Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire. Tobacco Workers, Managers, and the State, 1872–1912 by Can Nacar (review)

Can Nacar's Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire. Tobacco Workers, Managers, and the State, 1872–1912 is one of the recent contributions to Ottoman labor history. Published in 2019, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the social background, gender profile, ethno-religious composition, working conditions, and collective movements of workers employed in the tobacco warehouses and factories across the Ottoman Empire prior to World War I. Focusing on the Ottoman tobacco industry, it explores "how workers interpreted the socioeconomic and political changes that the Ottoman Empire underwent and how they tried to resist, contest, adapt to, or transform these changes" (p. 2).

Nacar's book consists of seven chapters. In Chapter 1 (Introduction), Nacar deals with scholarship on Ottoman labor history and the tobacco industry, lays out his major arguments, and presents the structure of his work. Chapter 2 (The Ottoman Tobacco Industry: Entrepreneurs and Workers) explores the historical development and general characteristics of the tobacco industry and workforce. Chapter 3 (Work All Their Lives in Tobacco: Life Inside the Factory and Warehouse Walls) focuses on how the labor process in the Ottoman tobacco industry was organized. Chapter 4 (Ignorance in Action: Labor Protests in the Hamidian Period) explores the first phase of collective labor actions in the Ottoman tobacco industry between 1894 and 1906. Chapter 5 (Long Live the Workers: The Revolutionary Euphoria of 1908) concentrates on the mobilization of tobacco workers in the first months of the Constitutional Revolution during which a massive wave of labor strikes swept across the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 6 (After the Euphoria: New Possibilities and Challenges) looks at how the labor movement developed in the Ottoman tobacco industry during the period 1909–12, after the revolutionary euphoria was over. In Chapter 7 (Conclusion), Nacar summarizes the contributions of his book to the historiography of Ottoman labor and refers to the experiences of Ottoman tobacco workers in Greece and Turkey after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.

Nacar begins his narrative with interesting details about global trends in the production, consumption, and trade of tobacco. This background information helps readers make sense of why and how a tobacco export industry grew in the Ottoman Empire. Nacar indicates that with the growing popularity of cigarettes as a mass-consumption commodity in the course of the nineteenth century, global interest in Oriental tobacco from the Balkans and Anatolia increased, as did the volume of tobacco export from the Ottoman Empire.

During much of the period covered in Nacar's research, the Ottoman tobacco industry was dominated by the monopoly of the Régie Company. Officially named Société de la Régie cointéressé des Tabacs de l'Empire Ottoman, this company was founded by the Ottoman Imperial Bank in partnership with the Bleichröder Bank of Berlin and the Credit Anstalt of Vienna (p. 24). Régie's establishment was the direct outcome of the Ottoman financial bankruptcy in 1876. In 1881, the Public Debt Administration (PDA) was founded by a consortium of European creditors to supervise Ottoman debt repayments. In 1883, the tobacco monopoly initially granted to the PDA was transferred to Régie in return for a specified annual payment. The Régie Company was the largest foreign enterprise in the Ottoman Empire. "Its capital made up 23% of total foreign direct investments between 1881 and 1914" (p. 3).

Nacar deals with the tobacco warehouses and factories run by the Régie Company across different parts of the Ottoman Empire, such as Salonika, Drama, İskeçe, Istanbul, Samsun, and Izmir. So the scope of his research is larger than many of the preceding works focusing on the conditions of workers in a single workplace or collective labor movements in a particular city or region in the Ottoman Empire. Examining the entire tobacco industry, Nacar provides insights into the profile of tobacco workers...