The Steppe Mode of Production: A Critique of Eurocentric Approaches to Turkish History

Abstract

When examining Turkish history, the most dominant and influential approach to examining both life in Turkestan and Ottoman society is seen as Eurocentrism. Indeed, within this approach, the lifestyle of Turkic communities is evaluated and judged as a "spoils of raids" activity based on "nomadism" and reduced to the category of settled-agricultural society. The proposal for the steppe mode of production, as a value-producing activity and, within this context, a form of political structure, emphasizes a lifestyle and subsistence model that emerged in the pursuit of a herd-pasture balance, presenting a characteristic emerging within the production-state-trade triangle. This characteristic persisted, albeit in varying forms, in Ottoman social structure beyond Turkestan, embodying a flexible and inclusive structure based on power monopoly/resource accumulation and power distribution/resource redistribution. The proposal for the steppe mode of production is functional in explaining the continuity of this mode of production's transformation within settled agricultural society, but more fundamentally, it is considered significant in overcoming the Eurocentric approach.