It is hard to contend that scholars have sufficiently addressed workers and their experiences in Ottoman studies, despite growing interest in Ottoman (and republican Turkish) labor history. Even research focusing on strikes, perhaps the most spectacular theme of labor history, have mostly remained all but descriptive, mostly without an in-depth analysis for understanding the development of these protests within their historical contexts. Can Nacar’s study successfully takes on this gap, concentrating on workers employed in a particular sector with the aim of understanding how they perceived some of the dramatic events and transformations in the late Ottoman Empire, and “how they tried to resist, contest, adapt to, or transform these changes” (p. 2). The book analyzes the experiences of tobacco workers employed in warehouses and factories across different parts of the empire, from Samsun and İstanbul to Salonica, Kavala, and İskeçe, and explores their relations with managers and the bureaucratic elites throughout the four decades that started with the establishment of a monopoly in the tobacco industry and ended with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912.

The book is organized into five chapters between an introduction and conclusion, and each chapter is designed and written in a way that allows one to read (and assign) them separately. The first two chapters after the introduction lay the ground for the next three chapters where Nacar analyzes the collective protests of tobacco workers in a chronological way. The book first introduces the reader, in the second chapter, to the development of the tobacco industry starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, its transformation, production processes, and labor profile. As tobacco production was a multilayered and challenging process that consisted of tobacco fields, warehouses, and cigarette factories, a highly heterogeneous and dynamic body of workers characterized the labor profile of the industry, particularly with regard to ethnic-religious diversity and the high rates of women and children within the workforce. The following chapter (chapter 3) is a particularly significant one as it successfully does what has scarcely been attempted in Ottoman labor studies, by entering into the tobacco workplaces to examine the labor processes and relations in warehouses as well as the tobacco factory in Cibali, İstanbul. A meticulous focus on each step of production allows Nacar to demonstrate the complicated relations at the workplace along the lines of skill, age, gender, and ethnicity/religion. Both of these chapters underline the impacts of consumer preferences and practices on the transformation of production and labor. As opposed to labor historians’ tendency to focus almost exclusively on production, Nacar’s effort to introduce consumption as an essential, and constitutive, component of tobacco workers’ experiences deserves special mention. But perhaps more importantly, these two chapters prove the significance of taking a sector-wide perspective regarding workers’ experiences and relations by tracing the chain of production from the agricultural fields to the factory, which helps the author reveal the connections across discrete actors, sites, and labor processes, even when these were divided by geography and/or type of production. Such a perspective can be particularly useful for encouraging Ottoman historians to go beyond such shallow polarities as between agricultural and urban, or artisanal and industrial, in their approach to working-class experiences.

The next three chapters examine, in a chronological way, the collective actions of tobacco workers in different towns and cities in the last years of Hamidian rule (chapter 4), during the 1908 revolution (chapter 5), and the following few years until 1912 (chapter 6). We first read about the formation of the collective protests by tobacco growers and warehouse workers in İskeçe and Kavala, and those by the Cibali factory workers between 1893 and 1908. Although staged in different cities, these protests demonstrated some common patterns, such as the role of problems related to unemployment or wages in catalyzing these strikes, the importance of shared hometowns and neighborhoods in organizing and sustaining them, and the way the Hamidian establishment acted in response to these protests. It is striking that both in Kavala and İstanbul, collective actions consisted of conscious and well-organized tactics to stop production, although the chapter does not inquire further into how this consciousness could be formed and how these tactics were adopted. With the 1908 Revolution, a new phase started for tobacco workers in their struggles against merchants and the Régie, as these protests took a more organized form, evolving into unions or associations, which also helped them to actively participate in the boycotts against Austria-Hungary. Following the “revolutionary euphoria” of 1908, cross-communal solidarities against the employers marked these struggles, even when ethno-religious tensions were high, alongside the increasing involvement of leftist organizations and actors in these struggles. A particular emphasis throughout these chapters, as reiterated in the conclusion, is the fact that “people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds could join together to fight for common causes” (p. 177). Indeed, both in warehouses and the Cibali Factory, workers from different ethno-religious communities, even when they formed separate unions as in Salonica, could support each other against employers or merchants (p. 140). On the other hand, their contacts with left-wing activists and with tobacco workers in other towns substantially increased, which materialized the prospects (and fear on the part of the government and employers) of larger-scale labor unrest in this period (p. 154). As contentious collective actions potentially draw a wide range of different actors into the same narrative, an in-depth focus on the formation of strikes seems a wise choice for the book’s goal of disclosing the complicated relations between workers, managers, and bureaucrats, as well as the connections or relations among workers across different workplaces or cities. Indeed, the book aptly proves that approaching strikes as processes, rather than mere events, reveals not only the rich diversity of working-class actions and tactics against both the companies and the state, but also the hitherto ignored significance of unionization and leftist political organizations in the history of Ottoman workers.

Each of these later chapters substantially contributes to a field marked by a dearth of analyses on strikes in the late Ottoman Empire, but they also reveal Nacar’s implicit persistence in avoiding investigation of the possibilities of these workers being part of a larger working class, and of their struggles as part of a larger history of class formation. As a result, he mostly ignores the possible impacts of their relations with and connections to workers outside of their workplaces or the tobacco sector. This is the case even in chapter 6, where Nacar limits his discussion of the activities of the Socialist Workers’ Federation of Salonica mostly to those related to tobacco workers, or when he very briefly mentions the important contacts between Cibali workers and the tailors’ union in İstanbul (p. 153). An inquiry along this line could encourage the author to explore further the possible connections between tobacco workers and the rest of the working classes, and to place his narrative within the larger context of capital–labor relations in Ottoman society. In fact, if we look beyond the tobacco industry, we can see important similarities and potential connections between tobacco workers’ experiences and the experiences of workers in other industries.Footnote ¹ Shared hometowns and neighborhoods, which Nacar well demonstrates as a significant component of solidarity among tobacco workers, may have been equally critical for connecting workers across different industries. Similarly, Nacar does not delve into how workers adopted such tactics as breaking windows in Kavala or sitting in the factory in İstanbul, actions that consciously targeted the production process and required a well-established organization. Investigating the possible connections of these protests with, for example, the courses of labor militancy dating back to the 1870s (which is surprisingly missing from the overall narrative) could open up a fruitful and interesting discussion on the relations between and among different working-class communities in the late Ottoman Empire.

Such points are to be seen less as shortcomings than ideas and questions inspired by the book, and thus highlight the significance of Nacar’s study for stimulating new lines of research and discussion on the history of the working classes in the late Ottoman Empire. A particular achievement of the author is his ability to mobilize a wide range of archival sources, from official records to newspapers, diaries, and photographs, weaving them in a skillful and eloquent way in the absence of institutional records on workplaces (a common problem for non-state factories and small workplaces). Thus, as it is well written in a style accessible to non-specialists, the book will hopefully reinvigorate public and scholarly interest in Ottoman workers and their experiences and is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of Ottoman labor history.