On their 1492 voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus and his sailors first encountered Amerindian tobacco. Thereafter, tobacco spread at a rapid pace both geographically and across different social classes. By the 1650s, it was cultivated and consumed in all major regions of the world from Europe to Africa to Asia. In the early modern period, most of its users consumed tobacco by smoking pipes or cigars, snuffing, or chewing.1 The mid-nineteenth century, however, witnessed a transformation in consumer preferences. Cigarette smoking began gradually to displace other forms of tobacco use, as it “became integrated into social and cultural mores of both work and leisure.”2 This transformation in consumers’ preferences had two significant effects on the Ottoman Empire. First, cigarettes gained quick and broad popularity among Ottomans of different social backgrounds. According to one estimate, even by the early 1860s, about a quarter of tobacco consumers in the empire smoked cigarettes.3 Second, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a large number of cigarette smokers across the world developed a taste for varieties of Oriental tobacco grown in the Balkan and Anatolian provinces of the empire. This led to a surge in Ottoman tobacco leaf exports, primarily to Europe, North America, and North Africa. As a result, by the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912, the Ottoman Empire had a flourishing tobacco industry, which employed over 30,000 people. This study looks at the lives of these people, who earned their living in tobacco factories and warehouses located in Istanbul and various provincial towns and cities in Anatolia and the Balkans.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman state began to take on functions previously considered outside its purview and increasingly intervene in the lives of its population in order to gain greater access to its material and human resources.4 As a result of this process, the domain of politics expanded to include non-elite sectors of Ottoman society.5 Studies on the Tanzimat period (1839–1876) and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 have shown that peasant communities in different parts of the empire interpreted the principles of the Tanzimat and revolution in accordance with their interests, used these interpretations to voice specific grievances and demands, and press their demands on both provincial notables and central state elites.6 Following a similar line of inquiry, this book 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.
One of these changes was the increased European control over Ottoman finances. The evolution of the tobacco industry was to a large extent shaped by financial exigencies confronting the Ottoman government in the late nineteenth century. After the stock exchange crisis of 1873 in Europe and the United States , foreign capital inflows into the empire nearly ceased. Financial problems were further exacerbated by poor harvests and famine in Anatolia in the early 1870s, ultimately leading to a default on loan payments.7 Under pressure from the European powers, the Ottoman government agreed to surrender some of its revenues to foreign creditors in the early 1880s. As part of this deal, the Regie Company , established by the empire’s three important creditors (namely the Imperial Ottoman Bank , the Bleichröder Bank of Berlin , and the Credit Anstalt of Vienna ), was granted a monopoly over the domestic tobacco market.
The Régie, officially named the Société de la Régie cointéressée des Tabacs de l’Empire Ottoman, was the largest foreign enterprise in the Ottoman Empire; its capital made up 23% of total foreign direct investments between 1881 and 1914.8 Expecting high profits, in view of the popularity of tobacco smoking among Ottoman peoples, the company established factories and workshops of varying sizes in different regions of the empire. Moreover, unlike cigarette manufacturers in Egypt , who were reluctant, until the end of World War I , to introduce new technology into their production processes because of serious financial and technical obstacles, the Régie invested heavily in tobacco-cutting and cigarette-making machinery.9 As was the case in other parts of the world, mechanization allowed the company to dispense with a large number of its workers.10 Meanwhile, those fortunate enough to retain their jobs lived in fear of unemployment. This fear enabled factory managers to exert greater control over the shop floor. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, they could force workers to accept lower piece rates and to speed up production.
Although the equation of power in the Régie factories was certainly in favor of managers, workers did not become paralyzed into inaction. Between the early 1890s and 1912, these factories often became the scene of labor protests, most of which were organized by tobacco cutters and cigarette makers who saw their livelihood threatened by mechanization. Yet, as will be discussed in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, their militancy had its limits. While the Régie initiated a frontal assault on shop floor relations, tobacco cutters’ and cigarette makers’ struggles remained mainly defensive, aiming to slow down mechanization and halt or at least curb the decline in their real wages. They could put pressure on the Régie for higher real wages and increased social benefits, only when the political context forced the company to take a more conciliatory stance toward them or when their co-workers, whose jobs remained untouched by mechanization, sided with them against the company. However, the situation was different in warehouses, where tobacco leaves were sorted and packaged before being exported.
