My paper explores the history of Ottoman mapping from the 1850s to the birth of “Turkish cartography” in the early 20th-centuries, covering a period when maps gradually became a fixture of not just military planning and administration but also the everyday lives of Ottoman subjects. The current literature approaches this proliferation of technological things as evidence of “countermapping,” constituting an attempt to appropriate European techniques of cartography to reform and strengthen the Ottoman state from within. While this framework helps explain the transformation of Ottoman mapping practices in a historical moment of contact, another crucial field of investigation remains unexplored, that of the myriad of ways in which people actually went about producing, circulating, and consuming maps in the late imperial period. Today “maps,” “charts,” and “plans,” are conventionally thought of as objects that must possess some common character, yet the concepts of “cartography” and “haritacılık” took hold only incrementally in the 19th and early 20th-centuries, a process that was closely tied to Ottoman wars. This process involved the creation of new mapping institutions, professional identities, and genealogies of geographical science and technology. This conceptual shift towards asserting a unity of method, procedure, and purpose of cartography was sustained by the emerging belief in the unity of scientific method, and set the conditions for countermapping to emerge as a framework of analysis. By reading material and conceptual transformations together, my paper excavates the individual life stories of several map producers to highlight the broad array of motives and power-relations sustaining the proliferation of mapping, and ask: What did Ottoman mapping cultures look like before cartography? How can letting go of the category of cartography disclose new social practices and discourses of mapping in the Ottoman Empire?