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The Journal of Peasant Studies
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The Development of Turkish
Agriculture: Debates, Legacies
and Dynamics
Tim Jacoby
Published online: 20 Jun 2008.
To cite this article: Tim Jacoby (2008) The Development of Turkish Agriculture:
Debates, Legacies and Dynamics, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 35:2, 249-267, DOI:
10.1080/03066150802150985
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150802150985
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The Development of Turkish Agriculture:
Debates, Legacies and Dynamics
TIM JACOBY
This article introduces three further contributions looking at the
Ottoman state, cotton production in Anatolia and Egypt and rural
indebtedness in western Anatolia during the nineteenth century. It
points to shared concerns the commercialisation of production, the
role of the state in surplus appropriation and geo-political
inuences over agricultural policy that link each of the subsequent
articles. The latter provides a useful basis on which to consider
contemporary debates about agrarian development in Turkey.
I NTRODUCTI ON
With around one-third of its entire civilian workforce, half of its rural men
and almost 90 per cent of its rural women employed in an agricultural sector
still largely dominated by small family enterprises, Turkey remains the only
peasant stronghold . . . in or around the neighbourhood of Europe and the
Middle East [Hobsbawm, 1996: 338]. Although contributing a declining
overall share of the countrys GDP, the amount of land under cultivation has
remained relatively stable over the last two decades at *27 million hectares,
around 50 per cent of which is given over to the cultivation of cereals. Of
these, over half, or nearly 20 million tonnes, is wheat. Crop production as a
whole constitutes around 75 per cent of the sectors output, with yields
highest in the Mediterranean provinces, lowest in eastern Anatolia and
averaging out at around two metric tonnes per hectare. This places Turkey
amongst the worlds largest producers of gs, apricots, hazelnuts, lentils,
watermelons and cucumbers; although cotton, sugar beet and tobacco
constitute the major industrial crops. It is also a major producer of livestock
with, until very recently, a considerable share of the worlds production of
Tim Jacoby, The Institute for Development Policy and Management, The University of
Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9QH, UK.
E-mail: tim.jacoby@manchester.ac.uk. The author is very grateful to Robert Jacoby and Phil
Woodhouse for comments on earlier drafts of this article.
The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.35, No.2, April 2008, pp.249267
ISSN 0306-6150 print/1743-9361 online
DOI: 10.1080/03066150802150985 2008 Taylor & Francis
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goat meat, sheep meat and, particularly, sheep milk [C akmak et al., 2004: 15
16].
Consequently, agriculture remains an important area of the Turkish
economy. Despite tending to grow at a slower rate than other sectors (only
about 1 per cent per annum compared with an overall growth rate of about 4
per cent between 1980 and 2003), it still constitutes 10 or so per cent of the
countrys GDP (or US$40 billion). Of this, $4 billions worth, largely edible
fruit, is exported each year, amounting to around 14 per cent of the countrys
total annual exports. Although periodic sectoral trade decits have become
common as import restrictions are increasingly liberalised (leading to large
increases in high-value imports such as industrial crops, oilseeds and hides),
Turkey remains a net food exporter. To even out uctuations in agricultural
output, to introduce efciency savings in land-use and production and to
capitalise on Turkeys potential, a great number of reforms have been
introduced in recent years. These are expected to create protable
opportunities for the initiation of new projects for foreign as well as local
investors [Turkish-US Business Council, 2006: 10]. In particular, commer-
cial openings are expected to arise from closer ties with overseas markets
(especially those in Europe), from the marketisation of subsistence holdings,
from a greater emphasis on mono-cropping, from an expansion in Turkeys
internal market driven by changes in demography and consumption and from
further retrenchments in state inuence.
The following three articles aim to offer a historical context for these
developments by analysing three important aspects of Ottoman agricultural
production. Already on the decline during the nineteenth century, the
Ottoman Empire covered an area extending from the Balkans in the north to
Egypt in the south.
1
Writing midway through the nineteenth century, the
economist J.R. McCulloch [1846: 825] having described the Ottoman
agrarian structure in some detail observed in tones of Victorian rectitude
that the agrant abuses consequent on such a system have brought the
Turkish empire to its present state of weakness and degradation; and the
necessity of making some very decided changes in the administration has
long been obvious . . . . But unfortunately the age of miracles is past, and
unfortunately nothing short of a miracle would sufce for the regeneration of
the Turkish empire.
The rst contribution, by Jacoby, adopts a macro-historical approach, and
offers an account of the ways in which the Ottoman states governance of the
rural economy changed as the empire expanded and then began to contract.
As such, it serves to contextualise the second and third papers, by O

zgu r
Teoman and Muammer Kaymak and by G. Attila Aytekin, which both look at
aspects of Ottoman agrarian political economy during the nineteenth century:
namely, the commercialisation of cotton production in Turkey and Egypt,
250 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDI ES
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and the structure and causes of rural indebtedness. Although adopting quite
different perspectives, each contribution is connected through three common
concerns: the commercialisation of production, the role of the state, and the
inuence of the geo-political arena. In this introductory article, these themes
will be used both to contextualise the discussion below and to consider how
the Ottoman legacy may be important in comprehending subsequent events
and contemporary debates. These particularly concern current deliberations
over the persistence of petty commodity production within the agrarian sector
of modern Turkey, the politics linked to this, and the impact of international
forces on national policy.
COMMERCI ALI SATI ON
Taken as a whole, the articles which follow conrm that, for many centuries,
a tension has existed between the imperatives of centralised authority and the
tendency of local elites to consolidate large, autonomous landholdings.
