The Great Depression and the Making of Turkish-Syrian Border, 1921–1939

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan

doi:10.1017/s0020743820000021

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743820000021

Copy DOI

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how the Great Depression in 1929 led to the expansion of illicit circuits globally, and examines the ways in which the introduction of anti-smuggling campaigns came to consolidate the border regimes in Turkey and French Syria. The global economic downturn in the late 1920s led states to embrace protectionist measures such as heightened tariffs and import quotas, all designed to protect local industries and maintain a favorable trade balance. The introduction of such measures, however, often resulted in the emergence of highly profitable illicit circuits, including in the borderland between Turkey and Syria. Here, a sturdy coalition of producers, shop owners, smugglers, trackers, and peddlers began to smuggle into Turkey a range of goods from silk textiles to cigarette papers, while funneling out narcotics into Syria. By seeking the global trajectories of such commodity flows, this article examines the impact of these borderland mobilities on the making of Turkey's southern border by exploring the local and bureaucratic responses to a rapidly changing world economic order in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Highlights

When the stock market crashed in New York City on 29 October 1929 and set in motion a crisis that was to last well into the mid-1930s, those who lived in the borderlands between Turkey and Syria were unaware that the economic downturn originating thousands of miles away would soon transform their local socioeconomic conditions in drastic ways
Unlike Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Iran, which cut across mountainous terrain with low population density, the border with Syria ran through heavily populated agricultural lands
While former imperial economic practices ensured the porousness of the Turkish-Syrian border, I locate the consolidation of the border regime in the government responses to the economic challenges brought about by the Great Depression beginning in the late 1920s

Summary

Introduction

When the stock market crashed in New York City on 29 October 1929 and set in motion a crisis that was to last well into the mid-1930s, those who lived in the borderlands between Turkey and Syria were unaware that the economic downturn originating thousands of miles away would soon transform their local socioeconomic conditions in drastic ways.

Results

Conclusion