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Long Live the Workers: The Revolutionary Euphoria of 1908

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Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on a single year, 1908, when the Young Turk Revolution overthrew the Hamidian regime and generated an atmosphere of freedom. The early months following the revolution witnessed a spiraling strike wave that hit various industries across the empire, including tobacco. The chapter explores the demands that tobacco workers in Anatolia and the Balkans made on their employers during this period, the actions they took to press their demands, and the results of these actions. In doing so, it highlights how labor protests in 1908 differed from earlier mobilizations in the Hamidian period, how tobacco workers interpreted the Young Turk Revolution, and how they envisioned their place in the post-revolutionary Ottoman Empire.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism, 133–34.

  2. 2.

    Sohrabi argues that the revolutions in Russia and Iran influenced the timing and form of the Young Turk Revolution. While the Russian revolution showed the Young Turks how a series of popular upheavals could force an autocratic regime to make concessions, the Iranian revolution encouraged them to make better use of religious rhetoric. See ibid., 78–84.

  3. 3.

    On revolutionary festivities and discussions about the future of ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, see Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 23–71.

  4. 4.

    For example, after the revolution, dispossessed Armenian and Kurdish peasants in eastern Anatolia regularly petitioned the government to seek redress for injustices perpetrated against them by local notables. See Özok-Gündoğan, “A ‘Peripheral’ Approach.”

  5. 5.

    Donald Quataert, “The Economic Climate of the ‘Young Turk Revolution’ in 1908,” The Journal of Modern History 51, no. 3 (1979): D1154–55.

  6. 6.

    Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 236.

  7. 7.

    H. Eyres, Constantinople, to Sir Gerard Lowther, Therapia, August 18, 1908, FO 195/2280. Consul Eyres noted that during the negotiations that lasted until August 12, the workers were on strike. However, according to a report presented by the director of the Régie to the Ministry of Interior on August 10, the workers had not gone on strike yet. See BOA, ZB 24/34, doc. 1 (28 Temmuz 1324/August 10, 1908).

  8. 8.

    “Reji Amelesi,” Tanin, 31 Temmuz 1324/August 13, 1908; H. Eyres, Constantinople, to Sir Gerard Lowther, Therapia, August 18, 1908.

  9. 9.

    In the second week of August, glass, tram, and port workers in Istanbul went on strike. See Kırpık, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde İşçiler,” 257.

  10. 10.

    BOA, ZB 24/34, doc. 1 (28 Temmuz 1324/August 10, 1908).

  11. 11.

    BOA, ZB 485/17, doc. 1 (30 Temmuz 1324/August 12, 1908).

  12. 12.

    BOA, ZB 325/16, doc. 1 (30 Temmuz 1324/August 12, 1908).

  13. 13.

    BOA, ZB 485/17, doc. 1 (30 Temmuz 1324/August 12, 1908).

  14. 14.

    BOA, ZB 325/16, doc. 1 (30 Temmuz 1324/August 12, 1908).

  15. 15.

    H. Eyres, Constantinople, to Sir Gerard Lowther, Therapia, August 18, 1908. The Rıza Bey mentioned in the report was probably the poet and philosopher Rıza Tevfik who, in the early days of the revolution, wielded considerable influence over working-class people in Istanbul, particularly porters. See Halide Edib Adıvar, Mor Salkımlı Ev (Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 2007), 177–78.

  16. 16.

    H. Eyres, Constantinople, to Sir Gerard Lowther, Therapia, August 18, 1908; “Reji,” Tanin, 2 Ağustos 1324/August 15, 1908; BOA, DH. İD 107/51, doc. 13 (25 Temmuz 1328/August 7, 1912).

  17. 17.

    BOA, ZB 24/34, doc. 1 (4 Ağustos 1324/August 17, 1908).

  18. 18.

    Yavuz Selim Karakışla, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda 1908 Grevleri,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 78 (1998): 189; Quataert, “The Economic Climate,” D1157.

  19. 19.

    Tanin, 16 Eylül 1324/September 29, 1908.

  20. 20.

    “Terk-i Eşgal,” Tanin, 13 Eylül 1324/September 26, 1908.

  21. 21.

    H. Eyres, Constantinople, to Sir Gerard Lowther, Therapia, August 18, 1908.

  22. 22.

    On the active role of the government in the settlement of disputes between the Régie and its workers in the summer and fall of 1908, see also Reji Şirketi Meclis-i İdaresi Tarafından Fi 16 Eylül 1325 Tarihinde Mün’akıd Cemiyet-i Umumiye-i Mu’tadaya Takdim Kılınan Rapor (Dersaadet: Yirardo Matbaası, 1325/1909), 1–2.

  23. 23.

