Edirne’s industry in the early years of the republic

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1800s in the Ottoman Empire, there was an advanced industry which manufactured in small ateliers and was organized in the form of tradesmen organizations (guilds) but which was ahead of its time. This local and national industry both met the needs of the country and exported the surplus production of the textile sector. This relatively advanced industrial infrastructure in the Ottoman Empire collapsed after 1839 in the Tanzimat Period. The most important reason for this was the fact that the Ottoman Local Industry, working with manpower, could not compete with the modern industry of Europe at that time, which was based on machine production1. The capitulations given by the Ottoman Empire to the European states and the trade agreement with the USA2, as well as the socio-economic conditions in which the empire existed, did not allow for the establishment of a modern industry despite all attempts and efforts. This situation caused the Ottoman Empire to begin to meet almost all of the products it needed by importing from outside, starting from the 1850s. When the Republic was founded, modern industrial enterprises, which were active in the early 1920s, gathered around two large groups. The first group included state-owned factories such as Feshane3, Hereke Carpet and Silk Weaving Factory, Zeytinburnu Weaving Factory4, Zeytinburnu Acid and Ether ?109 | 110?Factory5, which mainly worked for the military needs of the country. In the second group, there were some. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2019 All rights reserved.