Rural transformation on the East Black Sea coast of Turkey: A note on keyder

This article questions the interpretation of modern Turkish agrarian history advanced in this journal in 1983 by Çaglar Key der. The preeminence of petty commodity production does not entail class homogeneity, any more than Lenin's analysis of class differentiation in pre‐revolutionary Russia was invalidated by Chayanov's theory of the family‐labour farm. Sharecropping illustrates the structural inequalities which characterise the social relations of Turkish agriculture. These are often founded upon uneven regional development. The argument is supported by fieldwork experience in the tea‐producing region of the Black Sea coast.