This paper discusses the role played by the extensive, nation-wide network of sales agents organized by the leading Turkish manufacturer of consumer durables, Arçelik, in the formation of mass consumption markets in the post-Second World War era. The case study attempts to draw attention to a relatively less explored dimension of the industrialization experience of developing countries by shifting the usual emphasis on the structure of production toward the organization of consumption. This shift of emphasis serves to highlight certain society-specific mechanisms of market formation which compensate the limitations of the market-forming role of the state in the context of twentieth-century late industrialization.

It was in 1974 when I first took a look at mercantile militarism in Turkey, emergent in the form of OYAK-Ordu Yardımlaşma Kurumu (Armed Forces Mutual Trust and Pension Fund) (Parla 1974). In the first section of this paper, I shall present the case as it then appeared. In the second section, I will update the data on the phenomenon of OYAK as of 1998. In the third, I shall examine aspects of the second, complementary wave of Turkish mercantile militarism that has manifested itself in the form of TSKGV-Türk Silahlı Kuvvetlerini Güçlendirme Vakfı (Foundation for Strengthening the Turkish Armed Forces). The concluding section will suggest a way in which this subject can be put in the larger context of an all-pervasive militarism in Turkey—political, constitutional, cultural—as well as some of the ways in which critical appreciation of this phenomenon seems crucial for understanding Turkish politics and political economy better.

We thought “isms” were dead after our disillusionment with socialist utopian thinking in practice. But in the last two decades, new “isms,” Islamism, feminism and postmodernism, each very distinct, have changed our lives as much as our conceptions of ourselves and our societies. Feminism redefined woman's identity and, by the same token, changed the relations between man and woman; Islamism brought Muslim actors to modern politics, in which the veiling of women blurs habitual distinctions between public and private, traditional and modern; and post-modernism-by pursuing the critique initiated by new social movements for egalitarian, progressive, emancipatory values of enlightened modernity-challenged the central and hierarchical place occupied by the West as standard-bearer of modernity. Despite their differences, each movement—feminism as a social movement, Islamism as an anti-systemic movement, and postmodernism as a movement of ideas—changed definitions and perceptions of woman, Islam and modernity.

Since the Customs Union came into effect on 1 January 1996, Turkey has effectively become part of the European Union's single market. This high degree of economic integration has not been matched in the sphere of political and social integration. Turkey was omitted from a list of countries with which accession negotiations began in March 1998, and the Cardiff European Council of May 1998 confirmed Turkey's marginalization from the current process of enlargement.

As new elections approach, Turkish political agenda is once again dominated by discussions of election systems and impending changes in the existing one. These discussions are not without consequence. Since the first competitive and fair elections of 1950, twelve general elections have been held and a total of 37 legislative arrangements concerning elections have been implemented. Three of those were passed by the parliament just before the December 1995 elections (Tuncer, 1997, 5). The new early election, expected to be held in April 1999, seems to be no exception to this general pattern. Besides incessant attention in the media paid to the characteristics of the existing election system in Turkey and their political consequences, a number of publications appeared over the past few years following the 1995 election that reflect an intense debate about how the election system should be changed.

In this paper I will construct separate time series for the wage levels of agricultural and unskilled (and non-factory) urban workers in nineteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia. An earlier study (Boratav et al. 1985) was able to construct an annual time series for urban wage levels by utilising a weighted average of the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Production of a time series for agricultural wages, on the other hand, is important for seeing the wage variations in rural and urban areas in the nineteenth-century Anatolian context and is crucial for understanding the peculiarities of the Ottoman (and later Turkish) economic development. These variations, at least to a degree, were responsible for the differences in labor costs in various parts of the empire and thus determined the peculiarities of the Ottoman incorporation into, world-economy (Ergene 1995).