First published in 1978, Professor O'Brien's Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France's path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.

First published in 1978, Professor O Brien 's Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France 's path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.

The period of Turkish history from the foundation of the Republic in 1923 to the depression in 1929 was characterised by a minimum of state intervention in the economy. This book, which illuminates the ways in which the forces of world capitalism acted upon and structured the peripheral formation of the Turkish economy in this period, provides a clear case study in the relationship of dependent economies to the capitalist world-system. Professor Keyder emphasises the importance, as mechanisms in the maintenance of existing economic relations, of two networks: that of trade, connecting producers with external markets; and that of credit, through which a dependency between foreign suppliers of funds and local users was established. This important contribution to the theoretical analysis of economic dependency will interest historians, economists and sociologists studying both historical and contemporary forms of economic peripheralisation.

This is a clear and original examination of the impact of modernity on Greece and Turkey, and the influence of the West on these former states of the Ottoman Empire during the crucial hundred years between 1850 and 1950. "Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey" explores the reactions and coping mechanisms displayed in both societies in reaction to Europe's all-pervasive influence. Elites in both societies engaged in defensive modernization, culminating in parallel attempts to mould their nations in line with the western blueprint. The authors examine reforms in the legal regime, the changing nature of family and gender relations, and re-engineered conceptions of space and the built environment. They describe and analyse different aspects of the changes in the two societies over this period, as they defined their practices and identities against Europe, and often against each other.

The formation of nation-states is as much the result of developments regarding land and people, as of military and political struggle. How nationalists imagined the borders of their desired territory, and how they defined the nation have determined the nature of the struggle. "Spatial Conceptions of the Nation" looks at the various aspects and stages of this process in Greece and Turkey -- two states where alternative principles establishing the basis for territory and population continue to compete. This book considers the intellectual and political conditions within which variously demarcated national spaces were imagined and considers the debates, social forces, and world-historical events that have affected national boundaries and conceptions of the nation.

An investigation of the processes of globalization in the context of Istanbul - one of the oldest and grandest of world cities. Istanbul is usually identified as a battleground between East and West, between Islam and secularism. Yet the authors argue that beyond these cliches lies a complex reality shaped by an ongoing struggle over the soul of the city and the identity of its inhabitants. Istanbulites try to accommodate, understand, challenge and shape the sweeping transformations that globalization has brought to their city. Explaining the course of the conflicts and the compromises involved in maintaining a precarious urbanity, this volume focuses on the fields of struggle ranging from politics to heritage, humour to music, public space to housing.

In a work of considerable analytic elegance, Caglar Keyder provides the first genuinely radical text on the political economy of modern Turkey. Keyder describes how, with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the traditional Muslim bureaucratic class of the old regime attempted to create a new nation state and effect its transition to modernity. Yet by expelling the Christian bourgeoisie between 1914 and 1924 the bureaucracy initially controlled Turkey's integration into the world capitalist system. Within the framework of the literature of peripheral development, Keyder argues that, in contrast to the Latin American experience, the lack of a dominant landlord class and the continued existence of an independent peasantry had a formative influence on Turkey's political and economic development. Keyder explains how the simmering conflict between the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie was suppressed during the successful period of import-substituting industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, to erupt again, soon after the world economic crisis of 1973. He recounts the way in which the rapid industrialization and urbanization transformed Turkey's social structure and shows how the severe economic difficulties of the late 1970s sparked off latent conflicts and led to the spread of fascist violence, culminating in the military coup of 1980. The book concludes with a look at Turkey's prospects for economic development and social change.