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The Berlin Historical Review Vol.02/No.01 (2016)
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The Berlin
Historical Review
∞
The open-access History Journal
ISSN 2196-6125 Volume II • Issue 01 • Special Issue • February 2016
The Berlin Historical Review Vol.02/No.01 (2016)
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The Berlin Historical Review The open-access History Journal
Volume 02/No.01 (2016) Published by Julia Kompe
Berlin, 2016
ISSN 2196-6125
Founding Editor & Editor-in-Chief
Julia Kompe Humboldt Universität zu Berlin & King’s College London Editors
Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford Simon Smith King’s College London Ashley Palmer King’s College London Tavinder Mangat King’s College London
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de .
All articles published by and in the Berlin Historical Review are licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Click here for more information: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en
Cover photo credit: Latheesh Mahendran, Revo remixa esfarto, 13 May 2015, accessible at:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:R1_RealRevolution.jpeg#filelinks
The Berlin Historical Review Vol.02/No.01 (2016)
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Contents
Editorial Welcome 04 Book Review: Denver Brunsman and David J. Silverman, editors. The American Revolution Reader Adam Simmons 06 Anti-Indian Radicalism during the Era of the American Revolution: Comments
and Reflections upon a Different Type of Revolution in the Early American
West, 1774-1795
Darren R. Reid 11 The Turkish Revolution and State Formation From Below Niall Finn 29 Open Call for Submissions 48 Open Access & Copyright Policy 49
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Editorial Welcome On behalf of the editorial board, we would like to welcome you to the second special
issue of the Berlin Historical Review and wish you all a happy new year!
As you might have already seen on our website, 2015 has been a year of change for
the Berlin Historical Review. Our editorial board underwent some fundamental
restructuring throughout the past months, and we would first like to use this
opportunity to thank the departing editorial board members David Coates and Sam
Walton for their service. With great pleasure, we would also like to announce the
arrival of the Berlin Historical Review’s three new editorial board members: Ashley
Palmer, Simon Smith and Tavinder Mangat!
Ashley Palmer has undertaken his Bachelor’s degree in History at King’s College at the
University of Cambridge, followed by the completion of the MRes programme in
History at King's College London. He is specialised in modern history and his research
interests focus on 20th Century British & European History, Cold War Studies, Human
Rights and the History of Political Thought. Simon Smith has completed his
undergraduate degree in History & Politics at Newcastle University, followed by a
Master’s degree in World History & Cultures at King's College London. He is currently
interning at the Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (BICOM) and his
specialisations include the History of International Relations, British Foreign Policy and
20th Century Imperialism. The third new member of our editorial board, Tavinder
Mangat, has joined the Berlin Historical Review after completing a Bachelor’s degree
in History at Brunel University, as well as a Master’s degree in World History & Cultures
at King's College London. She is especially interested in South Asian colonial and post-
colonial history, British colonial policy and Post-colonial heritage.
This second special issue of the Berlin Historical Review enjoys a focus on the theme of
revolution. Firstly, Adam Simmons reviews The American Revolution Reader, a
collection of essays edited by Denver Brunsman and David J. Silverman which draws
together work on a range of aspects of the American Revolution and which combines
established scholarship with newer research.
We are delighted that this issue also features an article by Dr. Darren Reid which
likewise looks at America during the revolutionary period. Shifting his attention away
from the events of the War of Independence, Darren Reid’s article considers the
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relationship between European settlers and Native American communities in the
Trans-Appalachian country, arguing that the period saw an equally revolutionary
change in this relationship – one that was to have a lasting impact on the development
of the United States.
Last but not least, Niall Finn takes a new look at the establishment of the Turkish state
in the 1920s. Applying Gramscian theory and E.P. Thompson’s historical methodology,
he produces a history from below of the period, paying particular attention to the
hitherto neglected roles of the Turkish working class and women’s movements in
forging the new nation from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
As usual, we hope that you will enjoy reading this second special issue of the Berlin
Historical Review and we look forward to receiving your comments and feedback. We
also welcome potential contributions for future issues at any time. Please do not
hesitate to get in touch with us: theberlinhistoricalreview@hotmail.com
Best wishes,
Ashley Palmer & Julia Kompe
Editor Editor-in-Chief
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Book Review
Denver Brunsman and David J. Silverman, editors. The American
Revolution Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. Pp.
460. Paperback $59.95/£42.99. ISBN: 9780415537575.
Adam Simmons
PhD History, Lancaster University
The American Revolution Reader is a collection of leading essays which uses classical
themes to discuss recent scholarship of the American Revolution. Its breadth of scope
makes it ideal for any student of the history of the birth of the United States. The
Reader consists of 21 essays by eminent historians approaching six central themes,
though this framework is liberal enough that essays are not entirely confined to their
designated theme. The first two essays are comparative, discussing the imperial
context by Ned C. Landsman and Eliga H. Gould. They set the scene of the Revolution
within the climate of the late eighteenth-century; the debate over home and imperial
rule. As a product of the climate the Revolution created an imperial crisis for the British
Empire, which is discussed in four thematic essays by T. H. Breen, John M. Murrin,
Woody Holton and Robert G. Parkinson. This crisis revealed the limits of the British
Empire over reaching and its inability to maximise its transnational resources. The
greatest enemy of the British army during the Revolution was distance. Distance
undermined the power of the Empire and under the heading of ‘War and the Home
Front,’ the Reader collects four essays by John Shy, Michael A. McDonnell, Mary Beth
Norton and Wayne E. Lee, with a focus on military, class and gender. The British army
appeared to fail to control the sentiment targeted towards it and remained alienated
from the American population throughout the Revolution. It would be wrong,
however, to suggest that the American victory provided a smooth transition to a new
nation. The importance of the theme of ‘Constitutionalism and Nation-Building,’ the
central result of the Revolution, is reflected in the five essays by Gary B. Nash, Gordon
S. Wood, Frank Lambert, Saul Cornell and Alan Taylor, the most of any one theme.
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These essays present the struggle that the newly independent Colonies faced in
creating their new nation with the numerous factions that existed across the political
landscape. Independence almost destroyed the fledgling America before it even had a
chance to establish itself. Four essays by Ira Berlin, Colin G. Calloway, Rosemarie Zagarri
and Aaron S. Fogleman debate the social impact of the Revolution amongst slaves,
Native Americans, women and immigrants respectively. It can be easy to forget the
impact of the Revolution on the disenfranchised. However, understanding the social
impact of the Revolution helps to lay the foundations for the drastic changes in
American society that followed after 1782: it proved that the norm could be
challenged. The social impact of the Revolution flows into the final section of the book,
which considers the legacies of the Revolution and comprises two essays by Maya
Jasanoff and Gordon S. Wood. Although there are many legacies of the Revolution,
these articles discuss the legacies of George Washington and of those who supported
the British Empire from within the victorious Colonies; not all Americans were
triumphant in the victory.
While this book does not present any new scholarship – all of the essays have
been previously published elsewhere – the Reader invaluably houses all these
important essays in a single body of text, ideal for the student consumer. The essays
are also presented in such a way as to stimulate thought regarding each individual
piece: the editors, before each essay, include a single page that summarises the key
concepts of the article and also asks questions for the reader to consider, in order to
provoke thought and encourage further study.
The range of themes covered in this volume brings together several perspectives
of the revolution and in doing so presents the different thematic layers in a way that
students can begin to grasp. The essays range in publication date from 1976 to 2008,
and so provide an insight into the changing historiography of the period as much as
they argue their own specific points. It is too easy to look at a narrow aspect of history
without considering the wider context of the event within its environment. This has led
the revolution in recent scholarship to, as Maya Jasanoff writes, “correct bluntly
patriotic portrayals of American independence” (p. 416).
The conclusions to be drawn from The American Revolution Reader are many and
varied in scope. The first section raises the debate of whether the Revolution was
enacted by the “provincial competence and confidence” of the colonies, as Landsman
argues (p. 18), or whether, as Gould suggests, it was the product of an overbearing
colonial government. Were the colonists driven self-motivated revolutionaries or was
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the Revolution the result of imperial provocation? The second section also discusses
this question of autonomy. Murrin builds on Gould in what he calls the “Countercyclical
Revolution”. Gould follows the idea that the Revolution was a countercyclical event
because “it ran against the prevailing integrative tendencies of the century” (p. 78). In
other words, the Revolution stands out as a special event as it stopped a century of
British imperial dominance. Moreover, Parkinson’s almost simplistic approach reminds
us of the simple, yet insightful, fact of the writing up of the twenty-seven grievances of
the Declaration of Independence which remained the official reasons for the
Declaration of Independence. However, were these grievances those of every colonist,
let alone every man, or were they only those of the wealthy elite whose power and
influence was undermined by the overbearing British Colonial Empire? Politics, though,
is contrasted with trade in the articles by Breen and Holton. Breen’s self-sufficiency
argument suggests the colonists had broken away from any dependency to Britain as
they learnt to sustain themselves in the wake of increased taxes in the previous
years. In contrast, trade, to Holton, was not a matter of dependency but, rather, the
Revolution was supported by the Southern colonies in particular as protection from
the overbearing state previously outlined by Gould. He argues that the slave trade
provoked the Southern colonies into action, as they were worried Britain’s increasing
anti-slavery stance would damage its economy and that slaves could cause unrest if
they latched onto this British message.
Other conclusions to be drawn are predominantly social. Three sections are
devoted to social questions and analysis and particularly the notion of alienation. How
did different portions of society react and become affected by the Revolution? Shy
suggests that British alienation of the populace allowed the revolutionaries to win the
hearts of the colonists. This alienation was present throughout the three social classes
present in the colonies defined by McDonnell as gentlemen, the “middle” and the
“lower” sort. Lee argues that it was the turnover of the militia that undermined any
hope for a virtuous war and so the alienated classes, along with British tactics,
destroyed hope for reconciliation. In contrast, Nash disagrees and argues that the fact
that the independence of the colonies took five years to implement shows that the
Revolution did not aim to produce a new social order. Taylor believes that the common
people of the Revolution actually lost out in the aftermath. He argues that frontier
expansion led to more elections and lobbying and that the rich and influential rose
further into prominence rather than the militias of the common folk who fought
throughout the war. Wood’s notion of “disinterestedness” led to, what Cornell
labelled, a “legacy of plebeian populism” (pp. 296-7). Some wanted the new nation to
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be built upon a politics of moral initiative above a politics of personal self-interest.
