KHAS CORE Talks series hosts Akın Sefer with her talk titled “Shipyard Workers, Migration, and Social Networks in Nineteenth Century Istanbul” on Tuesday, December 26th.
Abstract: This talk focuses on shipbuilding workers working at the Tersane-i Amire in Istanbul in the mid-nineteenth century, and aims to shed light on the complex connections between the experiences of these workers in the production process and the relationships they developed at the workplace, and their geographical mobility, settlement patterns, and daily relations. The capitalist transformation in shipbuilding and production relations from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards led to striking transformations in the economic, social, and spatial profile of the Tersane-i Amire and its surroundings. During this process, carpenters, seam cutters, and caulkers, most of whom came/were brought from the Black Sea coast or Egypt to work at the Tersane, settled with their families in the Kasımpaşa neighborhoods around the Tersane. The talk primarily focuses on investigating the migration processes and relations of these workers through the population, dividend, and daily wage registers of the mid-nineteenth century, and the networks of these workers through network analysis. Through this investigation, it is planned to reveal the interaction of these networks with other networks formed through workplace, neighborhood, and professional affiliation, and the role of Ottoman modernization processes in the formation and transformation of these networks.
About the Speaker: Akın Sefer received his BA and MA degrees from Boğaziçi University and completed his PhD in the History Department of Northeastern University in 2018. His research and publications focus on late Ottoman labor history. He is currently a faculty member at the Core Program at Kadir Has University and is also the director of a TÜBİTAK 1001 project titled “Shipbuilding and Labor Migration in the Black Sea Coast and Istanbul, 1827-1878”.