Frequently, these frictions have been driven by the seemingly incongruous
objectives of securing the supply of provisions to urban centres (particularly
Istanbul) although maintaining an adequate supply of revenue to the imperial
sc. Once the Ottoman empire stopped expanding, these contradictions
obliged the state to permit greater levels of provincial authority to develop
which, by the nineteenth century, had, in some areas of the empire, begun to
commercialise agricultural production. Perhaps the most signicant result of
this at least in the west of the Ottoman empire was, as all three of the
following contributions point out, the emergence and partial marketisation of
large rural estates known as ciftliks.
2
The formation of such rural units is broadly in keeping with the classic
analysis of agricultural commodication (derived from Lenin, Kautsky, Mao
and others): that is to say, the continued development of capitalism will tend
to divide a previously undifferentiated peasantry into winners and losers,
ultimately leading to a class of large, capitalist farmers on the one hand, and
a class of landless agricultural wage-workers on the other [Richards, 1986:
4]. Accordingly, the commercialisation of agriculture will tend to
amalgamate arable land into larger holdings to which greater economies of
scale can then be applied. These estates also have the potential, as Teoman
and Kaymak suggest of Egypt later in this journal issue, to subordinate labour
under the power of the landowner, a process which may, as Marx observed,
become the master of the process of production and of the entire process of
social life, thereby helping to establish an exclusivity of land possession and
a more capitalised proprietary economy [cited in Mann, 1986: 410].
A key determinant in this process is uctuations in the supply and
character of labour. Famines and plagues, such as those that affected Europe
DEVELOPMENT OF TURKI SH AGRI CULTURE 251
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during the fourteenth century for instance, tend to make labour scarce and
agricultural plots more plentiful, thereby obliging landowners to pay workers
a higher wage or an increased share of the crop. This, in turn, introduces the
possibility that some peasants may accumulate capital as a result of
producing surpluses, and thus be able to pay others as substitute workers to
fulll labour-service obligations to the landowner in their place. An important
consequence of this kind of division of labour whereby some tenants cease
personally to carry out rental dues is that a previously undifferentiated mass
of petty commodity producers are, as Kautsky [1988], Lenin [1964] and Mao
[1954: 72ff., 9295] all argued, internally divided along class lines.
3
It is, however, unclear if, rstly, such a process is a necessary corollary of
commoditisation and, secondly, if consolidation of land succeeds in
increasing productivity. Such an outcome can be related easily neither to
an economys conguration of land distribution nor, as Teoman and Kaymak
explain, to the simple availability of labour inputs. The presence of a
prosperous stratum of farmers controlling extensive tracts of terrain may thus
be as much an inefcient legacy of a feudal mode of production (in which
landowning elites collect rents that are then allocated to the maintenance of
the property rather than to innovative reinvestment) as an indication of
mature capitalism. Indeed, it is clear from Teoman and Kaymaks research
that the slow emergence of ciftliks in Western Anatolia and the Balkans did
not lead to the type of commercialisation which resulted from the more
export-orientated reorganisation of land distribution carried out in Egypt by
Muhammad Ali during the nineteenth century.
Part of the reason for this, they propose, may have been a combination of
the former regions comparatively low ratio of labour to available land and
the latters alluvial, and thus more tightly delimited, farming structure.
Potentially cultivable empty land in Anatolia remained abundant and, as
C aglar Keyder notes, individuals could (without establishing property rights
per se) open up, appropriate and take possession of state land. In the
ongoing absence of technological inputs that might have increased output
irrespective of the workforce, this meant that labour intensities were (in
contrast to Egypt where nascent industrialisation and the premium attached to
irrigable plots tended to place greater production pressures upon the
peasantry) likely to be restrained, ensuring that the commercialisation of
the north-western empire operate[d] predominantly in favour of consolidat-
ing peasant rights [Keyder, 1993: 181].
Such concerns with the position of the small producer endured, and came
to constitute an important component in the construction of Turkishness
during the later years of the empire and the establishment of the republic
during the 1920s.
4
This was, perhaps, unsurprising given that the Balkan
Wars, the First World War and the subsequent war of independence had
252 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDI ES
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combined to halve the size of the Turkish peasantry and create widespread
food shortages.
5
To restore the agricultural sector (and building on the
nineteenth century rural commercialisation described Aytekin), the new
republic abolished the land tithe which, at the time, was supplying the state
with 63 per cent of its direct taxation revenue and 23 per cent of its overall
income. Shortly afterwards, a new civil code was introduced which made the
permanent acquisition of private land easier to achieve and, amidst a general
decline in the land to labour ratio, helped to consolidate the predominance of
peasant property. The result has been that, despite urbanisation levels
increasing from 24 per cent of the population in 1927 to over 60 per cent
today, major changes to the distribution of land have not, as Table 1
illustrates, tended to occur [Arcanl, 1986: 42].
One explanation for this is that migrant smallholders, including many of
the 3.2 million Turkish nationals estimated to be currently living in Europe,
tend to lease out their land to middle-sized farmers rather than sell-up to
large-estate landlords. In 1994, for instance, the poorest fth of agricultural
households was found to derive more (11.3 per cent) of its income from rents
than each of the other wealthier quintiles (7.7, 6, 4.5 and 3.1 per cent,
respectively). It also received only a slightly larger share of its income from
salaries and wages than the sectoral average (13.7 per cent compared to 10.1
per cent). Although great regional variations doubtlessly exist village
enclosures and sharecropping continue to be noteworthy factors of production
in the southeast of the country it is clear that, despite the fact that the great
majority of plots have generally been too small to produce an adequate
subsistence income, landlessness and wagelabour have not emerged as
generalised consequences of agrarian change [Brookes and Tanyeri, 1999].
