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Ayşe Buğra, Osman Savaşkan. New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship between Politics, Religion, and Business . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014, xi + 208 pages.

In a nutshell, New Capitalism in Turkey is an analysis of the most recent phase of Turkish modernism in the hands of the newly emerging conservative economic and political actors. Buğra and Savaşkan place Turkey’s unique experience since the early republican era within a broader canvas of global economic developments from the 1980s onwards. Yet the authors try to go beyond simplistic formulations that explain the Turkish case as yet another localized instance of an all-encompassing global class project, instead drawing attention to non-economic factors, especially political processes and cultural encounters, as the primary determinants of the direction of social change. Their key analytical lens in this endeavor is religion, as they trace the role religion plays within the emerging business community as a resource that not only establishes a form of solidarity among the community’s members, but also motivates the latter to adopt and pursue a cultural project to redress state-society relations in line with a socially conservative agenda. At the outset of the book, Buğra and Savaşkan clarify how they define the main pillars of New Capitalism. They concur with the observation that the state does not necessarily retreat under global capitalism, but rather gains new relevance as a regulatory apparatus in the emergence of new power-sharing models between the state and non-governmental actors in terms of the production and provision of goods and services. Moreover, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) become an especially important vehicle for economic development, particularly in late industrializing societies, with their special role in global chains of production. Finally, religion rises to prominence, especially in capitalist undertakings, as an element of the networking, regulation, and discipline that make up the political and cultural matrix of the New Capitalism. In the rest of the book, the authors set out to demonstrate that the recent economic experience of Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) provides a good snapshot of this new global condition, particularly in terms of how Islam becomes instrumentalized by economic and political actors.