Görkem Akgöz, “In the Shadow of War and Empire: Indrustrialisation, Nation Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey”

Abstract

The subject of this review is the book by Görkem Akgöz, titled In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, Leiden, 2023, xviii, 374 pp. (hardback), ISBN 978 -90-04-41674-1; Open Access (paperback), ISBN 978-90-04-68714-1). I believe that it is an important review subject, as it is a representative of the new currents in the field of labor history, where through a discursive approach to the sources testifying the human condition of the working class, new knowledge is gained about the processes of nation-building and capitalist modernization. The thematic focus in the book is on the industrialization processes in Kemalist Turkey and the impact of the etatist regime on the formation of the new civil and working-class identities. The author offers successful attempts to debunk older official historiographical narratives regarding memory and ideology about workers' lives and relations on the factory shop-floor in the period from the beginning of the 20th century to the mid-1950s.