6
The purpose of the contributions by Jacoby, by Teoman and Kaymak, and
by Aytekin, is thus to provide the agrarian context for a struggle with the state
over the establishment of property entitlements, the control of land and the
character of labour inputs which have, until recently at least, tended to favour
TABLE 1: THE DI STRI BUTION OF LAND IN TURKEY
Land size (ha)
Holdings (as percentage of total)
1952 1963 1970 1980 1991 2001
02 30.6 40.9 44.4 28 34.9 33.4
2.15 31.5 27.8 28.2 32.5 32.1 31.5
5.110 21.9 18.1 15.7 21 17.9 18.5
10.120 10.3 9.4 7.7 11.9 9.6 10.8
20.150 4.2 3.2 3.1 5.4 4.4 5.1
450 1.5 0.6 0.9 0.7 0.9 0.7
Source: Adapted from Eder [2003].
DEVELOPMENT OF TURKI SH AGRI CULTURE 253
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small cultivators over capitalist landlords. The themes to be discussed the
slow emergence of an intermediary class of provincial notables, the rise of
cash-cropping for export and nineteenth century patterns of rural indebted-
ness constitute a necessary backdrop to this social trajectory. More
specically, each contribution helps to explain how a broadly undiffer-
entiated Ottoman peasantry retained the capacity to engage in petty
commodity production during a period of rapid commercialisation in a way
that did not generate forms of industrialised agriculture.
Although the precise impact of these continuities (especially the
persistence of the peasant family farm) on the agrarian structure in particular
and rural conict in Turkey more generally remain much debated, the factors
which determine whether capitalist agriculture or petty commodity produc-
tion emerge out of the peasant background . . . [tend to be] those mediated by
and directly emanating from the state [Keyder, 1993: 176]. A crucial aspect
is the degree to which discourses about the desirability of modernity and
emancipation have been halted, not to say rolled back, as traditional forms of
religious ideology have become more prominent over recent decades
[Kasaba, 1997; Keyder, 1997]. The extent to which this development is
linked in turn to the ensemble of cultural survivals in the Turkish
countryside arising from the persistence of petty commodity production is a
moot point, but an important one.
7
THE STATE
Writers about agrarian transition generally concur that it is vital to address
the question of the role of state policy in shaping the processes of
agricultural development and peasant differentiation and the implications of
the problems created by those processes for state action [Richards, 1986:
2]. Indeed, as the preceding section made clear, it is impossible to consider
the commercialisation of Turkish agriculture without at least an implicit
account of state action. Here, the three articles to follow make an important
contribution. In focusing on the developmental role of the state more fully
from the macro-historical concerns of the rst paper to the subsequent two
pieces comparative analysis of the states role in cotton production and
rural indebtedness each offers useful insights into not only the upheavals
of the nineteenth century but also the trajectory of rural transformation in
Turkey more broadly.
Perhaps the most far-reaching debate in this regard relates to Ottoman
specicity particularly as a source of explanatory propositions regarding the
incompleteness of Turkeys transition to capitalist agriculture. For writers such
as Mann, feudalism is largely a result of Europes monastic-episcopal
economy of feudal manors modelled on the late Roman villa. This form of
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political organisation, structured by what Mann describes as an agglomeration
of largely autonomous households, is said to offer the ruler only an indirect
form of power, apart from those labourers directly tied to his land, over his
subjects [Mann, 1986: 381]. By contrast, Ottoman efdoms for much of the
empires history were not, as the contribution by Jacoby explains, hereditary,
nor could they be allocated to lesser feudatories by major ef-holders. Knights
(sipahis) did not exercise juridical or full property rights over labour and land,
respectively.
For others, such as Haldon [1989], what Wickham [1985] called the
uniqueness of the east was more about divergences in superstructure than a
discrete Asiatic mode of production resting upon a fundamentally different
method of surplus acquisition. Reviewing this debate, which has largely taken
place in the pages of this journal [e.g. Keyder, 1983; Margulies and Seddon,
1984; Hann, 1985], it is possible to observe that the focus of these writers has
been, as Berktay himself notes, less on the state and rather more on grassroots
processes/structures: peasant cultivation, tenure patterns, and forms of
surplus extraction.
8
Aiming to pursue similar objectives, Jacobys contribution to this issue
seeks to cast light upon constant centre-periphery tensions by deploying
Manns account of imperial power. It endeavours to develop a less static
account of Ottoman methods of extraction: one not based on the assumption
that a kind of equilibrium existed which facilitated the states appropriation
of the peasants surplus in conditions of relative stability [Byers and Mukhia,
1981: 278]. Instead, it argues that the distinction between the peasantry and
the ruling class, whereas sophisticated and exible, was subject to uctuating
centre-periphery tensions throughout the history of the Ottoman empire. As
such, it aims to offer a theorisation of the Ottoman state and its structures of
domination that overcomes simplistic East/West demarcations be they
characterisations of an arbitrary, indulgent and exploitative occident versus a
uniform, just and legitimate orient (which Halil Berktay identies as the
central (but never openly acknowledged) proposition in contemporary
Turkish nationalist historiography) or a Europe as the locus of the dynamic
motor of modernity, with a spirit of rationality, liberty and justice contrasted
with a vision of Asia [as] the realm of despotism, fanaticism and historical
xity that continues to color[ ]European views of Turkey today [Berktay,
1987: 321; Larabee and Lesser, 2003; Zubaida, 2003: 63].
