Eren Duzgun’s book, Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity, offers a reinterpretation of “Turkish modernity” from 1839 to the present day through the prisms of capitalism and Jacobinism. Its primary purpose is to develop a theoretical framework for understanding “multiple modernities” and “alternative routes to modernity.” In doing so, it engages in controversial debates about the origins of capitalism, international relations of modernity, the significance of the French Revolution, and its world-historical consequences. As such, Duzgun asserts that Jacobinism represents a geopolitical and qualitative alternative to British capitalist modernity. According to him, this alternative model presented a blueprint for other countries’ modernization endeavors. The utilization of this theoretical framework implies that the commodification of life was suppressed, and non-market survival strategies continued in the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey due to Jacobinism, which maintained its superiority over capitalist modernity until the 1950s.

The book consists of seven chapters. While the first chapter serves as an introduction, laying out the plan of the book, the last chapter makes a general evaluation of “Turkish modernity.” The author builds his main arguments in discussion with the controversial historical debates in the second chapter, where he raises two crucial criticisms of the existing literature of historical sociology. These critiques are methodological internalism and methodological presentism. Duzgun contends that the primary problem fueling these methodological traps is the separation of economics and politics and the tendency to ascribe different rationalities to each. According to him, presentist approaches transhistoricize and equate capitalism with embryonically developing phenomena such as commerce, wage labor, and industrial production. Employing the theoretical assumptions of political Marxism regarding how capitalism emerged, he instead defines capitalism as the dependence on the market and the establishment of a new institutional set up, which requires the systematic and political eradication of non-market survival strategies. This definition is based on Ellen Meiksins Wood’s conception of capitalism.

Second, Duzgun analyzes the consequences of internalist tendencies and their critiques. He claims to have undertaken a transdisciplinary effort, asserting that the dialogue between international historical sociology, specifically uneven and combined development (UCD), and political Marxism provides an understanding of global modernity that is both “noninternalist” and “nonpresentist.” The theory of UCD, as he argues, rejects autonomous, independent, and disconnected routes of development. Instead, it recognizes multilinear accounts of modernization, wherein “less developed” societies can learn and emulate diverse strategies for development. However, he notes that the current usage of UCD, particularly consequentialist readings, holds a transhistorical position that obscures social agency. According to him, political Marxism could underpin UCD with its emphasis on specific socio-spatial struggles, which allow “interactive, temporal, and cumulative constitution of the modern world” (p. 16), and the combination of the two is essential for the true historicization of multiple modernities.

In the third chapter, the author investigates the emergence of “British capitalist modernity” and “French Jacobinism” within different socio-geopolitical contexts. While getting to the roots of these two different paths to modernity, he qualifies early modern Britain as the mainland of the transition to capitalism through market dependency and the rise of capitalist social relations. He argues that the British state acquired a military power and fiscal base that posed a new geopolitical challenge to other European states, particularly France, where this challenge led to an absolutist state during the eighteenth century. According to Duzgun, the primary difference between these two paths lies in enclosures. In Britain, enclosures led to a market-dependent society as peasants were forced off their land and stripped of their customary rights to subsistence. In France, where enclosures were not viable, the propertied classes were dependent on the centralization of the state machinery for generating income.

Consequently, this chapter asserts that as state apparatus became the primary source of income, the intraclass conflict intensified and led to the French Revolution. It was within this context that revolutionary elites produced a non-capitalist route to modernity in which citizenship was defined by service to the nation in the shadow of geopolitical threats. Duzgun argues that the Jacobin model ensured the continuation of peasants’ customary rights to land and subsistence in order to mobilize the social forces and resources of the lower classes. Universal conscription and public education transformed peasants into citizen soldiers and citizen officers. These Jacobin policies were quickly adopted by state elites in continental Europe. During most of the nineteenth century, when faced with geopolitical challenges, they implemented a combination of them and capitalist policies.

Asserting that Jacobin modernism was vanquished in Europe during the 1870s, in Chapter 4, Duzgun revisits the experience of the Empire to trace the path of this trajectory in non-European regions. He characterizes the social transformation in the Empire as a contradictory amalgam of two distinct modernization models. He states that Ottoman elites strategically adopted specific social and institutional strategies linked to capitalism and Jacobinism starting from the 1840s. He puts forward that geopolitical threats and the possibility of peasant unrest render the capitalist strategies to abolish the customary rights of peasants unfeasible. In this way, Duzgun outlines the mechanism of contradictory modernization processes: the propertied elites strengthened small-commodity production and private property, and the state simultaneously safeguarded the collective rights of peasants and their right to use the land.

