CAPITALEAST is an ERC-funded project led by Associate Professor M. Talha Çiçek examining the impact of capitalization and commercialization on tribal agency and urban-rural / global-local relations in the Middle East.
The project compares tribes of diverse origins, examining the ‘capitalization’ of their agriculture and the commercialization of their livestock. It adopts a translocal and global approach to reveal the connectedness of the diverse social entities to the wider world like the nomadic, semi-settled and settled tribes living in cultivable, desert, and mountainous ecologies.
The project argues that intertwined processes such as commodification, the scientification of cultivation and animal breeding, mechanization of agriculture, ‘automobilization’, and new patterns of land ownerships resulted in an impressive repositioning of tribal agency in the physical environment and a noticeable increase in urban-rural and global-local relations. States, urban elites and tribal leaders, and global capitalists all emerged as active participants in the process.
Extensive research expertise in the Ottoman, Austrian, German, British, French and American state archives, focusing on the history of the Middle East in the Modern era. Çiçek has held previous positions in Istanbul Medeniyet University (Turkey), ANAMED-Koç University (Turkey), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Germany), SOAS University of London (United Kingdom).
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Abdulhamit Kırmızı is currently working on "Bureaucratic Expansion and Capitalist Integration in the Ottoman Countryside" as part of the CAPITALEAST project.
Laura's work in the CAPITALEAST project will focus on the Bedouin sheep economy in the Middle East, its integration into regional and global capitalist trade networks, and its local social implications from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
Sevde is currently working on her thesis titled “Date Trade and Translocalization of the Iraqi Rural Space in the Age of Globalization”.
CAPITALEAST aims to shed light on Middle Eastern rurality from a new angle, illuminating the parts of its history that remained unseen due to the existing literature’s focal point, perspective, and methodology. While historians of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey, and the French and the British mandates had told the Middle Eastern history many times, these studies either dismissed the rural space and agency or embedded them into a well-established “victims and resistors” narrative. What these studies generally have in common is that they consider the rural spaces as isolated units that had little to no contact with the local, imperial, and, most importantly, the global networks.
CAPITALEAST, on the other hand, aspires to fill the gaps these studies have left behind, arguing that the Middle Eastern rurality neither existed in a vacuum nor was entirely victimized by and, therefore, resisted the change. Even research conducted from a global, translocal, or connected history approach fails to provide an adequate platform for rural space and agency. They address rurality merely as the “dependent variable” of the urban narrative and, as a result, leave a significant portion of the region overlooked and misperceived.
This project expands the spatial scope of the Middle East’s capitalist history, shifting its research focus from the region’s commercialization to the countryside and interior areas. As the Middle Eastern urban space slowly but surely became increasingly integrated into the global capitalist system, it was inevitable that the rural space would also experience this integration. The capitalization of rurality goes hand in hand with the commodification of agricultural production and animal husbandry, two of the primary sources of income of the rural actors in the region.
The very nature of this project requires both a qualitative and data-driven historical enquiry. A multidisciplinary approach built on economic, sociological, anthropological, and environmental studies will complement the archival and published sources, creating a narrative that enables us to view the Middle Eastern rurality’s experience with global capitalism from different angles. Combining the abovementioned disciplines will help the project produce results that they failed to yield individually.
CAPITALEAST seeks to demonstrate how the Middle Eastern processes of capitalist transformation should be placed in a translocal and global context to fully comprehend their evolution and impact. The rural actors maintained their trans-border commercial, social, and political relations during the Ottoman modern age and post-Ottoman period. Their engagement with the global sphere gradually increased during the timeframe selected for this project, the years between 1870 to 1945 can best be understood if a translocal and global approach is assumed. The longitude of the period selected is crucial to identify the continuities and discontinuities within the capitalist history of the Middle East. The longitudinal analysis will help to examine the entangled and interconnected dynamics of state-society, urban-rural, and global-local entities from the late Ottoman era to the end of the Second World War in matters of the commodification and productivity of rural tribal property.
On top of all these, CAPITALEAST aims to show the multiplicity of agency in the rural space, which includes international capitalists, imperial rulers, and urban merchants (of diverse ethnic and religious origin) in addition to its usual residents, tribal society, and tribal elders. Combining classic historical and anthropological research methods, CAPITALEAST accounts for the perspective of the imperial Ottoman, Western colonialist and Republican Turkish centers, but it focuses in on the agency of local tribal leaders and the tribespeople, urban politicians/elites and foreign merchants from various ethnic, religious and sectarian backgrounds, examining the interplay and impact of individuals, social groups, and state institutions at the local, regional, and global levels. In so doing, it allows the project team to track and compare ‘small-scale’ experiences and combine these stories and their inherent agency with a wider global and translocal narrative. Differentiating between the agency of the tribespeople and their leaders and comparing the various ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups also enable the project members to gauge the role of socio-economic status, ethnic, religious, sectarian, and cultural background, and other key factors shaping society’s experiences and uses of capitalism.
06May
Talk by M. Talha Çiçek as part of the UCD School of History Global History Seminar Series (GHSS) & Gender History Seminar Series