Politics was for the masses, not the few.
Another important conclusion to be drawn from the essays concerns the impact
of the revolution upon different minorities. Berlin discusses the “maturation of Afro-
American culture” (p. 324), an interesting outlook considering the earlier article by
Holton. Calloway brings forth the impact of the Revolution on Native Americans who,
as he argues, had a relatively good entwined existence before post-Independence
expansion. The impact on women is dealt with by both Norton and Zagarri. Norton
argues using the notion of motherhood that female colonists had strong family ties to
Britain and often felt helpless in their situation within an international family feud.
Zagarri, on the other hand, portrays women as having a more central role in the new
republic, but although female equality was acknowledged, there was a sense of fear of
opening the flood gates in politics by enlarging the franchise. Liberty was not for
all. The idea of liberty is also questioned by Lambert and Fogleman. Lambert poses the
question of the “free religious market”. Was it designed to protect the freedom of
religion or to protect the unity of the new republic from internal religious divisions?
Fogleman’s questioning of the idea of liberty is formed in relation to immigration. He
contrasts the fact that the proportion of free immigrants within the population rose
from a quarter to two thirds after independence with the fact that the Revolution
disrupted trade, particularly the slave trade. Were the increasing numbers of
immigrants actually seeking liberty? The ending articles on legacy are a fitting end to
the collection. The underlying theme throughout the Reader is the overall legacy of
each individual set of arguments for the historiography of the Revolutionary period.
Despite the many good attributes of this volume, there are no essays on
increasingly important aspects of the history of the American Revolution. For example,
it does not explicitly discuss the global context of the Revolution between the spheres
of Britain and France and within their prolonged continental conflicts between the
Seven Years War and the War of 1812. Another excluded theme is the role of Islam on
the continent, particularly amongst American slaves, rather than placing Americans
within a purely Christian world: Given the freedom of religion that the constitution
would later promise, this is a noteworthy omission. A comprehensive collection of
themes and arguments concerning the American Revolution, however, is impossible to
achieve in a single work of under 500 pages so these exclusions hardly diminish the
value of those essays presented. The editors, in many ways, achieve their stated goal
to “represent current interpretations of timeless issues and new trends in scholarship
over the past generation” (p. ix), but many essays, though discussing timeless issues,
do still portray an arguably rather traditional view of the Revolution which may not
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fulfil the more inquisitive reader. If there is one true flaw of this book it would be that
only one of the contributors is based outside of the USA; Michael A. McDonnell at the
University of Sydney. This has inevitably resulted in a rather nationalistic history,
particularly evident in the final essay, Gordon S. Wood’s ‘The Greatness of George
Washington’. The “Great Man” school of history is reductionist and Washington was as
equally lucky as he was “great”. In particular, his military leadership was as much down
to the inept ability of the British Empire to take advantage of victories than his own
personal character. For example, he was sighted at the aftermath of the Battle of Long
Island where the British army could have plausibly destroyed the Continental
Army. The Reader would further benefit students if they read it alongside F. D. Cogliano
and K. E. Phimister (eds.), Revolutionary America 1763-1815, A Sourcebook, published
by Routledge in 2011. The book itself would also benefit from the inclusion of a source
bibliography of the period such as critical editions of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist
Papers and the personal writings of eminent Revolutionary figures and those who
fought during it, particularly the sources published by the Library of America that are
not available in the Revolutionary American Sourcebook. Nonetheless, despite the
book’s minor flaws, it remains an invaluable single corpus of important essays to
accompany aspiring students of the American Revolution. The breadth of the themes
covered in this volume means it should be read by all students but could also be of
equal use to scholars, in having these influential essays published together in a single
work.
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Anti-Indian Radicalism during the Era of the American Revolution:
Comments and Reflections upon a Different Type of Revolution in
the Early American West, 1774-1795
Dr. Darren R. Reid
Lecturer in History, Coventry University
Abstract: West of the Appalachian Mountains a distinct sectional revolution occurred in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century which was rooted not in the better understood events
surrounding the American Revolution but in the evolving nature of European American and
Native American interactions in the region. From the outbreak of Dunmore’s War in 1774
until the signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, the Trans-Appalachian country was mired
in a generation defining conflict which served to radicalise western anti-Indian views. Though
staunchly anti-Indian attitudes had existed prior to the 1770s - and had certainly found violent
expression - the twenty year war for the Trans-Appalachian country normalised such views,
bringing them from the cultural fringe to the societal centre. Among the European Americans
who poured into the Trans-Appalachian region, the ardent resistance they met, in part
facilitated by further fundamental changes in Indian country, served to foundationally alter
their perception of the Indians by severely deepening anti-Indian resentment and making
racial acrimony a widespread part of their emergent frontier culture. The common and long
lasting experience of violence in the Trans-Appalachian west, particularly in areas such as
Kentucky, encouraged the region’s growing European American population to self-identify as
victims; their conceptualisation of the Indians had to account for that particular sense of
community. In a period of twenty years, stalwart anti-Indian attitudes were normalised by
the experience of war, a revolution in perception which helped to separate the cultures of
east and west in the early United States.
Keywords: American Revolution, anti-Indian radicalism, Trans-Appalachian country,
American frontier, Kentucky
Setting aside the question of whether or not the American Revolution was as radical as
Gordon Wood famously argued, at least two fundamental changes occurred west of
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the Appalachian Mountains in the last quarter of the eighteenth century that had little
to do with the political revolution in the east.1 Stephen Aron, in his study of the
Kentucky frontier, touched upon one such revolutionary shift which, from the
perspective of its participants, was significantly more radical in nature than those
events concerning the thirteen colonies. The transformation of the Shawnee and
Cherokee from long term enemies into staunch allies was, as Aron correctly
highlighted, a seismic shift that turned relations in Indian country upon their head.2 It
completely changed the aboriginal map of the American interior, transforming
Kentucky, once a buffer zone between those antagonistic tribes, into a symbol of
cooperation and mutual support. It became the centre of a new relationship which was
built around a common identity that was defined in opposition to the European
Americans who were increasingly encroaching upon their lands.3 That was not,
however, the limit of the fundamental changes which were occurring in the Trans-
Appalachian country.
By resisting European American settlement as effectively and as determinedly
as they did, the Shawnee, Cherokee, and their numerous allies set off a conceptual
revolution among their enemies. Faced with one of the bloodiest and most prolonged
frontier wars in North American history, European Americans in the Trans-Appalachian
country discarded the nuance of past world views in order to adopt a hard, racialised
construct of the region’s Indian population. Prior to the 1770s, a meaningful middle
ground, as Richard White paradigmatically put it, existed between European
Americans and Native Americans.4 The war for the Trans-Appalachian country,
1 For a very brief overview of the interpretive dissonance concerning the revolution see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1993); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005); John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Reflections on Economic Interpretation, Slavery, the People Put of Doors, and Top Down versus Bottom Up”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 68 (2011): 649-656; Michael A. McDonnell, “Men Out of Time: Confronting History and Myth”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 68 (2011): 644-648; and Alfred F. Young, Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 215-261. 2 Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Stephen Aron (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), pp. 37-38. 3 For Kentucky as buffer between the Shawnee and Cherokee see James Mooney, “The Old Cherokee Country [Map]” and “The Cherokee and their Neighbours [Map]” in James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee: Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Government Printing Office: Washington, 1902), pp. 15, 23. 4 For theoretical spaces of interaction and cooperation between European and Native Americans see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and its Peoples, 1724-1774 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999).
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however, destroyed that theoretical space; middle ground became battle ground.
Anti-Indian prejudices had certainly existed before the 1770s but events during and
after that decade turned what had been a divisive and inconsistent philosophy into a
widely held, deeply pejorative belief which appeared, to those cultures that had
developed in the west, to be a self-evident truth. Before the 1770s, there were cultures
which accommodated Indian haters; after that period, however, there was, in the west,
a culture which promoted and even demanded Indian hatred. To put that another way,
and to borrow a theoretical framing device from Ira Berlin, there were cultures with
Indian hatred and there were Indian hating cultures.5 Whatever can be said about the
American Revolution, the changes occurring between the Appalachian Mountains and
the Mississippi River in the late eighteenth century were radical indeed.
The shift in world views that was occurring in the west was rooted in a crisis
brought about by a clash of evolving ideas and a rapidly changing set of external
circumstances. In the backcountry, European American views of the Indians had
suffered during the Seven Years War, becoming increasingly negative as a result of that
conflict.6 From 1774 until 1795, however, European American inhabitants of the Trans-
Appalachian country were confronted by two decades of almost unbroken, deeply
violent, and intensely bitter conflict – their pre-existing negative bias, exposed to those
conditions, was transformed into a negative certainty. Historians who have examined
the re-framing of the Indians into a racial group have failed to settle upon a consensus
as to when that event occurred, identifying eras as divergent as the late seventeenth
and late eighteenth centuries as the moment of that transformation. Of these it is
Patrick Griffin’s argument, that the period of the American Revolution marked the
greatest change, which bears the most weight.7 Griffin identified that era as a type of
theoretical ‘frontier’ – following the Frederick Jackson Turner model – in American
5 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 8-14. 6 See Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754- 1767 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), pp. 3-4; and Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004); for a broader discussion of the Seven Years War as a key turning point in American history see Lawrence Henry Gipson, “The American Revolution as Aftermath of the Great War for the Empire, 1754-1763”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 65, No.1 (Mar 1950): pp. 86-104. 7 See Alder T. Vaughan, The Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 13-33; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp. 173-225; John Grenier, First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 11- 12; Jane T. Merritt, At the Cross Roads: Indians and Empires, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 285-295; and Patrick Griffin American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and the Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), pp. 12-14.
