Our Faculty Member Dr. Akın Sefer’s New Article Has Been Published in New Perspectives on Turkey (Q1) Journal!

We are proud to announce that our Core Program faculty member, Dr. Akın Sefer, has published his new article, “Connecting neighborhoods with worksites: coercion, labor migration, and shipbuilding workers in late Ottoman İstanbul,” in the journal New Perspectives on Turkey.

The article highlights the state’s labor coercion practices and their defining characteristic in the history of migration in 19th-century İstanbul.

Dr. Sefer’s research focuses on the shipbuilding workers of the Tersane-i Amire and their settlement in the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood in the Kasımpaşa quarter. Using population records from the neighborhood and wage records from the Arsenal, the article argues that coercive relations at the workplace significantly impacted the configuration of migration networks and settlement patterns.

The study specifically demonstrates how workers from two distant regions, the Black Sea coasts and Egypt/Alexandria, were able to integrate into the same neighborhood networks , a familiarity forged through their long-lasting collective work experience at the Arsenal.