Indeed, Teoman and Kaymaks research suggests that differences within
modes of production are, perhaps, as signicant as those between modes of
production. In a similar vein, Brenner [1976] has long argued that French
absolutism represents an important exception to general patterns of feudal
development. Others, such as Teschke, have gone further and suggested that
pre-revolutionary France constituted a sui generis social formation,
DEVELOPMENT OF TURKI SH AGRI CULTURE 255
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displaying a specic mode of government and determinate pre-modern and
pre-capitalist domestic and international laws of motion [Teschke, 2003:
191]. A comparable divergence may be deduced from Teoman and Kaymaks
observation that the slow emergence of ciftliks in Western Anatolia and the
Balkans did not lead to the type of commercialisation which resulted from the
more export-orientated reorganisation of land distribution carried out in
Egypt by Muhammad Ali.
Although sharing a concern to maintain the supervisory power of the state,
the focus of latter approach upon large-estate farming and industrialisation
can be quite sharply contrasted with the rentierism of the Ottoman heartland
where attempts to stimulate agricultural production tended to be couched
more in terms of increasing revenue to imperial coffers than generating
accumulation, private wealth and the power of landlordism [Arcanl, 1986:
32]. This historical difference may help to explain the greater inequality of
land distribution which emerged in Egypt [Abdel-Fadil, 1975; Hopkins,
1987].
9
At the time of the 1952 revolution, for instance, a mere 0.4 per cent of
the largest landholders controlled 34 per cent of the countrys cultivatable
land. This compares with a census carried out at that time in Turkey which
revealed that (although inequality remained acute) 6 per cent of village
households farmed 41 per cent of the total cultivatable land. Each country
remained, however, dominated by smallholdings (55 per cent of Egyptian and
40 per cent of Turkish holdings were divided into plots of 10 hectares or less
in 1952) [Abou Mandour and Abdel Hakim, 1995: 8; Aksit, 1993: 190].
10
Although this remains the case, states seeking to commercialise
agricultural production have always, as Teoman and Kaymak note, been
faced with the possibility that farmers will react to adverse market conditions
by withdrawing their surpluses and returning to the level of subsistence. In
response, governments (driven by the kinds of motives Aytekin identies)
frequently use reforms to the ownership and/or use of land as well as a
combination of taxation, acquisitive price-xing and subsidised technology
to ensure food security [Birtek and Keyder, 1975: 448]. The Turkish state, for
instance, succeeded in redistributing 2.2 million hectares of, mostly its own,
land (as well as reallocating a further 3.4 million hectares of meadow and
pasture to common usage) to 432,117 families between 1945 and 1973.
Although this involved the expropriation of only 5400 hectares from entitled
landowners, a small decline in overall inequality resulted the share of land
controlled by the top 6 per cent of landowners had dropped to 35 per cent by
1980 [Demirel and Gulsever, 2007].
11
Ankara has also long maintained a comprehensive system of price
subsidies. These were initially introduced to offset the contraction in the
domestic economy caused by the curtailment of imports following the 1929
crash. Thenceforth, the state, through broadly agential sales cooperatives and
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unions, re-established itself as the primary buyer of a wide range of
commodities (cereals) in ways quite similar to the types of Ottoman market
supervision that are discussed in the contribution by Jacoby to this journal
issue.
12
Combining its subsidies with other transfers (such as input support
for seeds, fertilisers and pesticides) the state contributed around 30 Turkish
lira for every 100 lira earned by the producer for much of the post-war era
[C akmak, 2004: 1315]. As the following three articles illustrate, such a
central role for the state emerges from the overriding, yet frequently
contradictory, concern to prevent decentralised challenges to its authority
while ensuring supplies to urban centres. The result, Aytekin points out, has
been a general indifference to the plight of the Ottoman peasantry so long as
productivity and revenue remain adequate. This certainly appears to be true
of Muhammad Alis reorganisation of waqf lands during the early part of his
reign (see Teoman and Kaymak), suggesting an antecedent to a general
difference between a more modern policy designed primarily to extract a
surplus from agriculture (Egypt) and one constructed to support agricultural
income and, therefore, domestic demands for industrial products (Turkey)
[Richards, 1986: 2, parenthesis in original].
As in the past, though, considerable modal differences exist within the
Turkish state. The mass displacement of farmers that has resulted from pro-
Kurdish activism and the vast Guney Do gu Anadolu Projesi (which
proposes to construct 21 dams, 19 hydroelectric power stations and to
irrigate over 1.7 million acres at an estimated cost of over US$32 billion)
has been used by the government, in ways not unlike those identied by
Aytekin as features of the Portes response to civil unrest in the nineteenth
century, as a coercive means of securing the loyalty of local elites in the
southeast of the country.
13
Operating largely through martial law (
emergency legislation), patronage has taken priority over productivity,
thereby ensuring that a few individuals with good party connections have
succeeded in getting the state to allocate large tracts of land to them
[Barkey and Fuller, 1998: 190].
By contrast, the agricultural sector of the west of the country has, as
each of the three subsequent articles in this journal make clear, long been
seen as the countrys economic heartland. Two-thirds of the 401 projects
the Industrial Development Bank helped to fund between 1950 and 1960
were in Turkeys wealthiest province, Marmara. By 1975, its capital,
Istanbul, was home to half the countrys major industrial establishments
and absorbing over 40 per cent of all public credits. The state continues to
commit around 30 per cent of its entire public expenditure there today,
despite the fact that, as the following section goes on to explain, it has
continued to benet considerably from its economic contacts with Europe
[Jacoby and O

zerdem, 2008].
