In the nineteenth century Turkey’s GDP fell behind that of the “core” industrialising nations and since then it never reduced its income gap with leading developed countries. Why has economic catch-up been rather limited over the past two centuries? Why has Turkey failed to converge or to produce an “economic miracle” like other countries in Europe (Italy, Spain) or East Asia (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea)? Şevket Pamuk’s latest book, Uneven Centuries, provides excellent answers to these complex questions using a rich historical analysis and a clear prose.

Uneven Centuries offers a deep and comprehensive investigation of the evolution of the Turkish economy over the past two centuries, stretching from its Ottoman past to the present. The monograph examines the fundamental questions of why Turkey is at its current stage of economic and human development, and of how this changed since the nineteenth century. Digging deep into the country’s economic history, Pamuk builds a solid narrative centered on two key components: the “deep roots” and the “proximate causes” of growth. The first trace the evolution of Turkey’s (formal and informal) social, political, and economic institutions, while the proximate causes refer to the country’s relative factor endowments (land, labour, physical, and human capital), their respective returns, and technology. Such analytical framework, which combines standard growth theory with an institutional approach, is used to explain each epoch of Turkey’s development and represents a clear strength of the book. It allows the reader to reflect on how Turkey’s institutions and institutional changes (all of which were top-down, elite- initiated) interacted with GDP growth over time; and especially on why they did not generate higher rates of economic growth and human development.

There is a lot to like about Uneven Centuries: first, it has a global comparative perspective. Turkey’s development trends are set against those ofboth developed and developing countries, with an interesting specific focus on comparisons with countries of similar population size in Southern Europe (Spain and Italy) and in the Middle East (Iran and Egypt). Second, the book provides new quantitative evidence on Turkey’s development by publishing for the first time a GDP per capita series since 1820. Third, while formally beginning in the nineteenth century (the year 1820, a starting date constrained by GDP data availability), the discussion on institutional development covers the pre-nineteenth century period as well (Chapter 3). This is an essential step to establish the continuity of the Ottoman past and particularly to gain insights on the process of Ottoman state formation (and the related tensions between the state and various competing elites), which left a deep, long-lasting mark on Turkish institutions. As previously argued inter alia by Ahmad Feroz in The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), the Ottoman institutional legacy is crucial to understand Turkey’s development. Fourth, Pamuk incorporates a political economy flavour to all chapters, the kind of emphasis to be found in Bent Hansen’s The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity, and Growth: Egypt and Turkey (Oxford University Press, 1991). By discussing the role of cleavages within each epoch analysed, the book touches on recurrent themes relevant today, such as the rise of Kurdish nationalism, the rural/urban divide, and the frictions between secular and conservative Muslims. Such cleavages had (and still have) negative consequences on state capacity and undermined political stability.

The book is made of 13 chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. It starts with a big picture of the trends in Turkish economic and human development over 200 years (Chapter 2), to then focus on the country’s key institutions and institutional changes, including mentions to the relationship between the state and the elites, religion and culture, and the public and private sector (Chapter 3). The rest of the book is divided in four epochs: the nineteenth century is treated in Chapters 4–6. Here Pamuk analyses the rapid transformations taking place in the Ottoman Empire, which led to unprecedented changes to its economic and political structure: the secularisation and centralisation reforms (tanzimat), the commercialisation of agriculture, and the process of de-industrialisation under open economy conditions. Chapters 7 and 8 cover the interwar era and emphasise the political change brought about by the Young Turks revolution, the negative impact of WWI, and the transition from empire to nation state. During this period the government embraced a policy of etatism, transforming Turkey into an inward-looking economy, thus marking a sharp change from the previous century. The following four chapters focus on the post-WWII period: during the Bretton Woods era (Chapters 9 and 10), Turkey, like many other developing countries embraced interventionist policies, such as import-substitution industrialization and price controls supporting the agricultural sector. This was also a time of dramatic acceleration of rural-urban migration, strongly influenced by the dominant pattern of small and medium sized peasant-owned farms, whose origins date back to the Ottoman era. Migration also contributed to prevent the Eastern and South-eastern regions from falling further behind relative to the Western regions in terms of per capita income.

Chapters 11–12 engage with the post-1980 neoliberal era, during which the inward- oriented model embraced since the 1930s was transformed by liberalizing markets and opening up to international trade and capital flows.

Uneven Centuries is truly an excellent read: Anyone interested in understanding more about Turkey’s long-run economic development and economic history should read it.