The Power of the People: Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923–1938 by Murat Metinsoy (review)

If one word could signal the breadth of historiography covering Turkey's early republican history, it is modernization. It is perhaps self-evident, but most histories of this period contend with the massive effort expended by the Kemalist state to modernize—economically, culturally, politically—the Ottoman's Anatolian successor from the rubble left following a decade of war, deprivation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It has become normal to depict the Kemalist era as a revolutionary one in which social change was radical, where the state sought to transform its subject's relations with its own past, with its language, with its dress, to see itself as secular, western, and modern as a response to real and imagined imperialist threats from abroad. Taking such a total transformation as its aim, the Kemalist state naturally took as the object of its tremendous efforts Turkey's peasants and working-class citizens. While the nature of these efforts has not always been consistent, much less successful, it has been a central point of political concentration since the 1920s and 1930s—as Asım Karaömerlioğlu aptly referred to it, "the cult of the peasant."¹

Despite the efforts of the cult of the peasant, the massive state investments in "modernizing" the countryside in the Kemalist period, and even more in the years of the Marshall Plan, it was notably obvious enough that the peasantry in Turkey had persisted through the mid-1980s that Eric Hobsbawm, in the final volume of his massive histories of the modern world, observed that Turkey's peasantry was the only one in its neighborhood or in Europe to remain "an absolute majority" of the population.² This seeming contradiction acts as the departure point of Murat Metinsoy's new, authoritative study of the peasant and working classes under the reign of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, The Power of the People: Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923–1938. Drawing inspiration from the seminal work of James C. Scott on peasant resistance, Metinsoy's study of the various "weapons of the weak" deployed by Turkey's subaltern classes meticulously and voluminously details how resistance to the efforts of the state and the intelligentsia to "modernize" played a major role in the shaping of Turkey's modernization.

The book is divided into three parts with fourteen chapters divided roughly between them, in addition to an introduction and epilogue. The first two parts address tactics of resistance to economic and infrastructural modernization amongst the rural peasantry, in Part I, and amongst urban laboring classes in Part II. Part III shifts focus to the cultural sphere, with particular emphasis on reaction to secularizing reforms introduced in the 1920s. The great force of this book comes as one digests the avalanche of fascinating examples of foot dragging, tax avoidance schemes, petty violence, indifference, adaptation and negotiation culled from an impressive array of sources, including the notoriously stingy files of the Turkish Police (Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü) and Interior Ministry (İçişleri Bakanlığı), and comes to realize how much the reality of daily Turkish life in this period of intense modernization was shaped by the antagonistic relationship between the state and its subjects. Read this way, the period of Kemalist modernization appears not as an aggressively modernizing dictatorship dragging an underdeveloped, and subordinate populace up "to the level of civilization," but rather one of the development of the Turkish economy in this period being largely the product of the state's concessions to the obstinate refusals of these classes to fully submit to its impositions. For just one example, Metinsoy details how the excessive demands that the modernization effort placed on concrete production led workers to engage in numerous tactics to slow down production—from sleeping on the job to taking long bathroom breaks—which in turn had to be...