DEVELOPMENT OF TURKI SH AGRI CULTURE 257
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GEO- POLI TI CS
Each of the three articles to follow underlines the role overseas states
played in the political economy of the Ottoman Empire. Amid a more
general assumption of inuence within the realms of commerce, industry
and law, agriculture was also becoming increasingly subject to the interests
of the European Powers during the nineteenth century. As the mercantile
capital of the Wests early developers overowed into the Balkans, the
Empires Mediterranean seaboard and, particularly, the Levant, inward
investments, commodity production for export and, in some areas,
expatriate settlement grew rapidly. This led to various limitations upon
the Portes sovereignty (see the contribution by Jacoby) and a restricted
capacity to determine the direction of its economy the most obvious
example of which was debt. Because the liquidity of specie and the social
relations which surround indebtedness remain comparable at various levels
of analysis, it is useful to locate the patterns of rural credit examined
shortly by Aytekin within a broader context of imperial borrowing. By the
1870s, the cost of the Portes defensive modernisation had produced
unpaid loans of more than 20 billion kurus (the annual interest upon which
was 1.4 billion kurus), obliging Istanbul to appoint a Public Debt
Administration made up of French, British and German creditors. Backed
up by a capitulations system which granted foreign nationals a wide
variety of benets and immunities, the Administration assumed control over
most of the states key agricultural monopolies and, between 1881 and
1908, redirected over 30 per cent of the economys entire tax revenues to
the payment of foreign debts [Howard, 2001: 77].
14
Today, the situation is not entirely dissimilar. With a long history of
support (during the 1950s, alone, Ankara received nearly US$200 million in
loans from the major international nancial institutions in return for a wide
range of economic reforms), Turkey is currently the International Monetary
Funds largest borrower. With a debt to GDP ratio of between 50 and 100 per
cent since 2001, the government has been obliged to guarantee the repayment
of over US$15 billion of overseas loans in 2008 terms comparable with that
which led to the Ottoman default of 1881 and to agree to a wide range of
economic reforms.
15
Particularly targeted has been the states support of
agriculture production which, as a percentage of GDP, was running at
between three and four times the OECD average for much of the 1990s.
Under the Agricultural Reform Implementation Project, announced in June
2000 and accompanied by a further $600 million loan from the World Bank,
input and credit subsidies were abolished and the price-setting functions of
state institutions and purchasing unions were removed. By the end of 2002,
the Bank was able to conclude that, amid a 13 per cent decline in real
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agricultural prices, an overall cut in scal outlays of $5.5 billion (or 2.7 per
cent of Turkeys GDP) had been realised [World Bank, 2004].
Despite being accompanied by an income support system, the result has
been (in a pattern not entirely different from the effects of market uctuations
in Ottoman cotton production which Teoman and Kaymak describe) an
overall contraction in crop production (of 6 per cent), in livestock numbers
(of 20 per cent) and in the use of previously subsidised inputs (particularly
chemical fertilisers which have dropped by over 25 per cent).
16
The
government responded by expanding income support to include all farms up
to 50 hectares (thereby incorporating over 99 per cent of all holdings),
gradually buying up unsold surpluses, writing off unpaid utility bills,
releasing US$2billion of new credit and, under the 2006 Agricultural Law,
reserving the right to adjust support instruments by up to 25 per cent of their
value [OECD, 2007]. Although it is too early to ascertain the full impact of
these measures, it has already become clear that they have contributed to the
widening of relative as well as absolute income inequality, as the higher
income regions [of the country] use subsidized inputs relatively more
intensively than the lower income regions [C akmak, 2004: 17].
With an 80 per cent share in Turkeys foreign direct investment and 50 per
cent of its imports, the European Union (EU) has been instrumental in
inuencing these reforms. Although the Customs Union of 1996 had excluded
agricultural products, the 1963 Ankara Agreement and the 1973 Added Protocol
both envisaged harmonisation with the European Common Agricultural Policy
an objective supported by an agreement to cut export subsidies and tariff
protection on a wide range of products at the Uruguay round of GATT in
1994.
17
As these have taken effect, Turkey has become the EUs seventh biggest
trading partner (up from 9th in 1990) and the destination for 4 per cent of its
total exports. Despite such access to Turkish markets, the over protection of the
EU for the agricultural sector remains high, and for some major export products
of Turkey (fruits, vegetables and processed products) seasonal ad valorem
tariffs and TRQs [tariff rate quotas] are applied [sic] [C akmak et al., 2004:
112; initial parenthesis in original]. The EU15 countries have, for instance,
contributed an average of between 29 and 43 per cent of their producers
earnings since 1986 signicantly higher than Turkeys support rate of between
3 and 29 per cent over the same period [OECD, 2007].
18
As Ankara prepares for entry into the Common Agricultural Policy under
the terms of the acquis communautaire, this combination of greater domestic
competition, increasing compliance standardisation, reduced subsidies and
imperfect market access is widely expected to merge divided landholdings,
push many [more] small farms out of the market and accelerate the
commercialisation of production [Bayaner, 2006: 10; Turkish-US Business
Council, 2006: 53]. The result, the Turkish government hopes, is that land use
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will become more efcient (particularly in terms of labour inputs once the
effect of direct income support is gradually phased out), yields will increase
and prices to consumers will decline, thereby providing a more egalitarian
method of income distribution than Turkeys tradition of support subsidies.
Since producers are predominantly based in the countryside and consumers in
larger towns and cities, however, the short to medium term impact of these
measures is likely to be a signicant resource transfer from rural areas to the
major conurbations, thereby reversing the Ottoman tradition, accelerating
urbanisation and, in the longer term, perhaps, signalling the end of Turkey as
the regions last remaining peasant stronghold.
