In this event Görkem Akgöz (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) will discuss her latest book In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey. The book offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester” a name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in İstanbul. Akgöz will tell the story of how workers in Turkey, who were recategorised from imperial subjects to citizens, lived and worked through the simultaneous processes of post-imperial nation-building and state-led industrialisation, and struggled to be heard amid the thunder of nationalist developmentalism. Mehmet Kentel (University of Leiden) will offer his commentary after the lecture. The event will be moderated by Ayşenur Korkmaz (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study).

In the Shadow of War and Empire is available in Open Access format here.

About the speakers

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 Orientalischen 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.

K. Mehmet Kentel is Assistant Professor of History and Urban Studies at Leiden University. He received his PhD from the Near and Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Washington in 2018 and his master’s degree from the Modern British and European History program at Oxford University in 2011. Before coming to Leiden he was the Research Projects Manager of the Istanbul Research Institute from 2019 to 2023. His research primarily focuses on the environmental history of late Ottoman Istanbul and he is the editor-in-chief of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies. He most recently co-curated the exhibition On the Spot: Panoramic Gaze on Istanbul, a History and co-edited the eponymous volume (Pera Museum, 2023).