Preliminary Programme

This paper examines the complaints and demands of the cultivators in Turkey in response to the impact of the 1929 economic crisis and the consequent economic policies generated by the one-party rule (the Republican People’s Party) in their lives. Besides, it tries to understand how those complaints and demands shaped the economic policies, especially after the social discontent became evident with the immense support to the newly established opposition party, namely the Free Republican Party (FRP), in the one-party rule.
The impact of the economic crisis on cultivators’ life in Turkey and the change in the economic policy in the early 1930s have been analyzed in the existing literature, the former as a sociological and historical case and the latter as high-level economic policymaking. Nevertheless, both cultivators’ reactions and voices in the form of complaints and demands, besides their role in the formation of new economic policy were missing in the literature. To fully understand these missing points, there is a need to resort to the relevant historical documents.
Hence, this paper is fundamentally based on archival documents, namely the records of Mustafa Kemal’s journey after the closure of the FRP in the state archive, the RPP provincial congresses’ wish lists, and the petitions sent to the Grand National Assembly. In this paper, I suggest a fourfold analytical framework oriented around the main themes of debt, credit, consumption, and production to understand the consequences of the economic crisis in the lives of cultivators and cultivators’ response to those consequences, specifically their complaints and demands. As the analysis unfolds, it would become apparent that the new economic policy was shaped in line with the cultivators’ demands with a concern of restoring the regime. (Show less)

This paper considers the political response to the Great Irish Famine (1845-51) manifested by the Irish Tenant League organisation, and its socio-economic underpinnings. Often dismissed as an abortive predecessor of the more successful Irish Land League of 1879-82, the Tenant League was the first non-violent mass movement of Irish tenant farmers mobilised to demand land reform relating to rent levels, fixity of tenure and defence of customary tenant right. The paper considers the relationship between famine (and famine memory) and political action, the motivation and ideology of its leadership and religious agents, the relations between tenant farmers and landless labourers, regional differences within Ireland, the reasons for its failure, despite having some real political impact at national level in 1852-3, and its legacies for later Irish (and international) agrarian reform movements, not least as a model for the Land League and in establishing an agenda for the Gladstonian land reforms of the 1870s-80s. In explaining its failure, attention will be given to the resilience of vested landed interests in Ireland and their support within the colonial power structure, the tensions between northern/Protestant and southern/Catholic wings of the 'League of North and South', the political impact of post-famine economic revovery, and the divisions between those emphasising nationalist protest and those seeking pragmatic reformism within the movement's leadership. (Show less)