    BOA, DH. İD 107/51, doc. 13 (25 Temmuz 1328/August 7, 1912).

  24. 24.

    “Reji Amelesi,” Tanin, 18 Eylül 1324/October 1, 1908.

  25. 25.

    H. Eyres, Constantinople, to Sir Gerard Lowther, Therapia, August 18, 1908.

  26. 26.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2681/20, doc. 1.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    As mentioned in Chapter 3, the executive board of the Association for Tobacco Workers’ Prosperity in Kavala consisted of thirty-two members, and they were all men. In Spain, the management of the National Federation of Cigar Makers and Tobacco Workers, the principal union of tobacco workers, was in the hands of men in the early twentieth century. Around the same period, the Cigar Makers’ International Union adopted exclusionary practices against female tobacco workers in the United States. See Martinez, “Life and Work in the Tobacco Factories,” 146; Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker; Dorothee Schneider, Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in New York City, 1870–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

  30. 30.

    Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 236–37.

  31. 31.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 175/17473, doc. 1 (17 Şubat 1326/March 2, 1911).

  32. 32.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 2 (6 Eylül 1324/September 19, 1908). By July 1908, the Young Turk movement had some following among telegraph clerks in Macedonia. According to Sohrabi, clerks in the Siroz telegraph office were predominantly CUP recruits. See Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism, 121. A British report dated July 31, 1908 stated that the CUP branch in Kavala was led by a lieutenant-colonel. According to the same report, on June 26, the Kavala Greek community decided to “join the Young Turkey party en bloc and with apparent heartiness.” See Lieutenant-Colonel Bonham to Mr. G. Barclay (July 31, 1908) in Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, Turkey No. 1 (1909): Correspondence Respecting the Constitutional Movement in Turkey, 1908 (Cd. 4529), 37.

  33. 33.

    Salonica newspapers covered strikes in Salonica and its nearby districts fairly frequently. See Paul Dumont, “A Jewish, Socialist and Ottoman Organisation: The Workers’ Federation of Thessaloniki,” in Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Mete Tunçay and Erik J. Zürcher (London: British Academic Press, 1994), 59.

  34. 34.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 9 (27 Ağustos 1324/September 9, 1908).

  35. 35.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 8 (31 Ağustos 1324/September 13, 1908).

  36. 36.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, docs. 8 and 9 (31 Ağustos 1324/September 13, 1908 and 27 Ağustos 1324/September 9, 1908).

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Lyndon Comstock, The English Secretary: Peggy Flexman in Turkey and Greece, 1909–1917 (Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platfom, 2014), 36; BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 5 (2 Eylül 1324/September 15, 1908).

  39. 39.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 8 (31 Ağustos 1324/September 13, 1908).

  40. 40.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, docs. 5 and 7 (1 and 2 Eylül 1324/September 14 and 15, 1908).

  41. 41.

    Such seasonal variations were by no means specific to Kavala warehouses. According to a regulation promulgated by the Ottoman government in the late 1860s, the length of the workday in the Imperial Arsenal varied from eight to ten hours, depending on the amount of daylight. See Sefer, “The Arsenal of Ottoman Modernity,” 227.

  42. 42.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 5 (1 Eylül 1324/September 14, 1908).

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 8 (31 Ağustos 1324/September 13, 1908).

  46. 46.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 2 (6 Eylül 1324/September 19, 1908).

  47. 47.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 183/18282, doc. 1 (6 Mayıs 1324/May 19, 1908); Great Britain Diplomatic and Consular Reports, Turkey, Report for the Year 1907 on the Trade of the Consular District of Salonica (Annual Series No.: 4121), 40.

  48. 48.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 196/19560, doc. 2 (6 Eylül 1324/September 19, 1908). Necib Bey did not mention who the intermediaries were.

  49. 49.

    Before the annexation, Bosnia and Herzegovina were formally Ottoman provinces, but they had been under Austrian control since the Berlin Treaty of 1878. The boycott ended in February 1909, when the Ottoman government recognized the annexation. In return, Austria-Hungary agreed to pay 2.5 million Ottoman liras as indemnity. For a detailed account of the boycott movement, see Quataert, Social Disintegration, 120–45; Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, 1908 Osmanlı Boykotu: Bir Toplumsal Hareketin Analizi (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2004); Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement, 39–88; and Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 100–109.

  50. 50.

    Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement, 50.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 49–50; BOA, TFR.I.SL 199/19880, docs. 1 and 2 (6 Teşrinisani 1324/November 19, 1908). Austro-Hungarian Herzog Company was apparently not affected by the boycott. That was because by early October, tobacco-processing season was virtually over.

  52. 52.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 199/19880, docs. 1 and 2 (6 Teşrinisani 1324/November 19, 1908).

  53. 53.

    Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement, 50.

  54. 54.

    BOA, TFR.I.SL 199/19880, docs. 1 and 2 (6 Teşrinisani 1324/November 19, 1908).

  55. 55.

    Ibid. The petition was not signed by the Greek Orthodox clergy. That was probably because the merchant, whose shop was picketed in mid-November, was a Greek Orthodox subject enjoying close relations with the clergy. However, this does not mean that all the Christian notables of Kavala sided with Sırrı Bey. Among the petitioners were persons with Orthodox Christian names, such as Hristofori, Ispiro, Yorgi, Yanaki, and Lazar.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.; Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement, 50.

  57. 57.

    Tahsin Uzer, Makedonya Eşkiyalık Tarihi ve Son Osmanlı Yönetimi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1999), 238–39. Talat Bey was nicknamed Küçük (Little) to avoid confusion with another Talat Bey (then Pasha), a senior CUP member who served as Minister of Interior and then as Grand Vizier. Küçük Talat Bey joined the CUP before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and was elected to its central committee in 1913. See Osman Selim Kocahanoğlu, Divan-ı Harb-i Örfi Muhakematı Zabıt Ceridesi: Tehcir Yargılamaları, 1919 (Istanbul: Temel Yayınları, 2007), 63–66.

  58. 58.

    Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism, 149.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 216; Uzer, Makedonya Eşkiyalık Tarihi, 239.

  60. 60.

    Mentzel, “Nationalism and Labor Movement in the Ottoman Empire,” 117; “Tütün Taycıları,” Aks-ı Sada, 9 Ağustos 1324/August 22, 1908.

  61. 61.

    Consul J. Francis Jones, Trebizond, to Sir Gerard Lowther, October 10, 1908, FO 424/217; BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, docs. 1 and 2 (October 8, 1908 and 8 Teşrinievvel 1324/October 21, 1908).

  62. 62.

    Consul J. Francis Jones, Trebizond, to Sir Gerard Lowther, October 10, 1908.

  63. 63.

    Ibid. During the demonstration, a quarrel broke out between some protestors and the assistant director of the Régie branch. Six of these protestors were subsequently imprisoned by the governor of Samsun at the insistence of the French, German, and Russian consular officials. See ibid. and BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, doc. 1 (October 8, 1908).

  64. 64.

    Consul J. Francis Jones, Trebizond, to Sir Gerard Lowther, October 10, 1908.

  65. 65.

    Ibid.

  66. 66.

    Ibid.

  67. 67.

    Ibid.; “Mutasarrıf Beyle Müddei Umumi Muavini Efendinin Nazar-ı İnsaf ve Dikkatlerine,” Aks-ı Sada, 15 Ağustos 1325/August 28, 1909.

  68. 68.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, docs. 1, 7, and 9 (October 8, 1908; 27 Teşrinievvel 1324/November 9, 1908; and 5 Teşrinisani 1324/November 18, 1908).

  69. 69.

    Ibid.

  70. 70.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2635/98, doc. 2 (23 Eylül 1324/October 6, 1908).

  71. 71.

    Ibid.

  72. 72.

    Ibid.

  73. 73.

    Consul J. Francis Jones, Trebizond, to Sir Gerard Lowther, October 10, 1908.

  74. 74.

    Ibid.; BOA, DH.MKT 2629/99, doc. 2 (27 Eylül 1324/October 10, 1908).

  75. 75.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, doc. 11 (2 Teşrinievvel 1324/October 15, 1908).

  76. 76.

    In the early 1920s, he was working as a director at the company’s headquarters in Istanbul. See “Tobacco Growing in Asia Minor,” Imperial Ottoman Bank Monthly Circular (September–October 1923): 8.

  77. 77.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2672/91, doc. 1 (10 Teşrinisani 1324/November 23, 1908).

  78. 78.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, doc. 10 (16 Kânunuevvel 1324/December 29, 1908). It seems that the efforts to exempt Wroblewski from liability proved successful. By August 1909, Ottoman public prosecutors did not file a suit against him in court. See “Mutasarrıf Beyle Müddei Umumi Muavini Efendinin Nazar-ı İnsaf ve Dikkatlerine,” Aks-ı Sada, 15 Ağustos 1325/August 28, 1909.

  79. 79.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, doc. 9 (5 Teşrinisani 1324/November 18, 1908).

  80. 80.

    Hafız Mehmed Bey was appointed as the governor of Samsun in late August or early September 1908. BOA, DH.MKT 1296/52, doc. 3 (24 Ağustos 1324/September 6, 1908).

  81. 81.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2648/63, doc. 9 (5 Teşrinisani 1324/November 18, 1908).

  82. 82.

