After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the founders of the Turkish Republic undertook an ambitious modernization and nation-building project under an authoritarian single-party rule. The literature about the first two decades of Turkey is vast. Scholars from various disciplines have examined in detail the various coercive policies and goals of the Kemalist leaders, their ideological mindset, and the power struggles among them. In The Power of the People, Metinsoy shifts the attention from state-centered analyses to society. He shows how ordinary people, particularly those who were the most vulnerable, coped with the ambitious demands of an authoritarian state. He illustrates how people could exercise agency by resisting, manipulating, and at times effectively obstructing policies that disadvantaged them.
The book is divided into three broad sections. The first section focuses on the peasantry that constituted the bulk of the population at the time and suffered the economic and demographic...