Then, Duzgun draws attention to Hamidian policies for conscription and public education and remarks that wars and financial crises heightened the role of Jacobinism during the reign of Abdülhamid II. He stresses that the mobilization of the lower classes through education and the army and the radicalization of their demands led to the 1908 revolution. Despite the Young Turks’ inclination towards capitalist projects, he notes, the post-revolutionary process also favored Jacobinist modernization without capitalism. Here, it is important to note that Duzgun refers to the Armenian genocide and the violence against non-Muslims during World War I as a Jacobin terror, whose social fabrics were related to social reproduction conditioned by service to the Turkish nation rather than market dependence.

In the fifth chapter, Duzgun questions whether the Kemalist state can be categorized as state capitalism. He notes that in the first decades of the Republic, sharecropping was widespread in the countryside, and the majority of the landless and land-hungry peasants were involved in sharecropping to make a living. It was seen as the primary potential for rebellion for the ruling elites. Nonetheless, he remarks that landowners involved in sharecropping also played significant roles in the Republican government. According to him, this led the state to adopt contradictory policies. He, for instance, interprets the 1924 constitution as a regime that bolstered the status of private property, thereby providing the legal foundation for large sharecropper units. However, it was also intended to promote the subsistence of the peasantry by enabling the expansion and fragmentation of small plots of land. Likewise, he argues that although state capitalism involves political measures, incentives, and market distortions, the Kemalist state did not increase the control of industrialists over labor. Thus, the chapter concludes that, between 1923 and 1950, Kemalist etatism and populism, based on public education, conscription, and universal suffrage, prevented the emergence of a market-dependent society.

In the sixth chapter, Duzgun examines the relationship between geopolitical dynamics and the rise of capitalism in Turkey, particularly within the context of the Cold War. He argues that the United States recognized Turkey’s strategic importance and that Turkish elites strengthened capitalist relations by relying on the increasing military support from the United States. Duzgun argues that this shift resulted in notable changes in consumption patterns beyond mere subsistence levels, as well as a transformation in the labor market with a focus on more disciplined factory labor. Although these developments did not go unchallenged by the Jacobin faction within the ruling elite, it eventually lost power to countervailing powers, such as industrialists and the parliamentary. This containment resulted in an oligopolistic structure within the country. In addition, Duzgun addresses the expansion of capitalism into Anatolian cities in the 1970s. According to him, commercial groups, feeling excluded from state economic benefits, joined forces under the Islamic National View Movement (NVM) with the aim of achieving a capitalist future unconstrained by Kemalist limits. Following the neoliberal shift in the 1980s, the classes aligned with the NVM attained significant political and economic power. As an offshoot of the NVM, the Justice and Development Party took power in 2002, adapting or discarding aspects of Kemalist modernity to fit its own goals. Duzgun concludes that the present circumstances indicate the authoritarian establishment of a Turkish manifestation of capitalist modernity.

While Duzgun’s account opens essential debates about the role of geopolitical and sociospatial struggles in the making of modernity, his theoretical ground is controversial because of the problems associated with political Marxism. The real problem behind the issue is that political Marxists define capitalism as purely economic coercion and dependence on the market. That, in turn, leads them to argue for exceptionalism for “British capitalism” and approach capitalism as an external factor to all countries. In this way, they prioritize geopolitical arguments over internal ones and overlook the various transitional forms, local capitalist forces, and inter-/intra-ruling class struggles in different geographies. In parallel, Duzgun’s framework encounters two limitations. First, while limiting the development of capitalism to the experience of the English countryside, he builds Jacobinism as the sole alternative to it. His theoretical framework, thus, fails to avoid Eurocentrism. Second, Duzgun constructs geopolitics as a primary historical agent and reduces “multiple modernities” to the strategies of elites in the face of geopolitical threats. In this framework, his narrative depicts the Ottoman/Turkish military and political elite as almost a monolithic group faced with contingencies and had to choose between Jacobinism or the capitalist project. Thus, the book overlooks the rise of new entrepreneurial classes, their internal conflicts, and the formation and dissolution dynamics of the ruling classes. In other words, he fails to recognize the motives and interests behind the factions that supported and opposed respective regimes and their economic and political projects. Undeniably, he resorts to a logic of two ways of external modernization, like the sword of Damocles that swings back and forth. Despite these limitations, however, this book is very successful in explaining the crucial role of the demands and mobilization of the lower classes in “Ottoman/Turkish modernization” and the decisiveness of geopolitics and UCD in shaping “multiple modernities.” Lastly, this book is a valuable resource for those interested in deep-rooted transitional debates, such as the Brenner debate, and their dialogue with the current international historical sociology literature. It also provides insight into the perspective of Ottoman/Turkish modernization from political Marxism’s side of the debate.