Darren R. Reid The Berlin Historical Review
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history, a watershed; but it was more than a national shift in anti-Indian
consciousness.8
It was a turning point mired in the specific experience of the region in which it
occurred. It was a conceptual revolution which marked a philosophical splintering of
western and eastern world views that would not be reconciled until western anti-
Indian views found national acceptance in the context of the Indian wars of the mid-
late nineteenth century. In 1832 and 1833, Black Hawk, the leader of this period’s
epilogistic war, would be celebrated as an ennobled sensation in the east; in the west,
he would be antithetically burned in effigy.9 The ideological break which was reflected
in that contrast was rooted in the Trans-Appalachian country’s anti-Indian revolution.
Twenty years of psychological warfare, sieges, and wilderness domination failed to
drive European Americans out of that country, but it did succeed in fundamentally
souring western perspectives of the Indians and, as a result, drew a conceptual line
down the spine of the Appalachians.10 Unlike in the east, where writers such as James
Fenimore Cooper could comfortably romanticise and ennoble the Indians, European
Americans in the west experienced almost an entire generation of warfare and, as a
result, came to self-identify as victims of the Indians. It was through that lens that they
constructed their particular understanding of the peoples against whom they were
fighting.11
Since the first regular settlement was founded in Kentucky in 1775, warfare with
a spectrum of tribes, including the Shawnee, Cherokee, Mingo, Miami, Wyandot, and
Delaware, had been a constant and defining feature of the region. By 1783
approximately seven percent of Kentucky’s population had been killed in combat with
Native Americans – to put that number into perspective, the thirteen rebelling colonies
had lost just one percent of their population during the Revolutionary War.12 Such a
high casualty rate hints at the broad impact violence had upon the region and, in
8 Griffin, American Leviathan, p. 15. 9 Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the American Heart (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007), pp.301-302. 10 Griffin identifies the era of the American Revolution as a turning point but that period is too restrictive. The total duration of the war during this period, which extended long past the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, must be accounted in any analysis of this period. The continuation of the war for the Trans- Appalachian country beyond 1782 allowed the region to be exposed to the violence of wilderness warfare for another thirteen years, a period which, even considered in isolation, eclipsed the exposure of the Seven Years War in terms of its capacity to spread the experience of warfare and underline any sense of self- identified victimisation. Griffin, American Leviathan, p. 15. 11 For an example romanticised literary Indians in the east see James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (New York: W.A. Townshead & Company, 1859). 12 John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), p. 144.
The Berlin Historical Review Vol.02/No.01 (2016)
15
particular, the ordeal faced by those who survived. Bodies – and there were many –
were routinely mutilated; women and men had watched as their spouses were brought
down by tomahawk and musket ball; entire communities were besieged and assaulted,
enduring, as a collective, military actions designed to drive them back east; and for
those not directly involved a vibrant and long lived oral culture ensured that they were
exposed to many of the macabre details. Therein lay the root of the western revolution
in anti-Indian thought. Bodies, real and imagined, the latter just as potent as the
former, piled up on the frontier and, as a result, world views shifted in order to
accommodate that reality. When Simon Kenton narrowly escaped being burned alive,
he reflected the potential of past violence to change future expectations and
aspirations: ‘I felt determined to avenge myself of the wrongs that had been inflicted
on me. I joined myself to the garrison and went with almost every expedition that was
sent out [against the Indians]... whenever there was a party going out, I was ready to
go with them’.13 Through prolonged exposure to one of the bloodiest frontier wars in
US history, anti-Indian thought and action was thoroughly normalised; moderation
gave way to radicalisation.
Violence during this period was more than an incidental detail. It was a process,
an experience, the importance of which was captured in the surviving record of the
region’s fundamental oral culture. Through recorded oral testimony, which gave a
voice to those typically denied a detailed or meaningful presence in the historic record,
memories of horror and revulsion were captured and revealed to be common, a key
part of the Trans-Appalachian experience.14 When the recorded oral collection of
Presbyterian minister John Shane is analysed, it demonstrates an almost overwhelming
obsession with the memory of the war. In spite of Shane’s attempt to record a tradition
which would have served as the basis for a history of the Presbyterian Church in
Kentucky and Southern Ohio, he found that virtually all of those with whom he spoke
dwelt disproportionately upon the conflict with the Indians.15 The unguided nature of
the accounts which Shane recorded gave his subjects freedom, but almost all roads
seemed to lead back to the Indians and their means of making war. In the resultant
collection, which comprised more than three hundred separate interviews, 75 per cent
13 Jonathan Alder and Larry L. Nelson, eds., A History of Jonathan Alder: His Captivity and Life with the Indians (Arkon: University of Arkon Press, 2002), pp. 174-175. 14 For a discussion on the critical opportunities and limits of the Shane collection see Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 7-39. 15 For Shane’s oral record as the basis of an attempt to write a history of Presbyterianism in Kentucky and southern Ohio see Perkins, Border Life, p. 9 and Unknown Author, “Early Indiana Presbyterianism excerpt [excerpt – pages removed from original source]”, John D. Shane Papers 63M289, University of Kentucky Archives.
Darren R. Reid The Berlin Historical Review
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of all the individuals mentioned were actively engaged in, or victims of, the war.16
When Shane spoke with an early settler named John Wilson, for instance, he gained
no insight into the evolution of the church, but obtained instead a potent glimpse into
the human cost of the fighting. Recalling the day when the body of one of his fellows,
recently killed by the Indians, was returned to his wife, Wilson reported to Shane that
the newly widowed woman had ‘examine[d] all the wounds of her husband... very
carefully, fondly, at first without a tear [and] the[n] suddenly gave way to her grief.’17
In another account, Shane was vicariously exposed to Sally Wilcox’s terror on the day
she had witnessed the pursuit of her husband by a band of Indian raiders: ‘Run, Daniel,
Run!’ she had ‘hallooed to him as hard as she could.’18 In another such account, Shane
was again exposed by proxy to the emotional turmoil caused by spouses who
disappeared. When John Hayden apparently vanished, Shane was told that his wife
‘looked like she would go distracted’ from worry.19
In another of Shane’s recollections, typical in its candour and its subject matter,
his interviewee, William Niblick, described the day he, as a child, had witnessed the
recovery of John Wymore’s body –sans scalp– from the wilderness. ‘[I was] hanging
on to my mother’s apron,’ he would later recall, ‘and heard the women crying...I saw
them bring Wymore in [on] a sheet that was all bloody; he [had been left by the
Indians] hanging on a pole.’20 When George Fearis spoke about the early settlement
of the country, memories of horror and distress were not far away. One of the
incidents he described concerned the day he and a friend had ‘saw the hog at
something’. Investigating the odd sight, Fearis’s companion discovered that the pig
had in fact been feasting upon the remains of one of his –recently de-scalped– children.
According to Fearis, the child’s father ‘gathered what of it he could, and took it along
and buried it.’21 Such incidents made deep impressions. When Shane interviewed Mr.
Spence, a comparative latecomer to the Kentucky country who arrived in the 1790s,
his short account of his brother’s death contained several telling details. Though the
incident was, in the broader context of the war, fairly unremarkable – his brother
16 A survey of Shane’s interviews was turned into a database of 11,179 individual European American settlers. Not included were individuals who fell out with the date (1774-1795) or geographic (Kentucky, western Virginia, and southern Ohio) ranges of this survey. Of the 11,179 records created, 6,148, 55 per cent, were classified as being directly involved in combat through participation in a confrontation with the Indians, suffering an attack, experiencing a siege, or being reported as dead, etc. A further 2,236, 20 per cent, were described as joining an anti-Indian militia parties but were not recorded as engaging the Indians directly. Database compiled from John D. Shane ‘Interviews’ located in the Draper Manuscripts 11CC, 12CC, 13CC, 16CC, 17CC. 17 John D. Shane, “Interview with Captain John Wilson”, Draper Manuscripts 17CC6-25. 18 John D. Shane, “Interview with an Unnamed Subject”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC177. 19 John D. Shane, “Interview with a Unnamed Person in Cincinnati”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC279-283. 20 John D. Shane, “Interview with William Niblick”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC84-85. 21 John D. Shane, “Interview with George Fearis”, Draper Manuscripts 13CC238-244.
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17
stepped out of his house and was shot – to Spence it was worthy of deep and long
lasting investigation and reflection. Because of the tracks discovered near his brother’s
home, Spence had deduced that three Indians had been involved in his death, one of
whom had ‘stood off at a distance and held a horse’; according to Spence, such an
animal had been stolen ‘from a young man about 2 miles in’, suggesting that his
brother’s death was one part in a longer chain of events. The actual death had been,
according to Spence’s investigation, a sudden and close range affair: ‘He was not more
than 10 steps from the Indians when they shot him.’ To underline the episode’s
personal importance, he then added that ‘I have measured it many a time.’22 The
recorded oral testimony of the region reflected the visceral nature of the war, the ways
in which it intersected with daily life and routine, and the depth of the memories it
helped to forge as well as causative links between experiences of violence and later
actions and attitudes.
When, in 1777, Hugh McGary had found the Indian who had killed his stepson,
he was moved not only to take the life of the perpetrator but to carry out a morbid
form of post-mortem retribution. Rather than scalping the Indian, or committing some
other act of hasty mutilation, McGary had instead set about the lengthy and gory task
of butchering, slicing, dicing, and ultimately feeding the body to the dogs at the
township in which he lived.23 When John Wymore was killed, the men of his settlement
had set out in pursuit of his killer; they had found an Indian, upon whom they presumed
guilt, severed his head, and ‘cut up’ the remains ‘for the dogs’.24 In 1782 a band of
European Americans, from a settlement which had recently survived an Indian attack,
discovered two Indian bodies in the nearby wilderness. With the first body sunk to the
bottom of a pond, and thus inaccessible, they instead turned upon the second, a young
man around ‘17 or 18’ years of age they discovered in a thicket, wrapped carefully in a
blanket. The body, which they brought back to their settlement, elicited the sympathy
from many of the town’s women who commented upon its ‘fine [and] tender hands
and feet’. Many of them then ‘begged that he might be buried’ but, unmoved, the men
of the township laid the corpse out in a public space where it ‘made a greater smell
than a hundred horses’ as it was graphically consumed by the town’s livestock. As one
of the settlement’s inhabitants would later recall, ‘I saw my sow in his belly more than
a dozen times.’25 Sympathy was not alien on the increasingly violent frontier, but it
was overpowered by those who were determined to extract revenge, symbolic or
otherwise, from their enemy.
