The founders of modern Turkey and their successors’ devotion to ethnonationalist policies resulted in today's “Kurdish Question.” In this well-researched book, Veli Yadirgi undertakes the monumental task of explaining what historical, political, ideological, and economic conditions account for the persistence of this question—and lack of resolution. As Yadirgi argues, for the Turkish state, the Kurdish minority is a problematic one typified by underdevelopment, stubborn feudal/tribal values and structures, and incitement by foreign powers. Turkish governments, violently silencing the ethnic dimensions of the issue, have portrayed the solution to the problem in terms of economic improvement and modernizing social reforms. Yet as Yadirgi shows, a majority of the Kurds see their continuing struggle in more political terms, that is as resistance against an imposed Turkish identity and culture, discrimination, oppression, and denial of basic human rights. Starting in the 1960s, many started seeing their resistance against such policies as an anticolonial struggle.
Instead of taking the usual conflict resolution or nationalism studies route to explain this multifaceted problem, in this book Veli Yadirgi carries out a historically grounded, in-depth examination of the political economy of the Kurds. At the heart of the book are two questions: Is the pervasive economic backwardness of the predominantly Kurdish provinces of Turkey, the Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia (ESA), a result of uneven capitalist development, geographical and sociopolitical forces, or else the multifaceted discriminatory policies of the Turkish state? Further, have the Turkish governments delivered on their promises of modernization that they claim would solve the problem? By following the continuities between the Ottoman period and republican Turkey, Yadirgi argues that the de-development of the ESA—and thus the broader material struggles faced by Kurds—is not a derivative of uneven economic development determined by global dynamics, but the result of a carefully orchestrated master plan diligently followed by successive regimes of Turkey.
Yadirgi's work unpacks virtually every aspect of Kurdish economic production, including historical patterns of commerce and transportation, agriculture and land policies, property rights, government and private investment, banking policies, and industrial projects. With an impressive number of supportive graphs and maps, Yadirgi persuasively concludes that Ankara's polices have widened the gap of development between the Turkish and the Kurdish parts of the country, and consequently contributed to the deepening of the Kurdish problem and the consequent conflict. The sum total is not underdevelopment but a deliberate de-development of ESA. As Yadirgi explains, built on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire and the fear of further disintegration, the Turkish state starting with the Unionist seizure of power in 1913 made sure that “there will be no economic base to support an independent indigenous existence” of non-Turkish elements. Preserving national unity thus required the destruction of any trace of resilience on the part of minorities, including their ethnic cultures and languages atop their economic impoverishment and disempowerment. This strategy of “de-development” is qualitatively different from the standard hypothesis regarding underdevelopment due to neglect rather than targeted policies, as even underdevelopment allows for some prospect of autonomous indigenous existence.
Kurdish intellectuals and a few leftist Turkish intellectuals have been arguing along these lines for quite some time. But their claims have not been substantiated. With this sophisticated intervention Yadirgi sets out to do precisely this by emphasizing the ESA's de-development. Critical of the existing literature on Turkey for ignoring developments within Kurdish society and not considering historical antecedents of the ESA's local economy, Yadirgi devotes the first two chapters of the book to the socioeconomic life of the Ottoman Kurdistan. With this longue durée account, which relies on imperial records including British consular trade reports, Yadirgi shows that Kurdish-majority regions of the Ottoman Empire were not stagnant, underdeveloped areas. The turning point for many economic indicators that negatively determined the future of ESA was the violent destruction of Kurdish polities beginning with the Tanzimat period of reform and culminating in the statist centralization embodied in the founding of the new republic and reordering of the Turkish state. Indeed, the Young Turk era set the ideological stage for the successive Turkish governments, which presided over policies designed to impose de-development through various measures, including forced displacement and property confiscation. These had long-term economic consequences—which the rest of the book meticulously illustrates by tracing the process of de-development through to the modern day. As the work shows, there is a reason why most shoe shiners, porters, construction workers, and seasonal fruit or cotton pickers of Turkey today are mostly Kurdish: it has little to do with their cultural and social background, and everything to do with how many decades of forced economic dislocation have all but consigned Kurds in many sectors to low-skilled and low-productivity occupations that perpetuate, in turn, their cultural marginalization and political invisibility.
Despite its fresh perspective and groundbreaking analysis, though, Yadirgi's book carries some problems of pioneering works trying to answer big questions. Like any book covering five hundred tumultuous years, it often relies heavily upon secondary sources and glosses over particulars. While Yadirgi’s theoretical sophistication and background in development studies shines through the first and last two chapters, his non-historian background is visible in the middle chapters, which miss innovative research outside an aging stream of well-cited historical narratives. The book could have also used a more consistent editorial service to evade small grammatical mistakes, as well as occasional problems with the footnoting style. Lack of a more critical stand towards the Kurdish political movements and their inability to come up with creative solutions to the problems of their oppressed people should be sited as another shortcoming of the book. Nonetheless, this is a compelling and original work that never loses the sight of its main argument, and one demanding wider attention.
As a historical account emphasizing the structural origins of Kurdish de-development, Yardigi's work importantly argues that Turkish historiography move away from its Orientalist trope that has long portrayed a modern and civilizing Turkish republic struggling against a socially and culturally backward ESA, a view espoused by intellectual defenders as diverse as Marxists and Islamists. Yadirgi's book is a welcome addition to alternative histories of the emergence and development of modern Turkey and the Kurdish question. It should be incorporated into the general reading lists of graduate seminars; even undergraduate survey classes would greatly benefit from the last two chapters, which combine sweeping overviews of the topic with useful scholarly reviews and citations.
