Entrepreneurial imaginaries: explaining the long persistence of entrepreneurship in Thessaloniki and Izmir

Thessaloniki and Izmir are port cities on opposite shores of the Aegean Sea. They are separated by borders, language, demographics, and religion and have recently experienced quite different political trajectories. What unites them is a past redolent of commerce, underpinned by half a millennium at the centre of the Ottoman Levant trade. While the economic importance of both has declined over the previous century, the cities remain especially ‘entrepreneurial’ by the standards of modern Greece and Turkey. Throughout the century since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, urban entrepreneurship levels have in most periods exceeded national urban averages. There is a small but burgeoning literature concerning the historical persistence of entrepreneurship in sub-national contexts. However, two established theories – the short-term constraints and embedded past approaches to entrepreneurship history – fall short in explaining the phenomenon of Thessaloniki and Izmir. The thesis advances an alternative explanatory frame: that the past can frame identities in the present through the channel of a local ‘entrepreneurial imaginary’. The entrepreneurial imaginary, as a narrative of collective urban identity, draws sustenance in both cities from the collective memory of past entrepreneurial achievements. The thesis traces the entrepreneurial imaginary at different points across the previous century, using relational content analysis of local newspapers in Thessaloniki and Izmir. In this way, it demonstrates the prevalence of the entrepreneurial imaginary in the local press of both cities, contrasting this with comparable newspaper outlets in Greece and Turkey. Fuzzy-set QCA is then used to relate the entrepreneurial imaginary to entrepreneurship, demonstrating a significant explanatory role for the former. The outcome of this exploration has relevance for scholars interested in how cities trap and reproduce entrepreneurship, and other economic activities, across time, and for historians of twentieth century Thessaloniki and Izmir more broadly.