22 John D. Shane, “Interview with ------ Spence”, Draper Manuscripts 13CC198-199. 23 John D. Shane, “Interview with Jacob Stevens”, Draper Manuscripts 12CC135. 24 John D. Shane, “Interview with ----- Wymore”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC128-132. 25 John D. Shane, “Interview with Mrs. Arnold”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC241-245.
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The experience of war changed people. In 1783, for example, the Davis family
of Fisher’s Station was attacked by an Indian raiding party who killed the family
patriarch and kidnapped the four children present. Mrs. Davis, who had ‘gone out in
the night to bring in some clothes’ was, by virtue of her location, saved from either
death or captivity but, from her vantage point, witnessed the death of her husband.
Davis was, at that moment, caught by indecision, pressured between her desire to go
to her family and her fear that a similar fate to her husband’s awaited her. According
to one of her acquaintances, ‘There she stood in agony, saying “I must go in”, and then
her heart would fail her, and she would turn back, and then go again.’ The pressure
and distress of that moment was not soon in passing: ‘After this tragedy her
countenance put on a change, and she got all her sleep alone in the daytime. She
would be up and walk the room all night.’26 Peter Silver has argued that the Indians of
this period were perceived to have acted in a ‘terroristic’ manner, fostering a sense of
fear that preceded and, in some cases, negated the need for their actual presence.27
Certainly, they were effective at spreading anxiety, and not always through the direct
use of violence. On one occasion they ‘came along and stole all of John Smith’s bed
clothes’ and, on another, ‘threw a couple of frogs’ into an unattended pan of boiling
sugar, subtle acts of psychological warfare that told their intended victims they were,
at all times, in danger.28 Fear was a weapon that the Indians wielded expertly; when
Tom Berry’s family received word that an Indian raiding party might be in the vicinity
they reportedly ‘began to cry as if the Indians were at the door.’29 In spite of the panic
they instilled, however, the Indians were unable to shift, through threat or terror, those
who had come to claim their country. By deliberately using non-direct violence, or
psychological tactics, the Indians had theoretically reduced the need to use direct
(physical) violence but their imaginary sword was double edged. It did inspire some
European Americans to abandon the west, but the allure of apparently free land was
strong and many of their victims stayed regardless, responding to threat, fear, and
suffering through other means.30
26 John D. Shane, “Interview with Sarah Graham”, Draper Manuscripts 12CC45-53. 27 Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbours: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008), pp. 41-42. 28 John D. Shane, “Interview with Benjamin Stites”, Draper Manuscripts 13CC56-57. For a broader discussion on the role played by psychological warfare in this conflict see Darren R. Reid, “Soldiers of Settlement: Violence and Psychological Warfare on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775-1783” Eras, Vol. 10 (2008): http://arts.monash.edu.au/publications/eras/edition-10/reid-article.pdf. 29 John D. Shane, “Interview with Nathaniel Hart”, Draper Manuscripts 17CC209-213. 30 For fear as a reason to leave the west see “Journal of William Calk, 1775”, Calk Family Collection 2005M14, Box 7, Folder 96, Kentucky Historical Society and John D. Shane, “Interview with Benjamin Allen”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC67-69.
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By the 1780s, anti-Indian sentiment in the west was, generally, serving to unite
rather than divide communities. In 1764 the march of the Paxton Boys, a vigilante
group determined to avenge themselves on the local – peaceful – Indian community,
had highlighted how divisive anti-Indian radicalism could be, even in the aftermath of
the Seven Years War. In spite of their willingness to tar all Indians with the same
proverbial brush they encountered a not insignificant amount of resistance from many
of their peers.31 That was not the case in 1780 when, in the wake of a successful
incursion by a multi-tribal Indian force, between eight hundred and one thousand
Kentuckians, approximately eighty percent of the adult male population of the country,
gathered to march upon the northern tribes. Even those who had remained behind
had done so with an air of martial responsibility, to ‘protect the settlements,’ whilst
those unable to take part directly in the operation – women and children – also played
a role as they ‘scraped up corn...and made bread’ and prepared other necessary
provisions.32 Prior to 1780, the community of early Kentucky had been united in
defence, enduring numerous sieges and assaults during the country’s first half-decade
of European American settlement but, by the turn of the next decade, their unity was
such that they were now willing to proactively seek, though not necessarily accomplish,
a reckoning.33 Following five years of continuous raids and assaults, retribution, the
death of Indians, was, by 1780, seen as their ‘only hope’.34 In 1782, following a second
successful mass strike by the northern tribes, one thousand Kentuckians again
gathered to make war upon the Indians whilst, in 1786, following another four years
of conflict and violent intercourse, another comparable campaign was launched.35 On
that latter expedition Hugh McGary, the same man who had diced up the body of his
step-son’s killer and fed the remains to his dogs, murdered an elderly Shawnee chief
31 For examples of works dealing with the Paxton Boys see Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); James Kirby Martin, “The Return of the Paxton Boys and the Historical State of the Pennsylvania Frontier”, Pennsylvania History, Vol. 38 (1971): 117-133 and Brooke Hindle, “The March of the Paxton Boys”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 3 (1946): 462-486. 32 John D. Shane, “Interview with Ephriam Sandusky”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC141-145 and John Bradford, “Notes on Kentucky” in Thomas D. Clark, ed., The Voice of the Frontier: John Bradford’s Notes on Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 37. See also William Hayden English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, 1778-1783 and Life of General George Rogers Clark (Indianapolis: The Bowell-Merrill Company, 1896): Volume Two, pp. 697-733 and Lowell Hayes Harrison, George Rogers Clark and the War in the West (1976; reprint, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), pp. 69-76. 33 The principle exception to the rule of defensive collection action in Kentucky prior to 1780 was George R. Clark’s march against the British in Illinois but the fear of Indian raids served to limit participation in that campaign rather than encourage it. European American settlers were unwilling to march north when, so doing, they would leave their homes vulnerable to further raids. For Clark’s march on Illinois see “Letter from George R. Clark to Colonel George Mason, November 19th, 1779”, Microfilm B/C 593m, Filson Historical Society, pp. 1-6 and John D. Shane, “Interview with Josiah Collins”, Draper Manuscripts 12CC68. 34 Bradford, “Notes on Kentucky”, p. 37. 35 John D. Shane, “Interview with Isaac Clinkenbeard”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC3 and Larry L. Nelson A Man of Distinction Among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1999), p. 127.
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who had surrendered peacefully to the invaders, burying a tomahawk in his head as he
cried ‘d—n you, I’ll show you Blue Licks play.’36 The ‘Blue Licks’ in question was the site
of a disastrous defeat the Kentuckians had suffered four years earlier. As there was no
credible reason for McGary to suspect that the elderly man before him had had
anything to do with the defeat at the Blue Licks (he had not), it seems that McGary’s
desire to extract revenge by killing practically any Indian had diminished not at all over
the course of almost half a decade.37
Faced with military defeats, ongoing assaults, and the mutilated remains of
those they held dear, European Americans responded to the war by dehumanising and
homogenising their enemy. In 1782, when colonel William Crawford was executed in
retaliation for the Gnadenhutten massacre – in which over ninety pacifist Indians were
systematically butchered at a Moravian mission town – Hugh Henry Brackenridge
quickly arranged for the publication of two captivity narratives which described, in lurid
detail, the failed expedition that had led to Crawford’s death.38 One of those accounts,
by Dr. John Knight, provided a particularly grim and macabre description of Crawford’s
torture and – eventual – execution, dwelling upon the colonel’s slow roasting as a
means to ‘induce our government to take some effectual steps to chastise and
suppress’ the Indians.39 In that publication the massacre of over ninety pacifist Indians
at the Moravian mission town of Gnadenhutten, the necessary context of that episode,
was ignored. Instead, the pamphlet used the language of atrocity to create an image
of victimisation, emphasising the brutality of the Indians whilst painting a deeply
misleading portrayal of European American innocence. In Knight’s narrative, the
wilderness came alive with hidden, unseen threats which snatched the unsuspecting
away: ‘The old man lagged behind...While we were preparing to reprimand him for
making a noise, I heard an Indian halloo...After this we did not hear the man call again,
neither did he ever come up to us anymore.’40 It is the scene of Crawford’s execution,
however, where the greatest care was made to assassinate the collective character of
the Indians: ‘When we went to the fire the Col. was stripped naked, ordered to sit down
36 John D. Shane, “Interview with Isaac Clinkenbeard”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC3. 37 For a broader discussion on McGary’s actions see Faragher, Daniel Boone, p. 254. 38 For Gnadenhutten see Harper, “Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence”, pp. 621-643 and Leonard Sadosky, “Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre: The Contest for Power in the Public World of the Revolutionary Pennsylvania Frontier” in David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson, eds., The Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814 (East Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 2001); for the Brackenridge’s publication see R.W.G Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier (1949, reprint; New York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 44. 39 “A Letter from Hugh Henry Brackenrige to “The Public”, August 3rd, 1782” in Hugh Henry Brackenrige, ed., Indian Atrocities: Narratives of the Perils and Sufferings of Dr. Knight and John Slover, Among the Indians, During the Revolutionary War, with Short Memoirs of Colonel Crawford and John Slover (Cincinnati: U. P. James, 1867), pp. 5-6. 40 John Knight, “The Narrative of Dr. Knight” in Brackenrige, ed., Indian Atrocities, p. 16.
