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Article Excerpt
Donald Quataert, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822-1920 (New York: Berghahn Books 2006)
Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2005)
John McIlroy, Alan Campbell, and Keith Gildart, eds., The Struggle for Dignity: Industrial Politics and the 1926 Lockout (Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2004)
Andrew Taylor, The NUM and British Politics: Volume 2, 1959-1995 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing 2005)
Stefan Berger, Andy Croll, and Norman LaPorte, eds., Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing 2005)
THE BODY OF LITERATURE on coal mining history has significantly expanded in the past decade. The studies listed above differ not only in their consideration of coal miners across time and space, but also in their depiction of how coal miners and mining unions interacted with capital and the state. Equally, however, the books also share a number of similarities, not least their portrayal of organized labour in the coalfields in decline, or at least struggling to survive. All five monographs also refer to national or central governments that were largely indifferent to the fate of the coal industry and its workers.
In Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822-1920, Donald Quataert examines the relationship between coal miners and the state in a single coalfield of the Ottoman Empire. As he outlines in chapter one, his intention is to diverge from the path taken by previous studies of coal mining in the Ottoman empire, by de-emphasizing the role of the state and examining the relationship from the perspective of the miners. He argues that while the state exerted a great deal of pressure on coal miners, for instance by enforcing compulsory labour and closely monitoring health and safety policy, it ultimately failed in its objective of increasing coal production during World War I, and in turn cast doubt on the legitimacy of its own power. The state's failure was largely attributable to the fact that, despite its use of coercion, it was unable to exert total control over the mining industry. Miners actively resisted work by fleeing mine sites, and the state's reliance on village elders for the appointment of miners was detrimental to its interests. Moreover, the state did not provide adequate funding or support for the mines during World War I. Quataert adeptly supports his argument, incorporating a broad range of documentary evidence and insightful analysis to his study.
In a brief historiographical essay, Quataert examines four historical accounts of coal mining in the Turkish republic. He notes that all four accounts emphasize the role of Uzun Mehmed, a discharged soldier who, motivated by promises of financial reward, discovered coal reserves near his home in 1829. Quataert is skeptical that coal was not discovered until that date, especially given the exposed nature of Turkish coal seams and the earlier discovery of coal in other countries. He also questions the accounts' emphasis on a single heroic individual. In considering how the accounts describe the early development of the coal industry, Quataert argues that they have created a distorted understanding of the relationship between the state and miners, by using periodization to place the state at the centre of the narrative, and by neglecting key aspects of workers' lives such as wages and working conditions. In particular, he draws attention to the account produced by the Zonguldak People's House, an institution that Turkey's ruling Republican Party established in June 1932 as a means of creating ideological and national cohesion. Quataert argues that the emphases in this particular account demonstrate the state's effort to control the historical narrative of the coal mining industry. The historiographical essay firmly supports Quataert's objective of reducing the emphasis on the state and giving a more central role to the coal workers. Moreover, it demonstrates his firm command of the limited printed resources on mining in the Ottoman state.
Although the book's title cites 1822 as the starting date for the study, Quataert's discussion of the first two decades after that year is rather sparse. Aside from his consideration of Mehmed's story in the historiographical essay, the book contains very little information on events prior to 1840. However, Quataert more than compensates for this omission with his sustained analysis of the events that curtailed the state's power in the coal industry from the mid-nineteenth century. In chapter two, he reveals that the Istanbul government's control over mines diminished after 1867, when it relinquished its coal extraction rights to private interests. The Eregli Company, ostensibly a state organization but in reality a joint venture between French investors and the Ottoman bank, emerged in 1891 and was indicative of the shift toward private control. The new company began to develop the transport infrastructure in the coalfields, constructing aerial tramways and expanding ports in order to increase profitability. Given the prominence of the Eregli Company throughout the book, Quataert could have provided more detail on its origins, but this is a minor omission in an otherwise informative chapter of how the state began to lose its grip on the coal industry.
In chapter three, Quataert demonstrates that, despite the ascension of private interests in the coal industry, the state still maintained its power over the miners. In the early 1840s, a free labour force composed mostly of unskilled workers toiled in the mines, but in 1867, when it became clear that free labourers were providing insufficient manpower, the state introduced regulations that mandated compulsory labour. Under the new regulations, it instructed village councils to appoint males between the ages of 13 and 50 to work in the mines. The councils decided who worked in the mines and who engaged in military service, granting exemptions to those who were sick or in poor health. In its early years, the compulsory labour program mostly targeted unskilled workers, but as the depth of the mines in the Zonguldak coalfield increased, operators came to rely on skilled workers who had the expertise to bring the coal to the surface. The issue of compulsory labour is one that Quataert returns to frequently throughout the book.
Quataert is mindful of the primary sources' limitations, and at frequent points in the chapter...
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