Ford Motor Company's assembly plant in Tophane-Istanbul, 1923-1944: Territoriality and automobility during interwar global capitalism

In the beginning of the 1920s Ford Motor Company opted for the Tophane pier in Istanbul as a nodal point of the internationalization strategy of its production facilities. The first Free Zone Law of the Republican period, promulgated in 1927, was actually a prerequisite that Ford posed in the negotiations with the Turkish authorities to establish this node as an assembly plant. Trieste, Alexandria, Piraeus, Constanta and Gorkygrad were alternative production locations to Istanbul within the territorial strategy of FMC. Finally, Ford received exclusive free zone rights for its projected assembly plant of automotives in Istanbul by way of a special legislation, called the Ford Law. Ford transformed the entrepots at the pier of Tophane, a section of which was a former Ottoman imperial small arms factory, into a plant equipped with an assembly line capable of assembling cars, trucks, tractors and even airplanes. There it assembled between 1930 and 1933 around ten thousand vehicles. In April 1933 the assembly activities were stopped by Ford to evade further losses. The plant was shut down in 1944 after a long and consuming customs smuggling case for Ford during the second half of the 1930s. This thesis consults new archival sources and nourishes mainly from the Ford Company Archives in Dearborn/Detroit besides the archival material on the Early Republican period from the Turkish State and American Consular Archives. It tries to trace the historical logic, territory, rescaling process and the subsequent exit of this enterprise. Ford-Fiat relations in Italy, the Ford-Soviet technical agreement, Ford's Alexandria enterprise, and contacts with Rumanian authorities for a plant in Constanta are also analyzed in order to understand the making and unmaking of the Tophane plant, including the reasons behind the failed Ford investment. On the empirical level this thesis constitutes a business monograph which is sensible to global spatial entanglements. It furthermore tries to de-center the state as the main agency of the majority of historical narratives on the Early Republican Turkey. Curious enough the monograph of the first automotive plant, first moving assembly line for motor vehicles and the very first free zone experience of the Republic had not been written so far. On the theoretical level the story of Tophane Ford assembly plant aims to integrate the formation process of the economic territoriality, i.e., a perspective of contingent space formation and the agency of capital into the Turkish Early Republican History on the scale of this exemplary case study. This thesis constitutes a proposition to include in historiography spatial case studies of 'failed projects' rather than only success stories as a way of avoiding teleological narratives of modernity. Thus, the possible reasons for this lack in the Turkish economic history will also be dealt with as 'a meaningful omission' to understand the functionings of Early Modern Turkish Historiography.