Adam Adamopoulos and Trajectories of Capital Between the Late Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Worlds

Through the story of one tobacco capitalist, Adam Adamopoulos, this paper examines the shifts in trajectories of capital between the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. Adamopoulos, a former Hellenic subject holding American citizenship, had invested extensively in the Aegean tobacco business beginning in the 1880s, including in the port city of Izmir (Smyrna) and its rural surroundings. His life and enterprise in Izmir ended in 1924 when he departed for Athens after being released from jail, where he had spent several months awaiting trial over a false accusation that he had organized a massacre of Muslims during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922). Drawing from Ottoman, Turkish, Greek, and American archival materials, the first part of this paper focuses on the expansion of Adamopoulos’s tobacco business involving commodity production in the plantations he owned, subcontracts with other landholders, and trade in global markets. The expansion of Adamopoulos’ business provides a prime example of what I call “the order of dispossession,” characterized by peasant dispossession, violence, and debt bondage, which developed as a class project of capitalist actors in the late Ottoman Empire. The second part of the paper concentrates on the dramatic end of Adamopoulos’ business in Izmir. Focusing on the trial that accompanied the downfall of this business reveals how citizenship and capital mobility were renegotiated in the post-Ottoman space. It also illustrates how peasant discontent over the order of dispossession was incorporated into the class agenda of Muslim capitalists who successfully organized what has been termed a “national economy project,” which aimed during this period to transfer non-Muslim capital into Muslim hands. Through the lens of Adamopoulos’ biography, this paper ultimately offers a new political-economy perspective on the social, spatial, and demographic changes that marked the momentous transition from the Ottoman to post-Ottoman world in the Eastern Mediterranean.