Like in other parts of Europe and, indeed, the United States, early initiatives in the Ottoman Empire for higher education in business date back to the second half of the 19th century. After a number of aborted attempts, the opening of a commercial school in İstanbul (Hamidiye Ticaret Mektebi) in 1883 under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade marked the beginning of business education in the Empire, purportedly, at the “higher” level. The Commercial School was closed down in 1890 and re-opened in 1894, attached this time to the Ministry of Education. It went through a restructuring in 1915 that led to a demarcation between an upper and a junior division. The School served as the sole provider of business education till it was inherited by the Turkish Republic and remained so for more than another decade. From the second opening until the founding of the Republic, it had an average of around 12 graduates per year, which increased to about 24 in the period up to the mid-1930s.

At the end of World War I, senior Ottoman military officers and bureaucrats led the Turkish Muslim inhabitants of Anatolia in a struggle for national independence against invading European armies, under the command of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and his deputy, İsmet İnönü. Emerging victorious in the war, Atatürk and his associates had garnered sufficient national legitimacy and prestige to end the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate, establish a Turkish Republic, and embark on a series of interventions in politics and society known in Turkish parlance as the Kemalist Reforms/Revolutions. Recrafting the ethos, substance, and goals of schooling into a properly national education (millî terbiye) was one of the central components of this reform.

In a report prepared by a German geologist in 1917, Çukurova was designated as the most important region of cotton agriculture in Ottoman Anatolia. At the turn of the 21st century, the corporations of two families from Çukurova, Sabancı and Karamehmet, ranked among the largest 65 of the world. No other region of the former Ottoman Empire produced such wealth. This paper traces its generation back to nineteenth century processes of capital accumulation through the development of the port-town of Mersin.

One prominent intellectual of the early Turkish Republic, İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, argued that the new Republic should be “a Republic of fine arts.” Indeed, the early Republican project in Turkey perceived culture and art as media through which the Republic could not only represent its achievements but also “create” itself. The present study focuses on the cultural policies and elite perceptions of culture during the single-party regime in Turkey. More specifically, it looks into the developments that took place in the plastic arts and in elite approaches towards aesthetics. This is done in order to shed light on young Turkey's cultural modernization. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and power, this discussion stands at the intersection of political studies and cultural history.