Plotting Development: Land, Race, and Statecraft in Turkey

This paper situates the agrarian and technological transformations of the Green Revolution in a longer history of land reform, population management, and international development in Turkey throughout the 20^thcentury. In doing so, it joins recent literature that uncovers the local roots of the Green Revolution in domestic politics and land struggles in the global south, also revealing the entwined histories of colonial and racial dispossession with agricultural norms and practices. Drawing on research in the records of the Economic Cooperation Administration, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Turkish parliamentary debates, and contemporaneous journals, I show how competing narratives of agricultural modernization, upheld by populist politicians, foreign experts, and leftists were plotted and spatialized in distinct terms, each treating land as the venue for the nationalist, anticommunist or anticapitalist fashioning of rural populations. I argue that the materials of agrarian development, such as problems of soil and arability, as well as decisions about what and when to cultivate were historically linked with questions of territory, colonization, and state formation in Turkey. The arrival of Green Revolution technologies in the 1960s and 70s superseded proposals for redistributionist land reform policies and resulted in the exacerbation of class, ethnic, and political divisions in rural areas. The consolidation of large-scale commercial agriculture also marked a new phase in the territorial control over Kurdish-populated areas, making it a productive site for an interdisciplinary study of the political economic, ecological, and racialized dimensions of internal colonialism.