| A significant population of the tributary paying peasant and commercial social formation of the "Turkish-Islamic Orient" lived in numerous and popolous cities till 1800. Moreover, a central, local administrative relations, and inter-urban regional specialization in commodity production, distribution created urban networks.The integration of feudal-merchantile social formation in a Euro-centric division of labor under the hegomony of an industrial-finance capitalism in the 19th century reduced the role of city to a mere intermediary between the European metropoles and the Oriental markets, the sources of primary goods, and investment areas. The intra-, inter-urban regional and town, countryside relations were reshaped by the free-trade agreements, dependent industrialization, private property law on land, administrative reform and railroads. Consequently, uneven regional, dependent urban development, non-reciprocal town and countryside relations accelerated.Neither the implicit socio-spatial dimensions of the Etatist and Laisses-Faire capitalist development strategies, nor urban, regional, and rural development policies of the Republican and the Democratic parties governments in the post-independence period did suffice to alter the course of such socio-spatial development pattern.Yet, the administrative and commerical city could not trancend itself into an industrial capitalist city before the 19th century, despite the emergence of prerequisite elements of a "junker type of transition" to capitalism, at the level of city, countryside and their articulation. Because, capitulations to European merchants and the governments had weakened the traditional urban economy, while the increasing prices for the primary goods increased the specialization of economy in the production of raw materials and foodstuffs for European capitalism. Under such historical circumstances, the putting-out manufacturers of the city could not develop a factory system and corresponding social relations between themselves and newly emerging wage labor in the city. Instead, the actors of money capital accumulation in the city inclined towards investing in rentier forms of income and wealth such as, farming the state's revenues, commercial agriculture and usury associated with it, real estate investments. Thus, the merchant-usuary capital and an absentee landlord class fused and controlled the cities. |
