Hundreds of geographical books and illustrations have been produced in Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish since the late 18th-century. With the proclamations of the Nizam-? Cedid and the Tanzimat, maps and documents titled “geography” (co?rafya), atlas (atlas), and later almanac (salname) proliferated with great speed amidst the emergence of the territorialized nation-state, intensifying militarization, and sweep capitalization of Middle Eastern economies. This body of spatial knowledge comprises both geography, information concerning life on earth usually portrayed as points, lines, and polygons, and cosmography, theories about the earth’s position in the universe represented as circles. Cosmography depicted phenomena through spheres from the celestial moving down to the planetary, the continental, the regional, and the urban. The aim of this presentation is to breathe life into the myriad of geographical works and objects produced in the modern period, outlining their historical value for understanding the challenges that the region confronted in the wake of military defeats, bankruptcy, and the proclamation of Ottoman reforms, and using it to identify the distinctive features of late imperial and post-Ottoman institutional, intellectual, and economic currents. From being rare and large artifacts accessible only within court circles and engineering schools, maps, atlases, and geographical books became more portable and popular as a form of representation and argumentation in military and infrastructure planning, financial policy, research, public education and advertising.This presentation examines how representations and metaphors of circles transformed throughout the proliferation of geographical language and tools in the 19th and the 20th-centuries. It brings together a new range of primary sources, from atlases and censorship decrees, scholarly works, and provincial almanacs, to financial, bureaucratic, and military records, to offer new insights on the transformation of cosmography and circular thinking throughout imperial reforms, capitalization, and militarization.