Turkey's underdevelopment is 50% structure, 50% agency

Why countries like Turkey remain relatively poor is roughly 50% structure and 50% agency: unfavorable initial conditions (starting on the wrong side of the 19th-century division of labor, British imports decimating craft industries, defeat in war) combined with leadership agency, where Atatürk's brutal, narrow top-down modernization produced both Turkey's secular middle class and the lasting problem of having pushed out conservatives and Kurds from the polity.