Geç Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda ipek işçileri: Bursa'nın filatürlerinde toplumsal cinsiyet, emek ve kolektif mücadele

This study provides an examination of the capitalist transformation of the silk industry in Bursa from the viewpoint of its workers. As the Ottoman economy integrated into the world market in the nineteenth century, silk fabric weaving on independent hand looms and artisan workshops declined. Instead, Ottoman and foreign entrepreneurs established many silk-reeling workshops (filatures) in major silk manufacturing centers to meet the demand for raw silk thread from the silk factories in Europe. In order to lower labor costs, these filatures employed young women and children of rural origin, instead of skilled male artisans available in the city. The present study sheds light on the experiences, working conditions and collective struggles of the filature workers in Bursa, a center of silk trade and manufacturing for centuries, based on primary sources including previously untapped archival material. It demonstrates that gender norms which undervalued women?s work in the labor market underlay the boost in local silk production after the 1880s. It presents a challenge to the common argument in the literature that Ottoman women joined the filatures to purchase luxury items for their dowries and suggests that these accounts reflected the perspectives of the factory owners and legitimized the low wages and poor working conditions. Gender ideologies operated not only as instruments of suppression and exploitation, but also as instruments of resistance in Bursa?s silk-reeling sector. During the strike in 1910, the workers mobilized gendered discourses to gather support from the local community and authorities. Lastly, this study presents an analysis of the controversy between the provincial and central government authorities on the labor unrest in 1910 and suggests that the Ottoman State was not a detached entity overarching the struggle between the workers and their employers. Rather, it was one of the grounds upon which this struggle took place. Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Bursa, silk industry, labor activism, labor process, gender