CONCLUSI ON
In Turkey, questions over how the issues considered above relate to
agricultural production and rural class structure have been debated
extensively for a great many years. Particularly contentious have been
discussions over the extent to which the Turkish countryside can be
considered to have been transformed by all the characteristics associated
historically with capitalist development: the commercialisation of production
leading inexorably to the elimination of peasant family farming, a process of
depeasantisation linked in turn to the growth of landless workers.
The articles to follow this introduction provide an account of the
background to and origins of such commercialisation. They help to explain
the persistence of petty commodity production, the enduring preponderance
of the state in the process of surplus appropriation, and the continuing
inuence of Europe over agrarian policy. As noted, each of these elements
is vital in developing a fuller understanding of contemporary debates and
processes related to Turkeys distribution of farmland, intra-state variations
in the structure of governance, and the effects of exposing the agricultural
sector to international markets and the geo-political pressures that this
brings.
NOTES
1 In one form or another, the Ottoman Empire lasted from the beginning of the fourteenth
century until the early 1920s, when the Turkish Republic was established by Kemal Ataturk,
and from which point a modern/nationalist/secular Turkey is said to emerge [Lewis, 1961].
The decline of the Ottoman empire has been said to date from many different historical
episodes and conjunctures, among them the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the siege and battle
of Vienna in 1683.
2 All technical terms used in the three articles are included in the composite glossary that
follows this introduction.
3 The differentiation of the peasantry into a rich, middle and poor stratum is a form of
categorisation that separates a broadly Marxist approach from a populist one.
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4 The representation of the rural populace as a source of purity and spiritual solace has been
an important literary theme for centuries, and it became an integral component of
proto-nationalism which Muslim provincial elites promulgated as they increasingly came into
conict with ascendant non-Muslim subjects (the antecedents and dynamics of which are
discussed more fully in the contribution by Jacoby to this journal issue). The writers Yusuf
Akcura (born in the Tatar city of Ulyanovsk in 1876) and Ziya Gokalp (born the same year in
the Kurdish city of Diyabarkr), for instance, were particularly inuential in this regard and,
in many ways, helped to establish the ideological basis for the new Turkish republic [Karpat,
1972].
5 At the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920, the Comintern [1977: 110]
highlighted the impact of the 191418 war on the peasantry in the following manner: Let us
look at Turkey, which has played a big role throughout the East. It is a striking picture, at
which we have only to glance in order to feel the social ghastliness of rural life as led by the
Turkish peasantry. Twelve years of unbroken rule in Turkey by the party of Disunion and
Regress [ Young Turks or the Committee of Union and Progress], crowning the
previous nightmare history of the Sultans absolutism, has brought the Anatolian peasants to a
state of pauperism. Here is the picture. Far off on the horizon we see a Turkish aul [ village
of Muslim peasants]. In the foreground a grey-haired old Turk is ploughing the land: he has
harnessed to the plough, along with his one and only ox, his own daughter. The tremendous
social signicance of this picture is clear. All the young men have been taken away from
productive work to ght in wars, and almost all the draught animals have been killed. This is
the economic dead-end into which Turkish absolutism, with the benevolent co-operation of
Western imperialism, has led the Turkish peasantry.
6 Although the scale of urbanisation, overseas migration, non-agricultural waged labour and
absentee farming casts some doubt over the ease with which it can be equated with petty
commodity production, the resilience of smallholding peasant proprietorship in Turkey is all
the more remarkable given the rapidity and scale of commercialisation during the post-war
period. Between 1948 and 1954, alone, the number of tractors rose from 1756 to 37,740,
trailers from 140 to 18,088 and combines from 268 to 4705 (today, there are more than one
million tractors and 12,000 combines). Yields have also doubled since the 193945 war, as
steady rises in average caloric intake (from 3045 calories per day in 1970 to 3416 calories
per day in 2000) have driven up consumption [C akmak et al., 2004].
7 This is, of course, a complex process, connected frequently (and in other parts of the global
economy) to the kind of identities deployed by peasant smallholders engaged in resisting
neoliberal capitalist penetration. Among the discourses such grassroots agency generates
effectively, it has to be said are ones defending historical patterns of culture, belief and
behaviour, the erosion of which is then attributed to new forms of economic development,
the latter being depicted as an alien ( foreign) intrusion.
8 Other contributions to this debate include Keyder [1987] and Aydin [1990]. To be fair,
Keyder has always contextualised grassroots processes/structures: by for example giving
due weight to the role of the Republican state in Turkish history [Keyder, 1988].
9 The classic pre-revolutionary account of the Egyptian peasantry, rst published in 1938 as
Moeurs et Coutumes des Fellahs, is by Ayrout [1963]. Important studies of land tenure,
agrarian reform, rural poverty and village life generally at around the time of the 1952
revolution in Egypt include Warriner [1948, 1957] and Ammar [1954].
10 See also the case studies by Glavanis [1990] and Stauth [1990].
11 A similar pattern emerged in Egypt where Agrarian Reform Laws, enacted between 1952 and
1970, redistributed almost 90,000 hectares (*12.5 per cent of the total agricultural land area)
to about 342,000 rural households (*9 per cent of the rural population in 1970). By 1990, the
top 0.8 per cent of landowners share of cultivatable land had dropped to around 24 per cent
[Abou Mandour and Abdel Hakim, 1995: 9].
