Elite perceptions of land reform in early republican Turkey

Abstract

This article focuses on the land reform attempts of the single‐party regime in Turkey of the mid‐1930s through the mid‐1940s, culminating in the reform Law of 1945. Why the Turkish ruling elite wanted a land reform is still not adequately understood, and there are a number of controversial and often contradictory interpretations. The thesis here is that despite mainstream approaches to the issue in Turkish historiography, the land reform attempts during the single‐party era should be seen as part of the Kemalist project of conservative modernisation. The article argues that a variety of concerns were important in shaping the Turkish elite's thinking on land reform, including an ideology of peasantism combined with a fear of rural unrest (from sharecroppers, agricultural laborers and landless and land‐poor peasants); a fear also of urbanisation, proletarianisation and socialist ideas; a desire to strengthen Republican nationalist ideology in the countryside as a basis of regime support (with a particular emphasis on the Kurdish issue). The conclusion presents an interpretation of the Turkish land reform that connects the long‐and short‐term causes of the land reform Law of 1945.