The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic by Veli Yadirgi (review)

The underdevelopment of Kurdish lands of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic has been a major source of inquiry for several generations of scholars and activists. Veli Yadirgi’s The Political Economy of the Kurds promises to replace the notion of underdevelopment with de-development in an effort to capture the modern historical experience of the region more accurately. As conceptualized by Sara Roy, de-development entails deliberate policies by a hegemonic power denying opportunities for the rise of an independent indigenous economy.¹ According to Yadirgi, policies informed by ethnic nationalism and pursued by successive governments since the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), which came to power in 1913, have hindered development, conceptualized as widespread social, cultural, economic, and political transformations, in Kurdish lands.

The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey offers a sweeping historical survey of Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia (ESA) starting with the emergence of Ottoman rule in 1514 and ending with the AKP rule in the 2010s. It does not utilize any primary documents in Ottoman, but relies on an extensive analysis of the archives of the United Kingdom Foreign Office on Kurdistan, the reports by British consuls and diplomats, the vast literature on economic life in the Ottoman provinces, and statistical data from the Turkish state. While the author also conducted fifteen in-depth interviews with individuals involved in regional economic matters in 2011, these interviews are not explicitly incorporated into the empirical narrative.

Yadirgi’s main revisionist argument is that the rule of autonomous Kurdish emirates that lasted from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century actually exhibited significant economic activity. The region entered into a period of stagnation and decline only when the Ottoman drive for centralization led to the expropriation of land owned by the local elites. However, the region experienced a revival of commercial and manufacturing activity from the 1890s to the 1910s, a period that coincided with the formation of the Hamidian regime. Hence, Yadirgi directly challenges the widespread perception that Kurdish autonomous rule was an obstacle to development. To the contrary, the region suffered economically when the central government pursued policies to impose direct control over the region.

In modern times, the CUP policies resulting in the Armenian Genocide and Kurdish deportations during World War I brought unprecedented devastation from which the region has never fully recovered. After the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the region remained a constant source of threat to ethnic nationalist modernization led by the Kemalist elite. The formation of an autonomous economic base that could lead to Kurdish development was perceived as a direct challenge to “the political-national imperative of maintaining Turkey’s national unity and territorial integrity” (p. 58). In Yadirgi’s narrative, neither the introduction of the multiparty regime nor the coming of the AKP to power with an initially reformist agenda has resulted in any meaningful change. Public investment in the region remained relatively low and agricultural production was in decline even before the outbreak of the PKK insurgency in the 1980s. Yadirgi concludes, “[n]one of the regimes post-1950 sufficiently de-Kemalised or dealt with the legacy of the Young Turk rule ... the predominantly Kurdish provinces in massive underdevelopment born of state negligence and paranoia” (p. 213).

With this periodization, Yadirgi problematizes the reading of Kurdish history as an unbroken chain of feudal underdevelopment since Ottoman times. This original argument allows him to offer critical assessments of competing theoretical perspectives that aim to explain why Kurdistan has lagged behind the rest of the empire and the republic. Modernization perspectives that identify the persistence of tribalism and feudalism as the major cause hindering development offer ahistorical understanding of Kurdish society and overlook the pattern of cooperation between the state and Kurdish elites. Perspectives informed by the dependency theory provide insights about the nature of domination...