Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire: Tobacco Workers, Managers, and the State, 1872–1912, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xv + 202 pages

• Published in: New Perspectives on Turkey Vol. 63; pp. 236 - 239
• Main Author: Sefer, Akın
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Istanbul Cambridge University Press 01.11.2020
• Subjects: Bureaucracy; Diaries; Elites; Employers; Factories; Labor history; Monopolies; Neighborhoods; Photography; Religion; Ruling class; Specialists; Tobacco; Tobacco industry; Warehouses; Weaving; Workers; Working class; Workplaces; Ottoman Empire
• ISSN: 0896-6346; 1305-3299
• DOI: 10.1017/npt.2020.22

The book analyzes the experiences of tobacco workers employed in warehouses and factories across different parts of the empire, from Samsun and İstanbul to Salonica, Kavala, and İskeçe, and explores their relations with managers and the bureaucratic elites throughout the four decades that started with the establishment of a monopoly in the tobacco industry and ended with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912. [...]he mostly ignores the possible impacts of their relations with and connections to workers outside of their workplaces or the tobacco sector. [...]if we look beyond the tobacco industry, we can see important similarities and potential connections between tobacco workers’ experiences and the experiences of workers in other industries.1 Shared hometowns and neighborhoods, which Nacar well demonstrates as a significant component of solidarity among tobacco workers, may have been equally critical for connecting workers across different industries. A particular achievement of the author is his ability to mobilize a wide range of archival sources, from official records to newspapers, diaries, and photographs, weaving them in a skillful and eloquent way in the absence of institutional records on workplaces (a common problem for non-state factories and small workplaces). [...]as it is well written in a style accessible to non-specialists, the book will hopefully reinvigorate public and scholarly interest in Ottoman workers and their experiences and is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of Ottoman labor history. 1 Such comparisons could stretch to post-Ottoman cases in labor history.