12 Important examples of state institutions include TMO (grain), TSFAS (sugar), TEKEL
(tobacco and alcohol) and C AYKUR (tea). By 1999, these four state institutions alone were
employing over 88,000 staff. The larger purchasing unions covered cotton, silk, soybeans,
hazelnuts, roses, pulses, pistachios, olives, sunower seeds, raisins, gs and mohair and had a
membership of more than 700,000 producers in 1999 [Schmitz et al., 1999: 2, 4].
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13 The mass ooding of arable land (the Ilsu Dam alone will ultimately necessitate the
compulsory resettlement of more than 16,000 farmers), the evacuation of more than
3500 rebel villages (dislodging at least 350,000 people) and the formation of a 65,000-
strong village guard militia (with an additional 335,000 to 400,000 salaried family
members) has created at least one million internally displaced people [O

zerdem and Jacoby,

2007]. Such programmes of forced migration are, in fact, a long-established method of
dealing with peripheral dissent. As former President Suleyman Demirel put it, the recent
period of Kurdish insurgency is being dealt with like the previous 28 revolts [Kurdish
Human Rights Project, 1996: 4].
14 These measures helped to consolidate the place of foreign capital, which had been long reliant
on a comprador class of foreign proteges, within the western empires manufacturing sector.
Because Ottoman agricultural production rested more upon the power over the peasantry than
control of the land, though, direct overseas investment in farms (such as the British ciiks
which farmed an estimated 200,000 hectares by 1892 examined by Teoman and Kaymak in
this journal issue) proved only infrequently successful [Arcanl, 1986: 3437].
15 The result is a level of foreign inuence that has a striking resemblance to an earlier
programme of normalisation which operated over independent states through capitulations
which required them to acknowledge the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Western states
[Hindess, 2005: 1390]. For instance, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
seeking to protect current foreign direct investments levels of over US$18 billion (up from
US$1.7 billion in 2003), have used, respectively, the threat of withholding US$15.7 and
US$1.7 billion loans to secure the privatisation of much of Turkeys telecommunications
sector [The New York Times, 10 July 2001; Zaman, 11 February 2007].
16 Despite being initially directed only at smallholdings of less than 20 hectares, this system
(like the price support regime which had generally beneted farms with higher outputs it
replaced) tended to favour larger landowners who simply reneged on sharecropping and
tenancy agreements and reregistered their holdings as smaller plots in the names of family
members. Given that these measures have occurred during a period in which the ofcial
unemployment rate has almost doubled and real wages have fallen by around 20 per cent
(since 1997), it is unlikely that meeting some of farmers losses will stimulate Turkeys
domestic market [Yeldan, 2006].
17 See Raghavan [1990] for a critical analysis of the impact on less developed countries of the
Uruguay Round and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
18 The EU 15 consists of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Their average annual support of agricultural producers from 1986 to 2006 was 36 per cent.
The comparable gure for Turkey for the years (19862005, data for 2006 are not yet
available) is 20 per cent [OECD, 2007].
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GLOSSARY
Acquis
Communautaire
The term acquis communautaire, or EU acquis, refers to the total
body of EU law accumulated thus far. For the negotiations with
Croatia and Turkey over accession, it was divided into 35
chapters covering a wide range of reform and compliances.
Amil A tax-collector, state agent or prefect.
Ard al-wassiyah The land reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of multezim (see
below).
Askeri Though term itself literally means of the military, it more broadly
encompasses all higher levels of Ottoman imperial
administration. Both Muslims and non-Muslims holding political
ofce in the service of the Empire could be considered askeri.
Asper A silver coin of about a gram in weight. Of Byzantine origin, the
Ottomans referred to it as akce.
Ayan The plural form of the word ayn meaning eye in Arabic, this
denotes the notables, respected and eminent people of a city,
town or society.
Barrani Extraordinary taxes.
Bey (or beg) A Turkish title broadly equivalent to lord, it was used for tribal
leaders, high civil and military functionaries and the sons of the
eminent (particularly pashas).
C ift-hane An agricultural unit based on peasant family: a peasant family
farm.
Cizye A special Islamic poll-tax imposed on non-Muslim adult men in the
Ottoman Empire in return for an exemption from military duty.
Defterdar The keeper of the defter (an account or letter-book used in
administrative ofces), this normally refers to the chief nance
ofcer in the Ottoman Empire.
Emin Literally faithful, trustworthy, this administrative title usually is
usually translated as a salaried commissioner to be
distinguished from a tax-farmer, a grantee, or a lessee of any
kind.
Fatwa A religious edict or a ruling on Islamic law issued by a Muslim
scholar.
Feddan Literally a yoke of oxen, this was the standard measure of land in
Egypt between ninth and fteenth centuries at which time it was
equal to 6368 m
2
. From 1830 onwards, one feddan came to
correspond to 4200.833 m
2
(1.038 English acre).
Fellah A peasant or agricultural labourer in Arab countries especially in
Egypt. Because it is derived from the Arabic falh (the act of
cleaving and cutting) Fellah can also be translated as
ploughman.
Hali ciftlik (or
mazraa) mezra
or ekinlik
Generally, this refers to arable land or simply elds. In Ottoman
survey registers, it designates a periodic settlement or a deserted
village and its environs.
Hane Named after its founder, Abu Hanifa an-Numan ibn Thabit (699
767), this is the oldest of the four schools of thought (Madhhabs)
or jurisprudence (Fiqh) within Sunni Islam.
Harem A term applied to those parts of a house to which access is
restricted to family members, and hence more particularly to the
womens quarters.
Ibadiya Used in nineteenth century Egypt for land surveyed in 1813 under
Muhammad Ali, but not taxed because it was uncultivated.
