Book Presentation - Görkem Akgöz: In the Shadow of War and Empire
This year, Görkem Akgöz published In the Shadow of War and Empire. Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey in open access. Her book offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in İstanbul.
The factory became, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent Marxist theorists, “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s. The book tells the story of how workers in Turkey, who were recategorised from imperial subjects to citizens, lived and worked through the simultaneous processes of postimperial nation-building and state-led industrialisation, and struggled to be heard amid the thunder of nationalist developmentalism. Discussant during the presentation is Marcel van der Linden.
Practical
Date: 16 May
Time: 15:00
Place: IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Entrance: Free admission, but please send an email to event@iisg.nl if you want to join.
Görkem Akgöz, PhD is a post-doc researcher at re:work (IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History) of Humboldt University and a lecturer at Orientalisches Seminar at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. Her empirical research concerns the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. She is a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History, the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, and the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network.
