Working for the state in the urban economies of Ankara, Bursa, and Salonica: from empire to nation state, 1840s-1940s

Abstract

In most cases, and particularly in the cases of Greece and Turkey, political transformation from multinational empire to nation state has been experienced to a great extent in urban centres. In Ankara, Bursa, and Salonica, the cities selected for this article, the consequences of state-making were drastic for all their inhabitants; Ankara and Bursa had strong Greek communities, while in the 1840s Salonica was the Jewish metropolis of the eastern Mediterranean, with a lively Muslim community. However, by the 1940s, Ankara and Bursa had lost almost all their non-Muslim inhabitants and Salonica had lost almost all its Muslims. This article analyses the occupational structures of those three cities in the mid-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, tracing the role of the state as an employer and the effects of radical political change on the city-level historical dynamics of labour relations.