Meeting again at Tahirova
German expertise in Turkish agriculture in the 20th century
Publication date
2022-04-12
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Universität Konstanz
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Series or journal
Contemporary European History
ISSN
Periodical volume
32
Periodical issue
3
First page
441
Last page
458
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
Rural modernisation was at the core of postwar development programmes, not least in the Mediterranean. The notion of ‘modernisation’ inherited a number of assumptions about the nexus between economic and social development from experiences in Western and Central European ‘internal colonisation’ projects. The Turkish case reveals how such concepts travelled alongside exiled scholars in the Nazi period. However, they were also renegotiated at the local and regional levels, in particular after the Second World War. Kemalist conceptions of a ‘modern’ countryside came into conflict with international policies. This article analyses these expert encounters through the prism of the German model farm of Tahirova. Zooming in on a particular breeding project of the Tahirova sheep, it seeks to untie the rationales of different actors and the ways in which they shaped Turkey's role in postwar Europe, deeply influenced by cryptocolonial representations of the Mediterranean as Europe's agricultural (and demographic) reservoir.
Description
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Version
Published version
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