Author's note: Special thanks to Samuel Liebhaber, Robert Greeley, Chris Gratien, and Graham Pitts from the “Working Papers on the Environment and Society in the Middle East” workshop at Middlebury College, as well as Jamie Vescio, Brian Rich, Christopher Zollo, Fulya Özkan, Ayşegül Okan, and the peer reviewers. This research was funded in part by the MacMillan Center at Yale University and the Jones Grant at Transylvania University.

¹ “Zingal Şirketine El Kondu,” Ormancı Postası, 26 March 1945.

² For a similar study, see Grodzins, Ann and Gukar, Bhoju Ram, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajashtan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

³ Similar ethnographies of the nation include Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; El-Haj, Nadia Abu, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lutz, Catherine, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Silverblatt, Irene, Modern Inquisitons: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

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¹¹ This contrast between desired natural landscapes and their abject counterparts was the motivation for swamp drainage and reforestation throughout the 20th century. See Evered, Kyle, “Draining an Anatolian Desert: Overcoming Water, Wetlands, and Malaria in Early Republican Ankara,” Cultural Geographies 21 (2014): 475–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gratien, Chris, “The Ottoman Quagmire: Malaria, Swamps and Settlement in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017): 583–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²¹ The scholarship of Yücel Çağlar and forestry school faculty working on the history and politics of forestry is an exception. Their contributions are, nevertheless, limited to discipline-bound frameworks. In more recent years Selçuk Dursun and Alan Mikhail have produced significant work on Ottoman forestry.

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³¹ Examples include Aslan, Senem, “Everyday Forms of State Power and the Kurds in the Early Turkish Republic,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 75–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Belge, Ceren, “State Building and the Limits of Legibility: Kinship Networks and Kurdish Resistance in Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 95–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yılmaz, Hale, “Learning to Read (Again): The Social Experiences of Turkey's 1928 Alphabet Reform,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 677–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Murat Metinsoy's analysis of a “flexible authoritarian regime” comes closer to my argument; Metinsoy, , “Fragile Hegemony, Flexible Authoritarianism, and Governing from Below: Politicians’ Reports in Early Republican Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 699–719CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁹ Two of these were inherited from the Ottoman state.

⁴⁰ Günay, Turhan, Ormancılığımızın Tarihçesine Kısa Bir Bakış (Ankara: Tarım-Orman Sen, 2003), 88Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Tekeli, İlhan and İlkin, Selim, Para ve Kredi Sisteminin Oluşumunda bir Aşama: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Merkez Bankası (Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Merkez Bankası, 1997)Google Scholar. The name of this company was later changed to Société Générale Allumettière et Foréstière.

⁴² The twenty-five-year contract granted to the company was ratified in the National Assembly in 1924 (Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.18.01.01.019.35.13.001). It was tasked with forming a new company half of whose capital and board members would be Turkish, and with building a match factory in Sinop that would use domestic wood from Zindan and Çangal forests (Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.18.1.1.17.84.2). S.A. Usines Allumtière de Flandres started operating in 1925, but it was short-lived. While some blame its fall on the location chosen for the factory, economic rivalry between the Match Monopoly and the Swedish Match Company, which eventually led to the transfer of the match industry to the Turkish state (1946), was the more likely culprit. Founded in 1927 by Ivar Kreuger (known as the father of financial scams), the Swedish Match Company was the world's biggest match producer. As the competition escalated, Kreuger bought some of the Belgians’ share in the Turkish Match Monopoly (Tekeli and İlkin, Para ve Kredi Sisteminin Oluşumunda Bir Asama [Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası, 1981]). When he decided to buy the rest in 1928, the government annulled the contract, arguing that the requirements of the 1925 contract had not been met. In 1930, after a legal battle, the Swedish Match Company, renamed as the American-Turkish Investment, reacquired the monopoly (Patnoy, Frank, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals [New York: Public Affairs, 2009])Google Scholar. With Kreuger's death and the Swedish Company's bankruptcy in 1946, the state took over match production.

⁴³ İş Bankası, Turkey's first national public bank, opened in 1924 under the guidance of Atatürk, who, like other politicians, held shares in the bank. It has close ties to Turkey's founding Republican People's Party and was instrumental in the creation of a national economy through a wide range of investments.

⁴⁴ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.18.01.01.019.35.13.001.

