on the grounds of its presumed “banality,” the term “Turkish film” having become almost synonymous with “bad taste” for a decade prior to the arrival of the new Turkish cinema. Since the 1990s, however, Turkish films have once again begun to attract audiences to theaters, signaling that the long lost reputation of Turkish cinema may have been restored.

The “East Asian miracle”, involving the phenomenal growth experience of countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, has attracted enormous intellectual attention in recent years. What has been striking in the development experience of countries like South Korea and Taiwan is not only their ability to achieve extremely high rates of economic growth, an average of nine to percent per annum sustained over the course of three decades, but also their capacity to combine these high rates of economic growth with equally striking performances in relation to other major indicators of development. These, in turn, include a relatively egalitarian pattern of income distribution, eradication of absolute poverty on a broad scale, significant employment creation as well as the virtual absence of macroeconomic crises. The Turkish experience also constitutes an interesting case of late industrialization from a comparative perspective. It is clearly a case of moderate success judged by the East Asian standards of economic growth. Furthermore, Turkey has displayed patterns of income inequality and macroeconomic instability that are, in many ways, closer to “Latin American” standards. Yet, from a different perspective, when we exclude the East Asian superperformers from our sample, Turkey’s growth performance, an average of five to six percent per annum over time, compares favorably with other late industrializers. Indeed, what makes Turkey particularly interesting and somewhat unique from a comparative perspective is that these reasonably high rates of economic growth and the creation of a substantial industrial base over time have been accomplished within the framework of broadly democratic institutions during the post-war period.

Drawing on the insights of the growing critical literature on urban governance and housing policy, this article seeks to analyze the specific field of social reform in Turkey in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in which housing shortages for working class families were depicted as constituting a new social and moral question. Housing policy was born in the early 1950s, as links were established between external sanitary and moral conditions and the homes of the poor, and as rival parties competed to attract the votes of the growing laboring masses. However, neither the middle class reformers nor the political elite supported direct state intervention to provide social housing for low-income citizens. T h e chosen solution was encouraging home ownership through minimum public subsidies to workers' cooperatives. Yet, cooperatives continued to build largely middle class housing during the period, which was far too costly for workers, while unauthorized land appropriations and squatting became the primary mechanism through which the working poor could be incorporated into the urban fabric.

Since the rise of the ruling Justice and Development Party in the early 2000s, Turkey has invested in several mega transport and infrastructure projects for the purposes of economic transformation, growth, and development. This article explores the impact of a recently completed mega-project—the Osman Gazi Bridge—on material change and popular imagination about the future. It claims that, while the Bridge created a colossal material change that can be observed by everyone, it also animated an imagined post-industrial transition and inclusive development in the industrial town of Dilovası. Although the dream of a better future serves as a medium for the industrial town’s underprivileged inhabitants to connect and socialize, along with the current marginalizing conditions, it also has the potential to fuel future resistance, if imagination is unable to be transformed into reality.

The rapid industrial growth accompanied by even more rapid export growth of such Far East economies as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan has drawn due attention from students of economic development. Economists with a Neo-classical ideological stance, favoring a perfectly free market economy, tend to attribute the industrial growth of these LDCs to the phenomenal increase in their exports. They argue that export expansion will be conducive to growth and the problems that might arise on the way will be taken care of by market forces. They identify the export sector of the economy as the “leading sector” and label the growth strategy patterned after this model as “export-oriented growth.” Over the last decade this growth strategy has been effectively “recommended” to a large number of LDCs facing debt servicing difficulties.