Uneven Centuries
Sevket Pamuk
Abstract
The population and economy of the area within the present-day borders of Turkey has consistently been among the largest in the developing world, yet there has been no authoritative economic history of Turkey until now. This book examines the economic growth and human development of Turkey over the past two hundred years. Taking a comparative global perspective, the book investigates Turkey's economic history through four periods: the open economy during the nineteenth-century Ottoman era, the transition from empire to nation-state that spanned the two world wars and the Great Depression, the c ... More
The population and economy of the area within the present-day borders of Turkey has consistently been among the largest in the developing world, yet there has been no authoritative economic history of Turkey until now. This book examines the economic growth and human development of Turkey over the past two hundred years. Taking a comparative global perspective, the book investigates Turkey's economic history through four periods: the open economy during the nineteenth-century Ottoman era, the transition from empire to nation-state that spanned the two world wars and the Great Depression, the continued protectionism and import-substituting industrialization after World War II, and the neoliberal policies and the opening of the economy after 1980. Making use of indices of GDP per capita, trade, wages, health, and education, the book argues that Turkey's long-term economic trends cannot be explained only by immediate causes such as economic policies, rates of investment, productivity growth, and structural change. The book offers a deeper analysis of the essential forces underlying Turkey's development—its institutions and their evolution—to make better sense of the country's unique history and to provide important insights into the patterns of growth in developing countries during the past two centuries.
Keywords:
Turkey,
economic growth,
human development,
economic history,
developing countries,
open economy,
empire,
industrialization,
protectionism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780691166377 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691166377.001.0001 |
