The Politics of Population in Modern Turkish History

This paper intends to shed light on the underestimated impact of population concerns on the ways in which historians and social scientits grasped the contours of modern Turkish historiography. The rapid social and political change during the time of Turkey’s foundational era in the 1920s, population concerns stood at the forefront of the new regime. The “disappearence” of the non-Muslim populations and a huge loss of Muslim populations during the troubled times of the Balkan Wars, World War I and the War of Indepence made it all the more necessity for the Turkish Republic to tackle the question of population in a serious way. Indeed, after such a demographic earthquake, the elites the new regime started a campaign of “more population” and devised spectacular ways to increase the population of the country. Birth control and abortion were outlawed together with incentives to those who had six or more children such as exemptions from the infamous Road Tax. In fact, many of the current issues such as nationalist discourse, strong state and many more can never be fully comprehended without taking into account the urgent necessity to populate the country. At the time, “quantity” rather than “quality” of the population mattered and many of the state social policies were based on this necessity. That most historians explain such polici