ABSTRACT

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Turkish debate concerning the place of the Ottoman Empire in world history was vibrant, and conducted largely in Marxist terms. Researchers, who in certain cases had participated in the incipient socialist debates of the 1920s and 1930s, argued in favour of regarding Ottoman state and society as an instance of feudalism. Views of the Ottoman Empire as a feudal system implied that the Ottomans possessed characteristics in common with a great many pre-industrial societies the world over, or if a narrower definition of feudalism is adopted, at least with pre-industrial Europe and Japan. The Kemalist movement advocated economic, political and cultural changes imposed from above, and thus regarded itself as a successor to the Tanzimat regime, which profoundly transformed Ottoman state structures by administrative fiat. The common denominator was the exaltation of the state as a guarantor of peasant freedom', which kept the inroads of capitalism at bay.