For a long time, the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires were perceived as failed states whose dissolution after World World I was interpreted as a historical necessity due to their inability to react adequately to the challenges of a modernizing world. However, recent historiography has shown that the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were dynamic states to whom the majority of their citizens were loyally attached. What is more, their élites had modernizing agendas including civilizing missions addressing cultural and economic peripheries and aiming at educating a population which was considered backward in order to integrate it in new modes of the production of goods and to make it accept expanding state bureaucracies. At the same time, local élites should be – at least to a limited extent – coopted and integrated in processes of decision making in order to secure their loyalty towards the imperial metropolis. Recent research has shown that local élites made use of these imperial integration policies to pursue their own political agendas (e.g. Judson 2016). Focusing on the transfer and popularization of the concepts of “science” and “progress” by the imperial administration of late Ottoman and Habsburg Bosnia the paper conceptualizes these civilizing missions as processes of knowledge circulation. Following recent approaches of the history of knowledge (e.g. Sarasin 2011) the paper focuses on the mediality and materiality of the circulating knowledge and concentrates on popularizing media like almanacs issued by the imperial authorities both in Ottoman Turkish and Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian. In so doing, the paper investigates in the first step continuities and discontinuities of the Ottoman and Habsburg civilizing missions and the concepts they promoted. Analyzing popular media published by the local Bosnian Muslim élites as well, the paper asks in the second step how these concepts were appropriated by local Muslim élites and integrated into their own political, social, and cultural agendas. In the last step, the paper tries to reconstruct transimperial dimensions of these transfers involving Muslim intellectuals all over the late and post-Ottoman world.