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21
by the fire and then they beat him with sticks and their fists...The Indian men then took
up their guns and shot powder into the Colonel’s body, from his feet as far up as his
neck...Three of four Indians by turns would take up, individually, [a] burning piece of
wood and apply it to his naked body, already burnt black with powder...Some of the
squaws took broad boards, upon which they would carry a quantity of burning coals
and hot embers and throw on him, so that in a short time he had nothing but coals of
fire and hot ashes to walk on.’41
Such sensational language was certainly evocative, simultaneously capturing
and informing, the shape of the west’s emerging hatred of the Indians.42 Brackenridge
was identifying the Indians as a broad group who could be collectively characterised by
violence and brutality, in effect articulating a framework of cruelty as a framework of
understanding. By virtue of omission, Brackenridge’s publication implied the opposite
was true of European Americans. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the
State of Virginia, articulated an interpretation of the Indians that was wholly
incompatible with Brackenridge’s, assigning to them the same potential for good and
evil as his own ethnic peers.43 Such an interpretation was diametrically opposed to
Brackenridge’s and, as a result, Jefferson drew a theoretical line not only between the
pair, but between himself and the denizens of the west. Jefferson recognised plurality
in the Indians, not just tribally, but on a fundamental and individual level; Brackenridge,
on the other hand, ignored nuance in favour broad stereotypes supported by a
particular and prejudiced interpretation of the evidence available. Writing in 1792 in
an open letter which was printed prominently in the Kentucky Gazette he stated, rather
bluntly, that ‘men who are unacquainted with the savages are like young women who
have read romances, and have an improper idea of the Indian character in one case as
the female mind has of real life in the other.’44 In other words, the experience of the
west had taught European Americans living in that country to think about the Indians
41 Knight, “The Narrative of Dr. Knight”, p. 23. 42 That being said, there is evidence which suggests the later popularity of those narratives in locations deeply affected by the violence though it seems unlikely that pamphlet was the specific cause of further anti-Indian sentiment. Rather, if the document played a role it was likely that it provided confirmation bias, seemingly demonstrating the truth of assumptions and ideas already widely held by the community. For the popularity of Knight’s account see Daniel Trabue, “The Narrative of Daniel Trabue: Memorandum Made by me D Trabue in the Year 1827 of a Jurnal of Events from Memory and Tradition [sic]” in Chester Raymond Young, ed., Westward into Kentucky: The Narrative of Daniel Trabue (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1981, Reprinted 2004), pp. 142-143 and John D. Shane, “Interview with Captain Marcus Richardson”, Draper Manuscripts 12CC126-127. 43 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A New Edition, Prepared by the Author (Richmond: J.W Randolph, 1853), pp. 63-69. 44 “Farther and Concluding Thought on the Indian War by H. H. Brackenrige of Pittsburgh”, Kentucky Gazette (Bradford), May 19th, 1792, p. 1.
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in a way that was alien to those who were separated from them by distance and, as
Brackenridge characterised it, the naivety of circumstance.
After the fighting had come to an end in the mid-1790s, the prejudices of war
continued to inform the attitudes of peace. One month after the climactic battle which
crippled the northern Indian war effort, European Americans in Cincinnati started a
race riot, demonstrating in the process that even friendly, allied tribes were perceived
through a lens that had been shaped by conflict.45 It mattered little that the Choctaws,
whom they targeted, were known allies of the American cause.46 Nor did it matter
that they had served as scouts for General Anthony Wayne, and thus helped to bring
about the final victory that had ended the war. What mattered to those who started
the riot was the ethnicity of their prey and, most importantly, the characteristics they
associated with it. When one of the rioters asked the local proprietor who had allowed
the Choctaw to drink in his establishment ‘is this the kind of Company you keep,’ he
was not asking a question; he was making a statement.47 The Cincinnati rioters were
expressing a sentiment, a blanket and pejorative bigotry that had become common
and, though not universal, was now widely accepted throughout much of the west,
particularly south of the Ohio River where the fighting had gone on longest. When, in
1811, Indiana Governor William Henry Harrison required an army to attack the pan-
Indian movement that was coalescing around two Shawnee brothers at Prophetstown
he was able to rely upon the support of Kentuckians whose staunch anti-Indian world
view, alongside their willingness to kill Indians, had remained firmly intact.48 During
the subsequent War of 1812, Kentuckians and other westerners once again found
ample opportunity to fight their old enemies whilst the actual fighting, and the losses
they suffered, served to replenish the anti-Indian cultural coffers of the region.49 When
Black Hawk led an armed resistance in northern Illinois in 1832 it should perhaps come
as no surprise that, in response to the five hundred warriors he was able to mobilise,
Illinois raised a volunteer army nine thousand strong. When Black Hawk, recognising
45 “Letter from Secretary Sargent to Captain Pierce, September 8th, 1794” and “Secretary Sargent to Judge McMillan, September 8th, 1794” in William Henry Smith, ed., The St. Clair Papers: The Life and Public Services of Arthur St. Clair, Soldier of the Revolutionary War; President of the Congress; and Governor of the Northwest Territory with his Correspondence and Other Papers, Volume II (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Company, 1882), pp. 327-328. 46 Kentucky Gazette (Bradford), April 27th, 1793, p. 3. 47 “Testimony of N.R. Hopkins, September 18th, 1794”, Arthur St. Clair Papers, Roll 4, Folder 7 MIC 96 Series 10, Ohio Historical Society. 48 Robert M. Owen, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Normal: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), pp. 214-215. 49 Elias Darnall, A Journal, Containing an Accurate and Interesting Account of the Hardships, Sufferings, Battles, Defeat, and Captivity, of those Heroic Kentucky Volunteers and Regulars, Commanded by General Winchester, in the Years 1812-1813. Also, Two Narratives by Men that were Wounded in the Battles on the River Raisin, and Taken Captive by the Indians (Paris: Joel R. Lyle, 1813).
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23
the futility of his position, had attempted to surrender to the militia on May 14th, the
party he dispatched bearing the white flag was fired upon and forced to retreat.50 As
one Illinoisan put it, his fellows acted with a ‘cowardly vindictiveness.’51 Illinois’ largest
donor of immigrants was Kentucky.52
War is not necessarily a radicalising force, it does not have to erode moderation
or push it to the fringe. In the Trans-Appalachian country, however, the war with the
Indians did just that. Because of their determination to preserve their territorial
integrity, and their willingness to leverage direct and indirect violence to further their
cause, the Indians exposed a generation of frontier settlers to one of the most intense
and long lasting backcountry wars in North American history. That situation created a
type of cultural momentum in the region that transformed the breadth and depth of
anti-Indian sentiment in the west, attaching it not just to abstract ideas of savagery but
a specific narrative of self-realised victimisation and the selective identification of
wartime atrocities. That narrative was rooted in the region where it came into being;
it was fundamentally western and, because of that, it helped to draw a theoretical line
along the Appalachian Mountains which served to separate, on that key issue, east
from west, backcountry from front country. In the west the American Revolution
occurred after its own fashion, but so too did another concurrent – parallel but
separate – layer of social revolution. The transformed way in which western Americans
conceptualised the Indians was not a complete break with what had gone before
(neither was the American Revolution) but it was a radical shift that marked not only a
vast increase of the breadth of anti-Indian sentiment but an ideological divergence
from the east. Where warfare with the Indians was an abstract notion, it was a distant
affair that could be romanticised and forgiven. In the west, where memories were
fresh and experience broad, Indian hatred was widely accepted, a celebrated part of
the region’s culture well into the nineteenth century.
50 Patrick J. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), pp. 87-89 and James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 1998), pp. 193-198. 51 Elijah Kilbourn, “Kilbourn’s Narrative: A Reminiscence of Black Hawk” in Black Hawk, Antoine LeClair, trans., and J.B. Patterson, ed., Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nations, Various Wars in which he has been Engaged, and his Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, his Surrender and Travel through the United States. Dictated by Himself. Also Life, Death and Burial of the Old Chief, together with A History of the Black Hawk War and Also Life, Death and Burial of the Old Chief, Together with a History of the Black Hawk War, by J. B. Patterson, Oquawka, 1882 (Rock Island: J.B. Patterson, 1882), pp. 162-164. 52 Davis Frontier, Illinois, pp. 122-123. For a broader commentary on the dispersal of Kentucky’s frontier population throughout the region see Aron, American Confluence, pp. 112-113.
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Shane, John D., “Interview with ------ Spence”, Draper Manuscripts 13CC198-199.
Shane, John D., “Interview with an Unnamed Subject”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC177.
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Shane, John D.,”Interview with ----- Wymore”, Draper Manuscripts 11CC128-132.
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29
The Turkish Revolution and State Formation From Below
Niall Finn
German-Turkish Social Sciences M.A., Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) &
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
Abstract: The history of Turkish state formation has focused almost exclusively on the role of
the founding elite. Against the narrowness of this approach, there is a need to widen the
scope of analysis both historically and theoretically. This article aims to contribute to this
process by focusing on the role played by social movements in Turkish state formation. To do
so it combines Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “passive revolution” with the “history from below”
approach pioneered by E.P. Thompson. This article does not dispute that the Turkish Republic
was a modernising project led by an emerging elite, but rather, following Gramsci's model,
argues that such a project necessarily had to gain the hegemony of groups in wider society.
In order to explain the concrete nature of this process, it follows Thompson in tracing the
development and experience of different social groups and how they actively related to the
elite who led the formation of the new state. The article therefore argues that the process of
state formation must be understood over a much longer timeframe and looks at the
experience of two key social groups; the organised working class and the women’s movement
in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. „It shows how these groups were actively
won over to the project of state formation by inclusion of some of their interests, and
simultaneously, the oppression of their independent movements.