(contd)
DEVELOPMENT OF TURKI SH AGRI CULTURE 265
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Icare-i muaccele A down-payment made by lessee to the treasury at the time of
lease.
_
Ihtikar (or inhisar)
The monopolies and restrictive practices of Ottoman guilds.
Iltizam A form of tax-farm used in the Ottoman Empire.
Kalemiyye Literally those of the pen, this scribal institution was
headquartered in the Sublime Porte and eventually became the
locus for imperial modernisation as formal departments were
established and developed. It came to include the nance,
commerce, interior and foreign affairs ministries.
Kharaj A type of Ottoman land tax.
Kirjal Armed irregulars (similar to sekban) in the service of provincial
notables (particularly ayans) in the Balkan provinces of Ottoman
Empire from the eighteenth century onwards.
Kocabas Local notable and/or leader of Christian communities in the some
Ottoman territories. Although civilians representing their
communities to the state, they also took on semi-ofcial
functions such as collecting communal taxes and fees. Their role
faded away after the administrative reform of 1864.
Kurus Derived from the German groschen, it was a currency subunit. One
Turkish lira was equal to 100 kurus (or piastre). Originally a large
silver coin, in the mid 1800s its value had depreciated to the point
where it circulated as both a large copper coin (as 40 para) and a
very small silver one as well. A currency reform in 2005 led to its
return as 1/100th of the New Turkish Lira as the Yeni Kurus.
Malikane A term made up from the Arabic malik (owner) and the Persian
sufx -ane (in the manner or way of), it was to describe the full
ownership of scal revenues.
Mamluk Originally slaves from the Caucasus, the Mamluks were members
of an Egyptian military class who were in power from about
1250 to 1517 and inuential until 1811 when they were defeated
by Muhammad Ali.
Mevat A juridical term designating uncultivated lands.
Millet Although this term came to be applied to specically non-Muslim
communities, it can be more generally understood to refer to any
one of the empires distinguishable peoples.
Miri Literally pertaining to the commander or governor, the amir, this
term was used interchangeably to refer to lands belonging to the
state, the tax levied from that land or simply the public treasury.
Moudir A provincial governor or the head of a department.
Mukataa The sum handed over by a tax farmer in return for the collection
and management of the revenue from a given province or
district.
Multezim A tax-farmer who, from the mid-sixteenth century on, collected
taxes and dues on behalf of the Ottoman Treasury. Particularly
used within the Arab provinces of the Empire.
Mutaahhit A holder of an uhda (see below).
Omdeh A notable in an Egyptian rural community who was responsible to
the government for the payment of all taxes, for military
conscription and the corvee and for all the other ofcial
obligations of the village.
O

rf Customary practices incorporated into laws additional to those

specied in the shariah.
Pasha The highest ofcial title in the Ottoman Empire, it survived for
sometime after the formation of the Turkish republic in countries
such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria.
(contd)
266 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDI ES
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Piastre An Ottoman monetary unit (originally called the kurus) rst
introduced in 1688. It was subdivided into 40 para, each of 3
akce.
Reaya A member of the tax-paying classes of Ottoman society. Literally
meaning members of the ock, it included Christians, Muslims,
and Jews who were shorn (i.e. taxed) to support the state and
the askeri.
Riba Forms of usury forbidden in Islamic economic jurisprudence. Some
identify thus as instances of excessive or exploitative charging of
interest, while others dene it as concept of interest itself.
Riyal Derived from the silver real rst issued in Spain in fourteenth
century, this term is used loosely to refer to coins from a number
of Muslim countries.
Selamlk The outer, more public rooms of a traditionally arranged house that
are typically used for receiving guests and non-family members.
S enlendirme (or ihya) Literally bringing to life, this refers to putting a piece of
(particularly) mevat land to use in Islamic law.
Seyyye Derived from the Arabic term sayf (sword), the Ottomans used
this term to refer to various types of troops in the imperial
military.
Sipahi An elite mounted force, they resembled the knights of medieval
Europe. The Sipahi was the holder of a ef of land (the tmar)
granted directly by the Ottoman sultan and was entitled to
income from that land, in return for military service.
Subas Commonly known as a ef-holding ofcial with administrative
functions and police authority over other functionaries as well as
the inhabitants of a district. More specically, it may refer to the
steward of a big agrarian estate in some Balkan provinces of the
Empire.
Tmar A system in which the projected revenue of a conquered territory
was distributed in the form of temporary land grants as
compensation for annual military service. The tmar could be
small, granted by governors, or large which required a certicate
from the Sultan. In both cases, they served as a means of paying
the army, generating tax revenue and bringing land under direct
Ottoman control.
Uhda A form of land tenure established by Muhammad Ali in the 1830s
which resembled the old iltizam system.
Ulema Muslim scholars who have completed several years of training and
study in one or more of the several elds that make up the
Islamic sciences. Generally well versed in legal jurisprudence,
many specialise in other sciences, such as philosophy, theology,
history, literature or Quranic hermeneutics.
Ushr The tithe in Islamic law.
Vergi-yi Mahsusa Literally special tax, it referred to an annual cash-based payment
from households after the Tanzimat reforms of 1839.
Waqf An inalienable religious endowment, typically devoting a building
or plot of land for Muslim religious or charitable purposes. Waqf
revenue was generally not taxed and thus lay outside the states
control.
*Compiled by Tim Jacoby, E. Attila Aykekin, Muammer Kaymak and O

zgur Teoman. The

Glossary is a composite, and covers terms found in the following articles by Tim Jacoby, by
E. Attila Aykekin and by O

zgur Teoman and Muammer Kaymak.

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