Chapter 2 discusses how the New Order regime in the late eighteenth century reorganized labor to create a regular workforce to decrease the Arsenal’s dependence on the labor market, deprive workers of their ability to (re)commodify their labor power, and thus bind them to their worksite. The chapter describes the attempts to discipline labor and investigates how such attempts created tensions between compulsory and wage labor schemes that had hitherto existed in the Arsenal. It discusses how transformations in production and the increasing anxiety with migration to Istanbul pushed for a new order in the labor force, leading to an amalgam of diverse forms of labor relations within the same site. In addition to creating a regular force of skilled carpenters and caulkers, the administration also systematized the labor draft from among guildsmen in Istanbul, and continued to utilize convicts and provincial craftsmen, trying to secure both their immobility and their productivity. Open and hidden ways of resistance and protests against the production regime of the New Order pushed the latter into a crisis throughout the early nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 investigates how naval reforms in the late 18th century aimed at rationalizing production, marked by standardizing, centralizing, and concentrating the shipbuilding process in the context of provisioning crisis and market relations. It gives a brief overview of shipbuilding and its transformation in the late eighteenth century, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. It highlights the increasing dependence of the navy on market relations and dynamics in the late eighteenth century, catalyzed by the provisioning crisis emanating from technological transformations, naval competition and military pressures, environmental restrictions, and political-economic challenges, as illustrated by the example of provisioning timber. Against this crisis, naval administrations introduced substantial changes in the production process under the supervision of French naval engineers, whose policies centered on professionalization and the use of “scientific” principles in shipbuilding. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the spatial concentration of capital in the Arsenal, by renewing and expanding its production capacity and exerting centralized control over the production process.