The docks of the revolution: the struggles of the port workers of Istanbul in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

Abstract

This study focuses on the role of the working classes, and in particular, of the port workers of Istanbul, in the making of a critical era in the Ottoman history. It shows that the Revolution of 1908, and working class activism it triggered, can not be understood without analyzing the struggles of the port workers throughout the decades preceding the Revolution. With the concession of the Istanbul Port to a European company, many port workers came to be threatened to loose their jobs, or more generally, by a process of proletarianization. This process also converged with the development of Armenian political movement, which had a decisive influence on the relations both between the working classes and the state and among the workers. The collective actions of the port workers against proletarianization directly through collective actions, or in mediation with the Armenian movement, negotiated, affected and transformed the power policies of the Hamidian government. The thesis argues that the port workers’ struggles against the state and the companies were framed by the decisions, strategies and tactics made according to individual politics; the power struggles not only between the elites and the workers, but also among the elites and among the workers; and also the struggles over meaning, in which the top-down imposed definition were renegotiated by the workers. Thus the thesis not only examines the activities of port workers through the collective actions they displayed, but also through the legal-manipulative and/or criminal actions which they carried on as parts of their struggles at the everyday level.