Claims on the common: Social services and late industrialization in India and Turkey

This project is a comparative study of late industrialization in two classic cases of "statist" industrialization, India and Turkey. The research uses social services as an analytic lens to examine the shifting social bases of economic change and to elucidate the varied mechanisms by which "labor" was brought into factory production and turned into a regulated industrial workforce. Far from the state's beneficent inclusion of labor as a redistributive mechanism, social welfare was undertaken in the service of industrial policy.Although the provision of social and public services facilitated industrialization, the manner in which it did so depended on the organization of production and character of available labor at specific historical conjunctures. I argue that world-historical changes in the international economy and the organization of production resulted in three different phases of late industrialization within both countries. The study is comprised of three paired comparisons of cities that reflect the three phases of late industrialization: the industrial capitals (Istanbul and Bombay), cities dominated by state-economic enterprises (Zonguldak and Ranchi), and new export-oriented towns (Denizli and Tiruppur). Each of these phases catered to different consumer bases, constituted different workforces, had distinct forms of industrial organization and were marked by different links to international and domestic markets.This research challenges the centrality of the state and capital accumulation to the study of late industrialization. In direct contrast to the assumptions of the dominant tradition of state-centered analyses of late industrialization, cities that industrialized in the same world-historical context exhibit greater continuities than other Turkish and Indian cases do with other national examples. The transitions in the ways that factory-owners recruit and regularize their industrial labor forces challenges the basic assumption of traditional studies of late industrialization that the principal difficulties for late industrializers were capital-centered. Just as the institutions used to mobilize capital differed in the case of European late industrializers, so to have employers' tactics for recruiting industrial workforces diverged over time. The findings of this research highlight the importance of historically and locally grounded research for understanding the new political economy of development.