From imperial frontier to national heartland Environmental history of Turkey's nation-building in its European province of Thrace, 1920-1940

• Published in: Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey pp. 52 - 70
• Main Author: Acara, Eda
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2020
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Factory Settlement; Ideal Villages; Regional NGO; Turkish Film Industry; Turkish Nation; Public Inspectorship; Soil Survey; Tame Nature; Turkish Race; Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; Electric Power Resources Survey; Turkish Migration; Central Government; Execution Decision; Early Republican Era; Soil Science; Young Men; Ottoman Past; Military Junta; Settlement Law; Turkey's Energy Strategy; Traditional Shadow Play; Edirne Province
• ISBN: 1138367699; 9781138367692
• DOI: 10.4324/9780429429699-4

This chapter explores the meanings and representations of places in which nature and nation became politicized and entrenched in the fabric of the state's governing discourses in its nation-building processes during Turkey's early Republican era. It discusses the idea of nature to historicize how nature and modernity were constructed within the context of Turkish nationalism. The chapter looks at, for example, how factories were seen as a way to "tame nature" and how they were intended to generate urban development as a symbol of Turkish modernity. It presents state-space relations by closely examining state practices of territorializing Turkey's Thrace border region into part of a "modern", "urban", "Turkish" nation-state during the early Republican era. The chapter focuses on the discourses around nature in terms of the governance and regulation of Muslim-Balkan immigration from the Balkans to Thrace from the early Republican era to the 1950s in order to territorialize the new Turkish nation by the region's agricultural and immigration policies.