Stefo Benlisoy

The final decades of the Ottoman Empire have long been understood through the lens of competing nationalisms — yet this picture is far from complete. In the ethnically and religiously diverse late Ottoman capital, Istanbul, new social classes were emerging, and with them new forms of political organisation. Workers and members of the professional middle class increasingly turned not only to nationalism but to liberal, socialist, and anarcho-syndicalist ideas to make sense of their world and challenge the existing order.

In this project, Stefo Benlisoy rehabilitates the first socialist labour organisation of late Ottoman Istanbul, the Union of International All-Laborers (Panergatiki), restoring it to its rightful place in the history of social and political movements in both late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey. Situating the organisation within regional and global networks of socialist and labour activism, he examines its ideological orientation, its key figures, and its strategies towards the city’s poly-ethnic and multi-religious working classes. In doing so, the project challenges nation-centric approaches that have long dominated Ottoman labour history, and reveals a more complex and contested picture of imperial dissolution than the narrative of inevitable nationalist conflict allows.