The history of economic thought in the non-European world has been a neglected subject, and the Middle East is no exception. However, the modern history of the Middle East cannot be fully understood without having recourse to economic thought, since the modern history is also the story of rising awareness of a new economy-oriented world order and the local reactions to it. Nevertheless, the role of economic ideas has hardly found a place in the intellectual history of the region. Thus, there is still a huge gap in our knowledge of the economic roots of the ‘Middle Eastern modernities’. A handful of studies concerning the subject matter seem to be trapped within the boundaries of the well-known ‘imitation-rejection’ model, which is based on the famous ‘modern-traditional’ dichotomy of the Modernization theory. Nevertheless, this simplistic binary model is far from providing us with a good explanation of the highly complex structure of intellectual and social processes. This study is an attempt to shed light on the economic aspects of the ‘Ottoman modernity’ as a project of the Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen, based on the idea of forging ‘economically minded individuals’ who would build a modern country. The interplay between modern European economic ideas and traditional/religious values, and the consequent political, social and economic transformation, were the main reactants of this highly complex process. Thus, instead of following the traditional method of ‘cataloguing the ideas and intellectuals,’ this study puts the emphasis on the interaction between intellectual history and social change. The main sources for this study consist of the examples for a ‘modern Ottoman society’ and its ‘modern citizen’, which were presented in the Ottoman textbooks for modern economic theory, journal articles on economic issues, and more importantly, popular novels and stories from the era. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to document the immediate actual social impact of these intellectual endeavors. Nevertheless, a clear understanding of these ideal models provides us with very important clues about the roots of the modernization projects of the post-Ottoman modern Middle Eastern nation-states.