About Project

The EVOBUSORG project was designed to examine the historical evolution of business organizations in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Through this examination, the study explored the effects of institutional heritage on the choice of legal organizational form and the challenges faced by latecomers in their attempts to borrow and adapt foreign legal and organizational institutions shaping the business environment.
In a field with almost no prior empirical investigation, one of the project’s major achievements was to collect historical and quantifiable data on Ottoman and Turkish business organizations. Based on the analysis of these new data, the project was able to shed light on the hitherto unexamined areas of Ottoman economic and business history and contributed to the historiographical debates on the long term economic backwardness of the Middle East. As such, the project has produced high quality research results disseminated in the international conferences, published in national journals and submitted to the top field journals.  The results of the project also provided insights for the policy makers and stakeholders on the nature of legal and institutional reform conducive for entrepreneurship and growth. Lastly, the project enabled the researchers to undertake comparative research through collaborations and networks with prestigious institutions all around the world (USA, Europe, and Japan).