How do we explain the success of the secular project driven by a nascent Turkish state in the early twentieth century, ushered in as it was by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire? The historiography of intellectual production during the Ottoman nineteenth century duly notes the growing matrices of ideas during this period, betraying unanimous acknowledgment of a problem posed by an emergent Europe. The literature has focused on idealist explanations, pointing to the kind of curricula operative in the newly established military (Mekteb-i Harbiye) and medical schools (Mekteb-i Tibbiye) in the first half of this century that graduated figures such as Abdullah Cevdet, Besir Fuad, and unsurprisingly, Mustafa Kemal, as a way of explaining the emergence of these secular subjects keen on “modernization”. Analyses of the varying set of intellectual currents inhabited by such figures, running the gamut from a positivist vulgar-materialism to a hybrid nationalist-liberalism, and the sort of subjectification undergone in these institutions, are underlain by a theorization of the subject as a discursive formation. This paper contends that a theory of the subject as decoupled from the material is inadequate. By turning to the material by way of an appraisal of technological transfer and its attendant bearings on shifting conceptions of work and time during the second Constitutional era, I argue that conceiving of the secular subject on the eve of empire is unimaginable without a consideration of a coeval change in production apparatuses, technological tools, logics of extraction, as well as a temporal reconfiguration of the soul ushered in by capitalization. To do so, I bring together the existing historiography of the period bifurcated into ‘the economic’ and ‘ideological,’ as well as focus on a short-lived publication of the Ottoman Socialist Party, Istirak. This turn toward the history of capitalization in the empire, then, not only complicates the familiar story of secularism as an ideological imposition, but also provides an occasion to reconsider the regnant dualisms that structure our conceptualization of the subject.