Capitalist Modernity a la Turca: Turkey’s ‘Great Transformation’ Reconsidered

Abstract

Many scholars associated the recent transformation of Turkish democracy with the rise of a new bourgeois class and the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. Using a social property relations approach, I provide a critique of the readings of Turkish modernity based on the fall and the rise of bourgeois agency. Revealing the non-capitalist origins and the protracted capitalist transformation of Ottoman and Turkish modernization, I conclude that the reformulation of the main pillars of Turkish modernity today is an expression of the recent consolidation of capitalist property relations.