It has become commonplace among economists and economic historians that developing countries’ growth successes and collapses tend to cluster in specific time periods, and that only the existence of a permissive global developmental environment can explain this. The global developmental environment reflects the external factors that affect all or a large array of developing countries and thus constrain or spur their growth possibilities.Footnote ¹ A smaller but developing literature, however, has focused on how country-specific factors—particularly the institutional underpinning of market economies—play a significant role in determining the growth dynamics and social development prospects in such economies. Şevket Pamuk’s recent book is a welcome addition to this last body of work, as it offers a compassionate insight into the developmental problems faced by Turkey in the past as well as those still faced today.

Uneven Centuries: Turkey’s Economic Development since 1820 examines the economic development of Turkey during the last two centuries from a comparative global perspective. Turkey is one of the largest developing countries, with limited natural resources and a large population. Governments in Turkey have pursued similar development strategies to those adopted by their counterparts in other developing countries. Therefore, the author argues, Turkey’s economic experience since the beginning of industrial capitalist development in western Europe serves as a good case study for the exploration of not only the patterns of growth and human development in developing countries but also their proximate causes and deeper determinants. The proximate causes refer to increases in productivity brought on by investments in physical and human capital as well as advances in technology and organizational efficiency, while the deeper causes denote (formal and informal) social, political, and economic structures that individuals and other economic agents are embedded in.

Şevket Pamuk’s account of Turkey’s economic development and institutional transformations is organized around thirteen chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion which provides a coherent and persuasive summary. There are a lot of novel contributions in Uneven Centuries. First, the book constructs, for the first time, long-run gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per capita series as well as series on education and health, and presents them in a comparative, critical, and synthetic way. As discussed in detail throughout the chapters, GDP per capita in the area within Turkey’s current borders has increased approximately fifteenfold, and Turkey’s rates of economic growth have been close to world averages and slightly above the averages of developing countries since 1820. Three salient features of the historical record are emphasized: the unevenness of the growth experience; the unbalanced nature of growth (in the sense that different sectors of the economy grow at different rates, resulting in structural change); and fluctuations in the pace of growth over time. In terms of human development, improvements in education and health have been correlated with that in GDP per capita. Despite rapid improvements in average years of schooling for the adult population since the end of World War II, basic indicators for education show that Turkey has lagged behind both world averages and averages for developing countries with similar levels of GDP per capita. As a principal health indicator, life expectancy at birth has moved above world averages in recent decades, and the gap in this respect between Turkey and developed countries closed.

The second contribution of Uneven Centuries is a suggested periodization of Turkey’s economic development in the last two centuries. In order to provide additional insights into Turkey’s absolute and relative growth record, the author reviews world economic conditions, government economic policies, the basic macroeconomic and social outcomes, and institutional change in Turkey in the period from 1820 to 2015 in four periods. These periods consist of the following: (1) 1820–1914, growing specialization in agriculture under open economy conditions; (2) 1914–50, the transition from empire to nation-state and the building of an inward-looking economy under etatist policies; (3) 1950–80, import substituting industrial development led by the private sector; and (4) 1980–2015, neoliberal market reforms and opening up to global trade and capital flows. Şevket Pamuk devotes separate chapters to each of these periods, discussing in depth the dominant economic model followed at the time. In all these periods, the author compares Turkey’s economic policies and performance to countries of similar population size in southern Europe (Spain and Italy) and in the Middle East (Iran and Egypt), highlighting affinities as well as divergences between them. For each period, identity-based cleavages, such as ethnic and secular-religious divisions, and competition between different elite groups, are analyzed in detail in order to show how such differences undermined political and economic stability with important implications for economic development both in the short and long term.

Third, the volume stresses the importance of interactions between proximate causes and deeper determinants of growth for each period identified. The proximate causes of growth (accumulation of physical and human capital, and technological change measured by total factor productivity growth) are not exogenous variables but are determined by the social, economic, and political environments and historical causes. Uneven Centuries thus adopts an institutionalist framework to emphasize the need to analyze the institutional shaping of behavior, and see institutions as mediating between macro and micro phenomena in complex manners. The existence and importance of institutions in real economic life is not a matter of controversy in itself. Nonetheless, too often institutionalist analyses risk treating polity as an autonomous sphere, institutions as tending to be persistent over time, and change largely as path-dependent and unpredictable.Footnote ²Uneven Centuries diverges from this body of scholarship in two critical ways. First, it explores not only the roots of institutional persistence, but also its relationship to underlying forces for change, and the conditions under which it will be overcome. Second, its focus is generally on the relationships between structures (institutions and particularly the state as the most significant of all social institutions) and agents (economic and political actors).

Moreover, such relationships are not taken to be on a personal level but are based on structural levels. This approach is exemplified in the volume’s take on the transformation of the underlying power balances in society during the Justice and Development Party period. By building upon the political fragmentation of the private sector, the author demonstrates that it was mainly the power struggle between the economically dominant, İstanbul-based, secular large conglomerates and a large group of newly emerging conservative business groups that determined the direction of institutional change at the turn of the twenty-first century. The author then examines particular institutional changes ranging from regulatory agencies to the public procurement system, and from growing authoritarianism to partisanship in bureaucratic appointments.

Şevket Pamuk’s book presents a successful and comprehensive overview of the present literature as well as quantitative and qualitative data on the economic history of modern Turkey from a variety of sources. Replete with statistics, tables, and charts, devoted to an exhaustive and authoritative analysis and discussion of all the facets and problems of Turkey’s economic and social development, Uneven Centuries surely deserves to be read not only by economists and historians, but also by anyone who wants to understand Ottoman and Turkish realities.