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Faruk Tabak, who died of complications following a stroke on 15 February 2008 at age fifty-four, passed his youth in central Anatolia. A childhood in industrial Eskisehir--where, he once told me, the Porsuk River's color varied with the day's textile-dye batch--and college winters in smog-enveloped Ankara made him ("a man of the north") dream of the pristine landscapes and bright tableaus of Turkey's Mediterranean shores. Trained as an architect and later as a planner at the Middle East Technical University, Tabak charted the currents of modern hegemony, capitalism, ecology, and the spatial dispersion of populations through the deep waters of the Mediterranean's past.
Our paths first crossed at Binghamton University, after Turkey's third coup d'état (1980) stifled political and intellectual life in the country and drove many into exile. Tabak's interdisciplinary spirit found an accommodating home in the graduate program of the sociology department. From 1981 until 2000, first as a PhD student and later as a researcher, he collaborated on the grand projects of the Fernand Braudel Center, where he specialized in issues of agrarian sociology and long-term economic change in the Mediterranean and Middle East.1 Our experiences inside and outside the Ottoman archives in the 1980s, as well as his generosity, gentleness, and hospitality in Turkey and in the United States, solidified strong intellectual and affective ties between the social scientist and this historian. It came as no surprise to me that a cosmopolitan scholar and a lover of French cinema and Ottoman cuisine would become the first to hold the chair in modern Turkish studies at Georgetown University, which had been established in honor of Nesühi Ertegün, the great impresario of African American music. At Georgetown, he brought macrosociological approaches to his teaching and writing as a faculty member of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he completed two important compilations. The first, Informalization: Process and Structure (2000) (coedited with Michaeline Crichlow), focused on the rise of nonregulated forms of labor, and the second, Allies as Rivals: The U.S., Europe, and Japan in a Changing World-System (2005), published the proceedings of a conference that he organized on the political economy of the new world order.
Despite his strong affinities for the world-systems