Keywords: Turkey, State Formation, Passive Revolution, History From Below, Kemalism
Introduction
In 1936 Mustafa Kemal, war hero and first president of the Republic, was given the
name “Ataturk” or “Father of the Turks” in recognition of the seminal role he had
played in the formation of the Turkish state. Symbolically, this cemented the view that
Turkish state formation was an internal process driven by a small elite or simply by
Ataturk himself. Viewed in this manner, the new state was represented as a
completely new entity - a clean break from the failed Ottoman Empire that preceded
Niall Finn Vol.02/No.01 (2016)
30
it. This interpretation came to dominate the historiography of the early Turkish
Republic.
Recently this overly simplistic narrative has begun to be challenged: scholars
(mainly from outside of Turkey) have focused on the links between the Ottoman
Empire and the new Republic.1 While this work has done much to inspire a
reassessment of the period, the focus has remained on the role of the elite. This is in
part due to the fact that the historical records of the period are limited to high politics
such as speeches of the National Assembly, and therefore research has naturally
tended to focus on elites.2 Tentative steps have been made to move to a wider scope
of investigation. In 1998 Gavin Brockett called for a social history of the Ataturk Era
and offered some useful initial research.3 While an important grounding, it was by its
own admission limited in its scope. There was little link to the legacy of the Ottoman
Empire or a theoretical analysis of the formation of the new Turkish State.
A more sophisticated attempt has been made by Ceylan Tokluoglu and Alan Hunt
who explicitly try and explore “state formation from below”.4 They make excellent
work in pointing out the importance of social movements in the process of state
formation. However their analysis of these movements is flawed, since these
movements are seen only in relation to opposing the growth of the state, which for
the authors constitutes the “spread of civilisation”.5 Resistant social groups are
“essentially reactionary".6 Their assumptions therefore mirror the traditional Kemalist
narratives of state formation in which Turkey had to be modernised by force at the
will of an elite. Theirs is a history from below, without the element that made such an
approach such a rich source of research. That is history from below without analysing
social movements to be actors in their own right, worth analysis for the way they
exercise historical agency.
The aim of this essay is therefore to attempt to point to examples that I believe
demonstrate a true history of Turkish state formation from below. To do this I will
combine Gramscian theory of state formation with E.P. Thompson’s historical method
in studying social movements. This will provide a theoretical framework in which it is
1 Erik J. Zurcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, (New York, I.B. Tauris, 2010). 2 Gavin D. Brockett, 'Collective action and the Turkish Revolution', Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 34, Issue No. 4 (London, Routledge, 1998), p.44. 3 Ibid. 4 Ceylan Tokluoglu and Alan Hunt, “State formation from below: the Turkish case”, The Social Science Journal, Vol. 39, Issue no. 4, (Portland, Elsevier, 2002), p.p. 617–624. 5 Ibid., p.618. 6 Ibid., p.620.
The Berlin Historical Review Vol.02/No.01 (2016
31
possible to both include the legacy of the Ottoman Empire in Turkish State formation
and show the contribution to the process made by social movements from below.
Gramsci and State Formation: Passive Revolution and Hegemony
Central to my argument is Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution. Building on Leon
Trotsky’s theory of “uneven and combined development”, Gramsci argued that the
spread of capitalism forced other countries to modernise or they would be dominated
by economically superior nations.7 The nation state was therefore an attempt to
respond to the onset of capitalist modernity. Thus the theory of passive revolution
describes “the transitions to capitalism forged through the emergence of the modern
nation state”.8 This required a new political order and “the inclusion of new classes
within the hegemony of a political order without an expansion of mass-producer
control over politics”.9 Therefore a passive revolution represents the dual process of
state formation in response to the pressure of the spread of capitalism and the
resulting construction of a new political order in the form of a nation state.
This approach is radically different from the deterministic view of modernization
and state formation as the unstoppable march to civilisation. In Gramsci’s view the
process is dependent on “the particular configuration of social, cultural and political
state forms within class struggles over transitions to modernity” – the process remains
specific to historical circumstance, thereby allowing different social actors to play a
concrete role in the outcome of the process.10
Therefore while it is essentially an elite project, the form or success of state
formation is by no means predetermined. It relies on an elite winning the hegemony
of wider groups in society. Building on the term first developed by Vladimir Lenin,
hegemony is the process by which one class (or a group within one class) takes the
leading role in society and involves a combination of both coercion and consent.11
Hegemony is therefore an interlinked process whereby a social group dominates
society. As leadership implies, this is done through both the suppression of alternative
views as well as winning support of other social groups. As Gramsci himself describes
it: “hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies
7 Adam David Morton, “Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Vol. 35, Issue No. 3, (London: Sage, 2007), p.610. 8 Ibid., p.610. 9 Ibid., p.609. 10 Morton, “Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International”, (2007), p.605. 11 Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment, (Boston: Brill, 2009), p.188.
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of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise
equilibrium should be formed[...] [but] such a compromise cannot touch the
essential[...] nucleus of economic activity“.12 Hegemony is therefore the process by
which subaltern social groups come to identify their interests with the leading group
of society; both through the leading group integrating the other groups interests into
their framework (without changing the basis of this framework) and suppressing
opposition.
Hegemony and State Formation From Below
Hegemony is an active and continual process that is never completely dominant.
People's material conditions highlight contradictions between the dominant view and
reality creating space for historical agency.13 Therefore in explaining state formation
as passive revolution involving construction of a new hegemony, it is necessary to
understand the position of different social groups in relation to this new hegemonic
project. The central question of state formation then becomes how and why different
social groups were constituted into what Gramsci calls a “historic bloc”. It is therefore
essential to build a comprehensive picture of the social movements that were present
in the Turkish context during state formation. It is only after understanding their
position in society in relation to the leading social groups that we will be able to fully
understand the process of passive revolution and the construction of a new
hegemony.
Therefore this article will use the methodology developed by E.P. Thompson in
his classic work The Making of The English Working Class.14 Thompson developed the
importance of focusing on the lived experiences of lower social groups.15 Crucially he
understood that a social group’s position of power in society was not mechanically
determined but dependent on their relationship with other social classes.16 The
approach thus represents an ideal method of historical investigation into how
hegemony is constructed.
12 Peter Lang, The Hegemony of Common Sense: Wisdom and Mystification in Everyday Life, (San Francisco: San Francisco State University Press, 2006), p.30. 13 John Fiske, “British Cultural Studies and Television” in Robert Clyde Allen, ed. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled Television and Contemporary Criticism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p.291. 14 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (London: Penguin Books, 2002). 15 F. K. Donnelly, “Ideology and Early English Working-Class History: Edward Thompson and His Critics”, Social History, Vol. 1, Issue No. 4, (London: Routledge, 1976), p.221. 16 Ibid., p.220.
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33
History of State Formation
If state formation is understood primarily as a response to capitalist modernity, its
origins can be traced back further than simply the establishment of the Turkish
Republic in 1923. In many ways state formation can be seen as early as 1839 and the
introduction of the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman state. In response to European
pressure various changes were introduced to modernise the bureaucracy, provincial
administration, taxation, education and communication network on a European
model.17 This process was intensified in 1908 with the coming to power of the
Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), who were explicit about wanting to
reproduce European capitalism.18
At the end of the First World War the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Istanbul and
Izmir were occupied and plans were drawn up to divide the rest of the Empire between
the victorious powers. In response a Turkish National Movement was set up to defend
the territorial integrity of Anatolia. This movement fought a successful military
campaign against occupying forces and founded the Republic of Turkey. Within Turkish
historiography there is a tendency to see a clean break between the Ottoman Era and
the new Turkish Republic.19 However, in many respects there is strong continuity. The
leaders of this new nationalist movement were almost without exception former
members of the CUP, including Mustafa Kemal.20 Although it would be a mistake to
simply conflate the two movements, their attitude to the social movements of the era
displayed remarkable continuity, including the motivation to build a new capitalist
state.21
Hence this study looks at state formation over a much longer period than
traditional literature has assigned to this process. All other studies in the past have
chosen to focus on the era before or after the foundation of the Republic. This essay
argues that much of the groundwork for constructing the new nation state took place
much earlier than 1923. An emerging nationalist movement began to win the support
of the relatively powerful workers and the women’s movement, which played and
important role in the late Ottoman period. This was not an inevitable process and can
17 Erik J. Zurcher, Turkey: A Modern History, (New York: Diane Publishing Company, 2004), p.56. 18 Feroz Ahmad, “The Development of Working Class Consciousness in Turkey” in Zachary Lockman, ed. Workers and Working Classes in the Modern Middle East, (New York: New York State University Press, 1994), pp. 133-164. 19 Zurcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, (2010), p.124. 20 Ibid., p.143. 21 Ibid., p.150.
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34
only be explained by examining the position of these social movements within Turkish
society.
The Workers’ Movement
The history of workers and the Turkish Republic are inextricably linked. As the
Ottoman Empire struggled to adapt to the increasing pressure brought about by the
expansion of capitalism at its western borders, it was workers who were not only at
the centre of these changes but also often in the best position to resist them. They
were particularly influential in the period before and after the Young Turk Revolution
in 1908, which was a crucial moment in the emergence of the Turkish state. This meant
that their hegemonisation was crucial to the successful process of state formation.
The social and political implications of what constitutes the “working class” or
even simply “workers” is one of the most disputed topics in social history.22 The
category becomes even more complex when we consider historical moments before
the relative homogeneity brought to workforces by large scale industrialisation. This
especially applies to countries like Turkey, which as part of the economic periphery
experienced particularly uneven industrialisation. This resulted in a multiplicity of
different experiences with often no clear distinction between wage earners and other
forms of labour.23
This was a particular feature of the Anatolian region that would form the geographical
basis of the new Turkish state. Anatolian exports as a share of the Empire’s whole
actually fell from 35 per cent to 29 per cent between 1840 and 1914, i.e. in the final
era of the Ottoman Empire. Thus the region remained more dominated by agriculture
than other parts of the Empire, with 80 per cent to 85 per cent of all exports (by value)
coming from the agricultural sector.24 This trend continued into the early Republic;
between the years 1923 and 1929 the growth in agriculture was twice that of
industry.25
22 Marcel van der Linden, “Labour History as the History of Multitudes”, Labour / Le Travail, Vol. 52, (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press , 2003), pp.235-243. 23 Özgür Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938“, Mittelungdblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, Heft 33, 2005, pp.123-136. 24 Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908, (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p.8. 25 Özgür Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005), pp.123-136.
