This project is an attempt at bringing Ottoman/Turkish history into the newly emerging field of digital humanities. To be able to contextualise and compare changes in occupational structure and urban growth trajectories across time and space, solid and detailed datasets of occupational structure and historical demographics for a very large part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and for the entire Turkey in the 20th century will be constructed. Throughout the project the focus will be on the dynamics of industrialisation, urbanisation and their accompanying changes in occupational structures and residential and migration patterns. To pursue these multiple goals the project will adopt both an interdisciplinary approach and a comparative perspective. By extending the analysis up to 2000 the project also challenges the disciplinary divide between economic history, economics and urban studies in research on Turkey. The chosen long-term Ottoman/Turkish perspective is intended to facilitate comparative approaches so as to overcome the limitations of national historiographies. This project aims to overcome historiographical and disciplinary limitations in social and economic history, historical geography and urban studies for the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. This article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. This article examines the effects of the ethno-religious characteristics and gender of Ottoman factory labourers on employment practices and wage-earning at the fez factory. Those ledgers enable us, for the first time, to formulate research questions within the framework of a broad labour history, in particular for the Ottoman factory workforce in the late nineteenth century. Those ledgers provide unprecedented information not only on remuneration but also on the production process and labour-control practices in the fez factory. Very recently, a limited number of wage ledgers for the fez factory became available for research. One of those state factories was the Imperial Fez Factory, where, throughout the nineteenth century, approximately 500 workers were employed, making it the second highest concentration of industrial workers in the empire after the Imperial Arsenal. In terms of production volume, most Ottoman state factories cannot be regarded as success stories, yet the labour relations they initiated, engendered, and supervised were important for the emergence of factory labour in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic.
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