“This chapter analyses the socio-economic and political structures and transformations of the Kurdish people from the Ottoman era through to the modern Turkish Republic, arguing that there is a symbiotic relationship between the Kurdish question and the de-development of the predominantly Kurdish domains. Adopting a longue-durée framework it combines key theoretical insights of the fields of critical political economy, development studies, international relations and comparative politics to develop an original account of the Kurds, ESA and Turkey’s Kurdish question. It delineates and examines the socio-economic and political developments, structures and transformations in ESA from 1514 to 2014. These transformations are then critically compared with those of other domains within the context of the larger geopolitical area of which these territories have been a part over the course of these five centuries. Resultantly, the chapter devises a novel periodization for the socio-economic history of ESA based on three distinct periods: development, underdevelopment and de-development, and posits that the relationship between these domains and the Turkish state is characterized by a unique socio-economic process: de-development.”