Historical scholarship in traditional geopolitics often relied on documents authored by states and by other influential actors. Although much work in the subfield of critical geopolitics thus far has addressed imbalances constructed in official, academic, and popular media due to a privileging of such narratives, priority might also be given to unearthing and bringing to light alternative geopolitical perspectives from otherwise marginalized populations. Utilizing the early-1970s case of the United States' first “war on drugs,” this article examines the geopolitics of opium-poppy eradication and its consequences within Turkey. Employing not only archival and secondary sources but also oral histories from now-retired poppy farmers, this study examines the diffusion of U.S. antinarcotics policies into the Anatolian countryside and the enduring impressions that the United States and Turkish government created. In doing so, this research gives voice to those farmers targeted by eradication policies and speaks more broadly to matters of narcotics control, sentiments of anti-Americanism, and notions of democracy in Turkey and the region, past and present.
Histories of medicine and vaccinology routinely reference the Ottoman Empire with regard to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her children's variolation, and the transmission of this knowledge throughout Britain and thereafter Europe. Few, however, follow the empire's ongoing relationship with vaccination after the Montagu family's departure. This article examines this aspect of Ottoman medical history by noting how Jenner's advances diffused back into the empire and then presenting and analyzing how imperial, medical, and even community leaders began to both educationally condition the population and gradually enact legislation that mandated vaccination. Owing to severe infrastructural, personnel, and financial deficits, instability, and popular fears and trepidation, the empire's aspirations to achieve universal vaccination were far from realized by the time of its early 1920s demise-especially throughout largely rural Anatolia. Ottoman institutional, educational, and legislative advances, however, collectively prepared the ground for the succeeding Turkish republic and its public health agenda. Given the republic's promotion of its efforts to modernize Turkey amid its mutual initiatives of nationbuilding, the empire's histories of providing this foundation are also sometimes overlooked.
Cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean region for millennia, the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) was profoundly significant in the economies, ecologies, cultures, and diets of the peoples of many towns and villages of rural Anatolia. When the United States compelled Turkey to eradicate cultivation of the plant in the early 1970s in order to diminish the flow of heroin into America, farmers were obliged to deal with not only changes in their incomes but also profound changes in their relationships with the land and the state. Although Turkish officials later allowed production to resume in a highly controlled manner for pharmaceutical purposes, significant socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of Turkey's poppy-growing communities were forever changed. Interviewing now-retired poppy farmers, I employ oral history as my primary source of historical evidence to reconstruct these past ecologies and associated social relationships and to give voice to the informants.
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