⁴⁵ İbrahim Kutlutan, “Zingal Ormanlarında ve Kereste Fabrikasında Tetkikler,” Orman ve Av 11–12 (1938): 240–73.

⁴⁶ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.010.000.000.183.264.9.

⁴⁷ Şirketi, Zindan ve Çangal Ormanları Türk Anonim, 1941 Hesab Yılı Idare Meclisi ve Murakıb Raporu (Istanbul: L.Murkides Basımevi, 1942)Google Scholar.

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⁵⁰ Kutlutan, “Zingal Ormanlarında ve Kereste Fabrikasında Tetkikler.”

⁵¹ This is confirmed by the statements of Zingal officials and by the Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.010.000.000.183.265.16.

⁵² Mimar Sedar Emin ve Suat Nazım, “1933 Yerli Mallar Sergisinde Zingal Pavyonu ve Evi,” Mimar 9–10 (1933): 278–82.

⁵³ “Zingal Şirketi Selanik Panayırında Büyük Muvaffakiyet Kazandı,” Sinop Gazetesi, 28 November 1935.

⁵⁴ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 080.18.01.02.108.23.16 and 030-0-018-001-002-110-22-9.

⁵⁵ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.265.16.

⁵⁶ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.18.1.2.110.22.9.

⁵⁷ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.18.01.02.114.50.2.

⁵⁸ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.18.01.02.117.69.7; Hıfzı Veldet Velidedeoğlu, Türkiye'de Üç Devir, İkinci Cilt (İstanbul: Sinan Yayınları, 1973).

⁵⁹ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.0.011.001.000.248.38.18 and 30.18.01.114.50.2.

⁶⁰ Tarkan, Sinop Coğrafyası, 33.

⁶¹ On the state's support for Zingal, see Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.018.001.002.14.68.8.

⁶² Tahsin Tokmanoğlu, Yeşil Elmas (Ankara: T.C. Orman Bakanlığı Yayın Dairesi Başkanlığı, 1996), 11.

⁶³ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.171.187.8.

⁶⁴ See the journal Verim, 5 August 1935.

⁶⁵ M.H.R., “Bizde Amenajman İşleri”; “Talebemiz Almanya'ya Gitmelidir,” Orman ve Av 34 (1931): 6–8, 4–5.

⁶⁶ Amca, Turkish for “uncle,” is also used as a respectful way to address older men.

⁶⁷ Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc, “Symbolic Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Bourgois, Philippe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 272–75Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ It is likely that Surkis's imminent prosecution upon returning to Europe must have been a factor in the extension.

⁶⁹ While the Persian word gāvur refers in its original sense to those who do not adhere to a monotheistic religion, in the Ottoman and Turkish context it has been used as a slur to define non-Muslim and non-Turkish groups. It is obvious that in my informant's usage the term also connotes modernity—thus, the reference to “Muslim infidels.”

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⁷¹ Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1964)Google Scholar, Kindle edition, xxxvii–xxxviii.

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⁷³ “Dr. Şerafettin Ayancık Halkevi Başkanlığına Seçildi,” Sinop Gazetesi, 26 November 1936.

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⁷⁵ Following the 1980 military coup, an open-market economy gradually replaced five decades of state capitalism, paving the way for a series of privatizations.

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⁷⁸ I shared this misconception until the archival material revealed the overlaps between the Match Monopoly and Zingal.

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⁸⁰ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.265.16.

⁸¹ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.264.4.

⁸² Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.264.9.

⁸³ The rapid growth of state forestry enterprises between 1938 and 1940 was followed by a lag due to the war. By 1943 one-third of forests were managed by twenty-one state forest enterprises and later an additional eighteen were established. Thirteen new enterprises opened in December 1943. “Devlet Orman İşletmelerinde Altı Yeni Revir Açıldı,” Ziraat Dergisi 38 (1943): 45–46; “Devlet Orman İşletmeleri,” Ormancı Postası, 29 October 1943; “Devlet Orman İşletmelerinde Yeniden On Üç Revir Açıldı,” Ormancı Postası, 15 December 1943; “Devlet Orman İşletmelerinde Altı Yeni Revir Açıldı,” Ziraat Dergisi 38 (1943): 45–46; “Zingal Şirketine El Kondu,” Ziraat Dergisi 68 (1946).

⁸⁴ Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.010.000.000.183.265.12.

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⁸⁶ A third locomotive is at the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Istanbul.

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