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35
The diversity of labour occupations makes discussion of a common Turkish labour
history difficult. It is therefore not surprising that the limited attention given to the
history of workers in Turkey has been dominated by the focus on the easily identifiable
workers, those who were organised and in urban areas.26 This is problematic given
that it does not take into account the role of unorganised workers and those who
existed in the economy outside of factory production. Whilst they may have lacked
membership of class based organisations, such as trade unions, this did not, preclude
these workers from struggling against their employers or the state.27 The
historiography concerning these workers is rather lacking, however it will not be
possible to solve this particular issue within the confines of this essay. While it is
important to acknowledge the role of such workers, this does not detract from the
role played by organised workers in state formation which this essay will primarily
focus on.
Workers’ relationship with the Ottoman state
The pioneering research of historian Donald Quataert shows us the importance of the
organised workers‘ movements at the end of the 19th century. His work illustrates the
way that economic expansion from the West changed the social conditions in the
Ottoman Empire and how this process was resisted by social groups. It mainly involves
detailed case studies of the experiences of different groups of Ottoman workers and
their interactions with the state.28
Quataert’s work helps us trace the long history of antagonism between the state
and workers in the Ottoman Empire. Like most other preindustrial societies,
production was divided by a guild system which meant that those involved in
manufacturing could not be talked about as a single group. In the 17th century there
were 260,000 artisans in Istanbul who were organised into 1,109 different “ensaf”
guilds. Alongside these existed an array of other kinds of workers from skilled
journeymen to unskilled casual labourers.29 Their influence was bolstered by strong
26 Donald Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire”, In Touraj Atabaki, ed., The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran, (London: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2007), p.20. 27 Donald Quataert, “Epilogue” in Touraj Atabaki and Gavin D Brockett, ed., Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History, (Cambridge: University Cambridge Press, 2009), p.190. 28 See Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908, (1983); Quataert, “Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, 1839- 1950”, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Quataert, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: the Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822-1920, (New York: Berghahn Press, 2006). 29 Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.16.
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links with the armed Janissaries, who effectively acted as the protectors of urban
interests against the Sultan and the state. However they were defeated as part of the
Ottoman State attempts at European style modernisation.30 No longer protected by
the influence of the Janissaries, the traditional “ensafs” began to be undermined by
cheap European imports and were therefore almost completely wiped out by 1908.31
Some artisan based production continued to exist alongside and even supplemented
the factory based production that had begun to emerge in 1830 but their influence
was limited.32
Trade unions and syndicates to represent the interest of waged labourers began
to emerge in the larger cities of Anatolia as early as 1889.33 These would found the
basis for the Ottoman Empire’s strongest workers' movement until Turkey's workers'
movement in the 1960s. Recognising their power the CUP - many of whom would form
the basis of the leadership of the new Turkish state - actively sought to win them to
their political programme and encouraged the involvement of workers politics.
Motivated in part by the high food prices and job losses that scarred the Ottoman
Empire in the early years of the 20th century, workers played a key role in political
campaigns against Sultan Abdulhamid II.34
After the CUP took power in a coup in 1908 this workers' movement became
increasingly emboldened. In the five months after the removal of Sultan Abdulhamid
II, there were an unprecedented 111 strikes involving as many as 100,000 workers.35
Vitally important industries such as the biggest coal mines of the Middle East and much
of the rail network were shut down.36 In its precarious position, the new government
was forced to accept at least partial wage increases in every case reversing the
general decline in real wages in the period.37
The CUP’s response to the wave of strikes presents a clear example of hegemony
in using both integration and coercion, thereby laying the foundation for the
hegemonic project of the Turkish Republic. The CUP attempted to integrate the
workers into their movement and at least appeared open to their demands. Crucial to
30 Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire”, (2007), p.23. 31 Ibid., p.20. 32 Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, (2001), p.16. 33 Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire”, (2007), p.22. 34 Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, (2001), pp.77-79. 35 Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, (2001), p.78. 36 Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire”, (2007), p.27. 37 Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, (2001), p.78; Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire”, (2007), pp.26-27.
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37
this process was that almost all of the large industrial companies in the Ottoman
Empire were owned by foreign capital.38 The Young Turks were therefore able to
position themselves as attempting to protect the interests of domestic workers. This
was a classic case of hegemony: while accepting pay increases as a way of building
consent the state also introduced anti-strike laws and forcibly ended strikes when
necessary.39
Other factors worked in their favour. The suffering of the Muslim population
after the accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina helped prompt a powerful boycott
movement. This movement took a strongly nationalist and increasingly Muslim form.
As Y. Dogan Çetinkaya argues, the boycott movement “mobilised and organised
Muslims within the framework of rising Turkish nationalism and turned it from an
abstract idea into a social reality".40 Quataert agrees: “The annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1908 was crucial for the success of the Young Turks. It allowed the
massive social unrest to be channelled into nationalism”. In this sense he argues the
1908 revolution was something of an “1848 moment” in the way that a powerful
movement for social change was diffused.41
Workers played a powerful role in this period and their hegemonisation into the
emerging nationalist movement was a crucial part of the formation of the new state.
However, this process can only be explained by the social context, which meant that
the CUP was able to actively win the support of workers. This was done by capitalising
on disaffection with the old regime and foreign companies, as well as suppressing
independent workers movements.
Workers and the Republic
Several aspects of the experience of workers in the post-war era worked in favour of
the construction of the new hegemonic project. The redrawing of the map in the post-
Ottoman era meant that most of the qualified workers were left outside of Turkey.
Between 1913 and 1923, thanks to emigration and population transfers, Turkey lost a
further 4 million people who were disproportionately working age men.
38 Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908, (1983), p.148. 39 Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire”, (2007), p.26. 40 Y. Dogan Çetinkaya, “The social origins of Turkish nationalism: The anti-Greek movement in the Ottoman Empire” in Lyberatos Andreas, ed. Social transformation and mass mobilisation in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean cities, (Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2013), pp. 229-244. 41 Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908, (1983), p.154.
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As we have seen the Muslim workers (who made up the vast majority of those
who remained) had already been integrated into Turkish nationalism as an important
social base. While other important groups, such as Greek workers, were among those
lost to emigration. Unsurprisingly this integration was reinforced by the experience of
war and especially that of occupation. In the face of an aggressive occupying force,
workers sided with the nationalists, engaging in actions like a wave of strikes against
the occupation centred on the strategically important transport sector.42
However, at this point workers had not been completely won over by the
nationalists. At May Day rallies in the occupied cities of Istanbul and Izmir in 1920 and
1921, workers shouted slogans hailing both the CUP leader Enver Pasha as well as
Lenin. In Mersin, workers protested against French ships anchored in their harbour
using slogans “Long live May Day, down with imperialism”.43 Workers clearly retained
an element of political independence. This worried the new regime; especially as
organised workers became more and more self-confident, often taking a lead in
nationalist protests. As a result the most powerful groups, like the Istanbul Union of
International Workers, were closed down and some of its leaders arrested.44
The position of the elite of the new state was difficult; they recognised the
centrality of workers to any move towards capitalist modernisation. However, thanks
to the wave of radicalism since the 1908 revolution, workers were also increasingly
aware of their important position in the new society. Take for example the lines from
a poem called “In Praise of May the First” written in 1923: “Oh Worker... Humanity has
achieved happiness thanks to you: But for you humanity would not have reached these
heights. Cut and cast the yoke of slavery from your neck!”45
The new nationalist regime responded in much the same way as the CUP.
Strategically important groups like the Eregli Miners (who worked at one of the Middle
East's biggest sources of coal) were offered the guarantee of an eight hour day and
social security as proof of the new government’s sympathy towards workers.46
Symbolically, workers groups were invited to take part in the Izmir Economic Congress.
This gathering was initiated to develop the economic policies of the new Turkish State.
The fact that workers groups were invited to take part in this debate is politically
significant as it has been widely regarded as recognition of the important role of
42 Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005). p.131. 43 Ahmad, “The Development of Working Class Consciousness in Turkey”, (1994), p.136. 44 Ibid., p.136. 45 Ibid., p.136. 46 Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005), p.131.
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workers in society.47 However the government used it as an opportunity to
hegemonise the workers' movement rather than seriously involve them in decision
making. The conference was dominated by groups like the New Turkish National Trade
Organisation who were hostile to any restrictions on free enterprise.48 The
government appointed the worker delegates who became, according to the words of
a merchant delegate, “nothing more than a puppet organisation of the merchants”.49
Again this process of political integration was not completely successful but it was
combined with policies that aimed to prevent workers from organising independently.
Some independent workers‘ groups, led by the socialist organisation Aydinlik,
successfully launched a propaganda campaign for more radical proposals. This led to
the Congress adopting many of the workers‘ demands, including an eight hour working
day and the establishment of the 1st May as “Workers Day”.50 However, these
proposals were never implemented. The first May Day after the conference (which
was also the first one of the new Republic) saw strikes from Tobacco workers in
Istanbul and a march to the General Assembly in Ankara.51 Their demands were the
same as those made at the Congress. This time, however, the government responded
with a crackdown. Arrests were made, organisations were closed down and
publications were banned.52 May Day was not openly organised by workers again until
1976.53
Resistance to these measures took the form of the foundation of the Workers’
Advancement Society which organised 14 unions and represented 30,000 members.
Although tame, it continued to campaign against anti-strike laws until it was closed
down in 1928.54 The 1926 Law for the Maintenance of Order in effect banned all
political opposition, including all unions and seriously curtailed the workers‘
movement until it was repealed in 1946.55 In this era urban wages fell overall by as
much as 30 per cent, which sparked some continued resistance. Recent research has
uncovered much more social unrest than was previously known. It now seems that
47 Ahmad, “The Development of Working Class Consciousness in Turkey”, (1994), p.136; Gökmen, ”The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005), p.132. 48 Ozay Mehmet, “Turkey in Crisis: Some Contradictions in the Kemalist Development Strategy”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 15, Issue No.1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.47- 66. 49 Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005), p.132. 50 Ibid., p.132. 51 Ahmad, “The Development of Working Class Consciousness in Turkey”, (1994), p.136. 52 Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (2001), p.85. 53 Ahmad, “The Development of Working Class Consciousness in Turkey”, (1994), p.137. 54 Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005), p.133. 55 Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (2001), p.86.