Tobacco-Processing Industry: A Different Balance of Power
The four decades preceding World War I witnessed expansion in several export-oriented industries of the Ottoman Empire, including silk reeling, carpet making, and tobacco processing. For example, as Ottoman carpet exports soared during this period, Istanbul- and İzmir-based merchants boosted the volume of production by establishing workshops outside traditional carpet making centers in western Anatolia. In these workshops, knotters who were mostly women “worked longer hours under controlled conditions at a faster pace and earned less” than their co-workers at traditional centers, such as Uşak .11 Hence, the growth in exports went hand-in-hand with increased control of capital over labor. Unlike the case in the carpet industry, most tobacco warehouses remained clustered in the established tobacco-processing centers in Anatolia and the Balkans. Moreover, by the time the First Balkan War broke out, the tobacco-processing industry was still unmechanized and dependent almost entirely on hand labor. These gave skilled warehouse workers a sense of power and allowed them to retain a certain degree of workplace autonomy. They had a say in their wages, exercised considerable control over their pace of work, and enjoyed relative freedom from close supervision by foremen.
Until the early 1910s, warehouse managers did not launch a concerted and coordinated effort to limit their autonomy and reduce labor costs. That was mainly because the costs of warehouses could be absorbed by profits from increased export sales. Moreover, from their sporadic attempts to reduce labor costs, the managers had learned that workers could effectively mobilize in defense of their interests and paralyze tobacco processing. Here, it is important to note that warehouse workers did not always remain on the defensive. As the demand for Oriental tobacco increased in overseas markets, so did the demand for skilled hands in warehouses. Workers took advantage of this situation to press employers for improvements in working conditions. While, by the early twentieth century, their counterparts in other industries, such as port transport, carpet making, and silk reeling, had lost much control over the conditions of their employment, they to a certain extent managed to shift the balance of power within the tobacco-processing industry in their favor .12
Workers, Employers, and the Ottoman Ruling Elites
As Ilham Khuri-Makdisi notes, the Ottoman tobacco industry, like its counterparts in Egypt , Europe, and the United States , “seems to have produced a culture of contestation and an inclination toward radical politics.”13 Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Ottoman labor historians have shown that some 260 strikes took place in the empire from 1891 to 1911. The tobacco industry ranked second to textiles with twenty-seven strikes involving hundreds of workers.14 Yet, the question of how striking workers negotiated their demands with their employers and Ottoman government officials has remained little explored. Studies on labor protests in the late Ottoman Empire have summarized the workers’ actions, but often have not explained why they resorted to them. For example, they have shown that strikes at tobacco warehouses in Macedonia and Thrace occasionally turned violent as workers smashed the windows and doors of the warehouses.15 They, however, leave unanswered the question of why strikers resorted to this mode of action. This study argues that when workers employed in tobacco factories and warehouses went on strike, they devised protest tactics that were both appropriate to the political conditions of their time and effective in enhancing their negotiating power. Moreover, as historical agents, they were able to adapt their goals and protest tactics to changes in the local and imperial political context. As will be shown in Chapters 4 and 5, tactics they adopted during the Hamidian period were considerably different from those employed in the early months of the Young Turk Revolution.
While examining strikes in the tobacco industry, this study also tackles the question of how workers’ actions were interpreted and addressed by their employers and Ottoman government officials. When faced with labor unrest, the managers of tobacco factories and warehouses primarily sought to weaken workers’ negotiating power. For this purpose, they tried to criminalize their actions and construct them as a threat to be handled by police and courts. The managers also frequently threatened strikers with loss of their jobs and exploited divisions among them. These tactics often proved successful in forcing workers, especially those employed by the Régie, to restrain their demands for better wages and conditions of work. However, this does not mean that the Régie workers left the negotiations empty-handed. Possessing a skilled capacity to o...