    Dığıroğlu, Memalik-i Osmaniye Duhanları, 116.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., 128; “Mutasarrıf Beyle Müddei Umumi Muavini Efendinin Nazar-ı İnsaf ve Dikkatlerine,” Aks-ı Sada, 15 Ağustos 1325/August 28, 1909.

  84. 84.

    The reserve army, established in 1834, was manned by “those who had completed their [four-year] service with the regular army, those who had been allowed to return to their homes because they were sole breadwinners, and those who were over 32 years of age.” The term of service in the reserve was six years. During this time, a reserve soldier was required to serve in his local regiment one month a year. See Zürcher, Young Turk Legacy, 157.

  85. 85.

    Ramber, Abdülhamit Dönemine Ait Gizli Notlar, 204.

  86. 86.

    “Reji Nezareti Nazarı Dikkatine,” Aks-ı Sada, 23 Ağustos 1324/September 5, 1908.

  87. 87.

    Kırpık, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde İşçiler,” 256–63; Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 263–69.

  88. 88.

    Mehmet Ö. Alkan, “Kısa Bir Tashihin Uzun Hikâyesi: Anadolu Osmanlı Demiryolları Şirketi Memurin ve Müstahdemini Cemiyet-i İttihadiyesi,” in Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türkiye İşçi Sınıfı Tarihi, 1839–2014: Yeni Yaklaşımlar, Yeni Alanlar, Yeni Sorunlar, ed. Y. Doğan Çetinkaya and Mehmet Ö. Alkan (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2015), 165–71; Quataert, Social Disintegration, 84; Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 251.

  89. 89.

    Vangelis Kechriotis, “Social Unrest on the Aftermath of the 1908 Revolution: The Strike of the Aydın Railway in Izmir and Its Repercussions,” in The Young Turk Revolution and the Ottoman Empire, the Aftermath of 1908, ed. Noémi Lévy-Aksu and François Georgeon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 156–57; Consul-General Barnham, Smyrna, to Sir Gerard Lowther, October 7, 1908, FO 424/217. Similarly, when tram workers in Istanbul went on strike in August 1908, they insisted on the dismissal of the director of the Istanbul Tram Company. See Karakışla, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda 1908 Grevleri,” 195.

  90. 90.

    Quataert, Social Disintegration, 115.

  91. 91.

    A. Gündüz Ökçün, Tatil-i Eşgal Kanunu, 1909: Belgeler-Yorumlar (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Yayınları, 1982), 1.

  92. 92.

    The kilometric guarantee system assured railway companies a certain minimum revenue per kilometer of track in operation, the state promising to make up any shortfall. See Quataert, “The Age of Reforms,” 806–807.

  93. 93.

    Ökçün, Tatil-i Eşgal Kanunu, 54 and 61; Quataert, Social Disintegration, 92–93; Can Nacar, “20. Yüzyılın Başında İstanbul Limanı: Hamallar, Dersaadet Rıhtım Şirketi ve Osmanlı Hükümeti,” Kebikeç, no. 41 (2016): 51–66.

  94. 94.

    Ökçün, Tatil-i Eşgal Kanunu, 77.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., 2–4 and 133–35.

  96. 96.

    Ibid., 100.

  97. 97.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2681/20, doc. 1 (December 7, 1908).

  98. 98.

    BOA, DH.MKT 2681/20, doc. 3 (29 Teşrinisani 1324/December 12, 1908).

  99. 99.

    It seems that tobacco workers in Kavala also did not initially know whether they had the right to form unions. Hence, to avoid ATWP’s immediate recognition as a labor union, they named several tobacco merchants to its executive board. See BOA, DH.İD 132/4, doc. 6 (6 Teşrinievvel 1325/October 19, 1909).

  100. 100.

    BOA, ŞD 2072/39, docs. 1–3 (24 Kanunuevvel 1327/January 6, 1912).

  101. 101.

    Haupt and Dumont, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Sosyalist Hareketler, 220–21; Egemen Yılgür, “Ethnicity, Class and Politicisation: Immigrant Roma Tobacco Workers in Turkey,” Romani Studies 25, no. 2 (2015): 177–78.

  102. 102.

    Kechriotis, “Social Unrest,” 157 and 171.

  103. 103.

    In discussing the relationship between the central committee and branches of the CUP, Şükrü Hanioğlu states that “the inclusion of diverse population groups with little in common within the ranks of single party led to ideological incoherence…The political platforms of the various branches contradicted each other and that of the central committee.” See Hanioğlu, A Brief History, 161.

  104. 104.

    Yıldırım, Osmanlı’da İşçiler, 264 and 363–67.

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    Can Nacar

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Nacar, C. (2019). Long Live the Workers: The Revolutionary Euphoria of 1908. In: Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31559-7_5

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