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THE DAWN OF OTTOMAN POPULAR POLITICAL ECONOMY: THE TURKISH TRANSLATIONS OF OTTO HÜBNER’S DER KLEINE VOLKSWIRTH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2019

Deniz T. Kilinçoğlu*
Affiliation:
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Lichtenberg-Kolleg.

Abstract

Otto Hübner’s (1818–1877) international bestseller introduction to political economy, Der kleine Volkswirth, appeared in Turkish in 1869 in two different editions. Two Ottoman officials translated the book into Turkish with different linguistic styles and pedagogical objectives. Beyond being an exceptional case in Ottoman-Turkish economic literature in this respect, the Hübner translations heralded the dawn of popular political economy in the Ottoman Empire. Economic literature before 1869 consisted of works written exclusively for the elite to introduce this new science as an instrument of state administration. Starting with the Hübner translations, we observe the burgeoning of a popular economic literature in the empire aiming at changing the economic mentality and behavior of the masses. This study is a comparative examination of the two Ottoman-Turkish translations of Der kleine Volkswirth in historical context.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2019 

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at Translations of Economic Texts into and from European Languages International Conference at University of Pisa (Italy) on September 13, 2013. I thank the participants of the conference for their questions and comments. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

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