Coal Mining in the Ottoman Empire
October 24th, 2007
Histories of coal miners are a staple of labor history, and thus the appearance of a book about Ottoman Coal Miners, Donald Quataert's Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield 1822-1922, “requires no justification.” [1] Quataert aims to contribute to both Ottoman history and labor history in general. The book’s contribution to Ottoman history is to help move the focus away from the state – which he claims has been overemphasized in Ottoman historiography – to look at groups traditionally neglected by Ottoman historians, in this case coal miners. Its contribution to labor history is to show us a very different kind of coal miner and a very different kind of labor system than that studied in most previous works on coal miners. Quataert achieves both objectives. His work is well researched and, for an academic book, well written, with only the flaw of neglecting to adequately cover strike activity among the miners.
The coal mining and miners explored in Quataert's work is drastically different from coal mining in North America, Western Europe, and many other parts of the world. Perhaps the largest difference lies in how the mines obtained their labor. Most coal mines pay wages to proletarianized workers to get them to work in their mines. The Ottoman state instead set up a corvee-like system where local villages were required to send villages to work in the mines. Workers rotated between the mines and their villages, spending time in one and then going back to the other. Soldiers were also used to mine coal, and later a more typical proletarianized workforce of wage-laborers supplemented the villagers’ forced labor. Instead of developing a militant working class identity, as coal miners elsewhere did, most Zonguldak miners became villager-workers with enduring ties to the land. Possibly as a result of this, the extensively violent mine wars between employers and employees that characterized coal mining in many other regions of the world at this time did not occur in the Zonguldak Coalfields.
The absence of mine wars did not mean there was no resistance by workers. Workers frequently left the mines and returned to their villages before their shift in the mines was over. They fled mines when they believed they were in danger of an imminent accident, attempted to evade being forced into the mines in the first place, and violated mining rules and regulations even when it threatened their own safety. This resistance by workers was one of the main reasons why the mines were never able to produce as much coal as the Ottoman state wanted.
Probably the work's biggest weakness in the work is its failure to give attention to a well-known and well-studied form of worker resistance – the strike. According to Quataert, strikes did occur in the mines, at least among the “free” workers, but he gives us little information about them. He states, “visible labor unrest, which became increasingly frequent among under- and aboveground workers alike, accompanied the subsequent fifteen years of rapid growth in the size and diversity of the work force. Between 1908 and 1913, strikes repeatedly wracked the coalfield.” [2] Yet Quataert gives us little information on these strikes, other than mentioning that they happened and that they may have played a role in improving working conditions. A chapter, or at least a part of a chapter, should have been devoted to describing the strikes in more detail.
Despite this omission, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire remains a very useful contribution to both Ottoman history and global labor history. By examining coal miners in a very different labor system he shows that many of our previous theories about coal mining are bounded to particular areas and/or socio-economic systems; they are not universal. Coal mining does not have to follow the typical Western capitalist path – other societies have organized the coal industry in very different ways.
Endnotes
1 Quataert, 1.
2 Quataert, p. 53.