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40
there were at least 97 strikes between 1923 and 1938. To put this in context, it was
previously understood that there were only 43 strikes from 1923 all the way up to
1960.56
The Women’s Movement
Turkey is often distinguished amongst other Muslim nations with regard to the
position of women in its society. Traditionally, the credit for this is given to Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk for granting women's rights and reforms as part of embracing western
ideals and rejecting the Islamic legacy of the Ottoman Caliphate.57 This narrative is
doubly problematic. First, the emphasis on the paternal role of Ataturk obscures the
role of women themselves in shaping their position in the new Turkish state. Second,
this paternal narrative is reinforced by the emphasis on the “western” nature of these
reforms which precludes Ottoman and/or Muslim women from being able to
independently assert their own interests, implying that instead they must be
enlightened by an external force. In reality women played an active role in shaping
their own destiny. They did not play a passive role in state formation but actively had
to be won over to the project or were defeated opposing it.
There is a limited amount of work dedicated to the women’s movements of the
era, and as with male workers groups,58 the literature that does exist focuses
disproportionately on the women who were organised and in urban areas. While
there were other kinds of women who similarly played a role in the formation of the
state, this essay will concentrate on women in urban areas, whose stories have been
documented.
Women in the Ottoman Era
The women’s movement in the Ottoman Empire goes back to the 1870s. Benefitting
from the Tanzimat reforms which brought the first wave of modernization women
wrote books and journals, initiated associations, protests and took part in public
debates.59 The first women’s magazine Terakki-i Muhadderat was published in 1869.
This marked the beginning of a growing trend that saw 40 women’s journals published
between 1869 and 1927.60 These publications are even more notable for the fact that
56 Gökmen, “The State of Labour in Turkey, 1919-1938”, (2005), p.134 57 Deniz Kandiyoti, “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey” in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, ed. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, (London: Routledge, 2003), p.263. 58 Kandiyoti, “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey”, p.282. 59 Sirin Tekeli, “The Turkish Womens Movement: A Short History of Success”, (2010), p.119 http://www.iemed.org/publicacions/quaderns/14/qm14_pdf/19.pdf, (Date accessed: 22/10/2015). 60 Nadje S. Al-Ali, “The Women’s Movement in Egypt, with selected references to Turkey”, United Nations
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41
their content points to an “emerging feminist consciousness”.61 In these writings
women articulated “a range of demands relating to education, employment, marriage
and dress code”.62
A conservative Islamic backlash marked the period after 1878. This came to an
end with the 1908 revolution and the CUP sought to capture aspects of the women’s
movement and mobilise women within their programme of capitalist development.
Universities were opened to women in 1914 and special classes were offered to
encourage women to become involved in business.63
Women continued to make significant contributions to the ideological debates in
the era after the 1908 revolution. An English woman who was in the state at the time
declared the new regime to be a “Turkish Feminist Government!”64 The period saw
independent women’s groups grow as part of the flourishing civil society. A wide range
of opinions were represented in a variety of organisations, from cultural and charitable
societies to openly feminist groups. The most radical action was taken in 1913 when
women organised a sit-in against a company that had discriminated against hiring
Muslim women.65
Women and the Republic
The strength of women’s groups in relation to the state increased with the onset of
the First World War. Women’s labour was needed to replace the men who had been
mobilized to fight. Women therefore took up crucial roles in all aspects of the
economy, from manufacturing textiles and ammunition to working in banks and
hospitals.66 The end of the war and the division of the Ottoman Empire meant that the
new Turkish territory lost many of the minorities who had made up the bulk of its
entrepreneurs and merchants. With the experience they had gained from professional
training during the war, it was mainly middle class women who filled the gaps. This
was encouraged by the new state as it sought to bolster the emergent nation’s
Research Institute for Social Development, April 1, 2002, p.20, http://www.unrisd.org./80256B3C005BB128/%28httpHomepages%29/$first?OpenDocument, (Date accessed: 22/10/2015). 61 Ibid., p.20. 62 Ibid., p.20. 63 Kandiyoti, “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey”, (2003), p.270. 64 Ibid., p.269. 65 Al-Ali, “The Women’s Movement in Egypt, with selected references to Turkey”, (2002), p.26. 66 Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East, (London: Lynne Rienner, 2003), p.92.
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42
bourgeoisie.67 In this way some women gained significant power and influence. Having
been already partially won over to the CUP project, many women played a significant
role in the movement against the occupation that followed the end of the war. There
were 16 women’s organisations amongst the 50 groups involved in the struggle for
“national liberation” and they emerged in all parts of the country.68
Given the relatively assertive history of the women’s movement prior to the
establishment of the Turkish state, it is not surprising that the new Kemalist elite
sought to hegemonise such a social force. In many ways this process ran parallel to the
domination of the working class. It built on the foundation set down by the CUP and
combined both the integration of some women’s demands into Kemalism while at the
same time denying space for alternatives. It therefore treated women’s issues in much
the same way it responded to class conflict.69
Mustafa Kemal himself began the process by lionising the role played by
Anatolian women in the nationalist struggle, often using it as a pretext to justify his
reformist measures in regards to women.70 These reforms have been heralded as so
radical and comprehensive that White has termed them “State Feminism”.71 Such a
reading sheds much light on the way the women's movement was integrated into the
hegemony of the new state. In the words of White: “the state-led promotion of
women’s equality in the public sphere, monopolized women’s activism and shaped it
as a tool of the state’s modernizing project”.72 Legal reforms gave women equal status
in divorce, outlawed polygamy and extended mothers' rights over children.73 These
changes especially benefitted educated and middle class women and the new ideal
woman in the mind of the Republican elites was a “bourgeois urban woman”.74 Thus
the women who had been most active in the women’s movement benefitted most
from the new social order.
Some authors are sceptical about how much these reforms actually constituted
“feminism”, arguing that the reforms aimed to change the form of domination rather
67 Jenny B. White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman”, NWSA Journal, Vol. 15, Issue No. 3, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p.153. 68 Al-Ali, “The Women’s Movement in Egypt, with selected references to Turkey”, (2002), p.26. 69 Zehra F. Arat, “Turkish Women and the Turkish Reconstruction of Tradition” in Shiva Balaghi and Fatma Müge Göçek, ed. Reconstructing Gender in Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p.59. 70 Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East, (2003), p.92. 71 White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman”, (2003), p.147. 72 Ibid., p.155. 73 Al-Ali, 2002, p.279. 74 White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman”, (2003), p.147.
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43
than to end it.75 This is a valid criticism and it is important to understand that these
reforms were not made in the interest of women so much as to gain the support of
women without challenging the fundamental Kemalist project of capitalist
modernization. Therefore the reforms that were offered were inextricably linked with
the move towards western capitalism. For example, “[s]chools added to their
curriculum the new Fordist “science” of home economics that taught women modern
child rearing, household techniques, principles of hygiene, and Western fashion”.76
Combined with the reforms to the penal code and public life, such a project could be
presented as benefitting women.
The other part of this process was that any attempts to move outside of this
monopoly were blocked, making it difficult to form any alternative to the reforms.
When women attempted to form their own political party, Mustafa Kemal stepped in
personally to stop them.77 In 1936 the Turkish Women’s Federation organised a
feminist conference in Turkey, which amongst other things issued a condemnation of
the rising Nazi movement. Worried about its politicisation the government closed the
Federation arguing that women had reached equality within the Republic.78 One of the
most striking examples of both integration and domination was that while women
were given the vote in 1930, they were unable to work for the state by joining the civil
service or public administration.79 It would not be until the 1980s that women’s
movements world be able to successfully challenge this project.80
Conclusions
This essay has aimed to show the way in which social movements played an active role
in the process of state formation. Tracing the history of the workers' and women’s
movements back into the Ottoman Empire is crucial to understanding the part they
played in this process. Social movements played an influential role from the very
beginning of capitalist modernisation and rather than passive objects of reform,
workers and women’s groups were agents of their own history. This historical agency
necessitated them being won over to the new hegemonic project that constituted the
creation of the new state. State formation necessarily involved the integration of some
of their aspirations, so that capitalist modernity could be seen to represent their
75 Arat, “Turkish Women and the Turkish Reconstruction of Tradition”, (2013), p.58. 76 White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman”, (2003), p.154. 77 Arat, “Turkish Women and the Turkish Reconstruction of Tradition”, (2013), p.66. 78 White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman”, (2003), p.155. 79 Arat, “Turkish Women and the Turkish Reconstruction of Tradition”, (2013), p.66. 80 White, “State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman”, (2003), p.155.
Niall Finn Vol.02/No.01 (2016)
44
interests. They therefore had an active role in shaping the process that went beyond
resisting reforms. In this way their role cannot be conceptualised as either a passive or
reactionary response to social change. Rather it was the emerging state that played a
reactionary role, suppressing both the workers‘ and women’s movements when they
attempted to develop independent action or ideas that moved beyond the dominant
view of society.
This theoretical approach is made concrete by analysing the social movements
themselves. While somewhat neglected, a social history of the era does much to
enlighten the actual process of state formation. By showing the position of these social
movements and how they related to other groups in society it is easier to understand
social movements as historical actors. An understanding of the position of workers
under foreign owned companies at the end of the Ottoman Empire, for example,
reveals their support for the CUP to be an active choice, rather than passive
compliance.
Given its short nature this essay is only able to sketch a rough outline of this
process and how it affected these two specific social groups. However, preliminary
results show that understanding Turkish state formation as a passive revolution and
new hegemonic project may well provide a productive framework for future research.
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45
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48
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