This paper examines the role of political and economic relationships between the Ottoman Empire, Germany and France vis-a-vis Istanbul’s electrification during the first decades of the 20th century. Drawing on research in financial, diplomatic and state archives in Turkey and Europe, I show that Istanbul’s electrification involved a process in which various European and Ottoman actors participated, resulting in a decades-long negotiation between private investors and state officials. By examining this process of electrifying both public works and domestic consumption, I shed light on political decision-making practices regarding energy production by engineer-entrepreneurs, financiers, diplomats, brokers and state officials. In doing so, I analyze the legacy of electrical infrastructures in knowledge exchange by charting the political and economic networks from which they emerged across Europe and Turkey. Through taking a close look at the inter-imperial politics of Istanbul’s electrification, I argue that electrical technology transfer to the Ottoman Empire was not a unidirectional process, but one that also transformed inter-European relations by contributing to the restructuring of the European financial market during monopolization. The dynamics that shaped this process include finance capital, diplomacy and international businesses on the one hand, and the management of coal mines, refugees, urban service workers, and emerging bourgeois consumers by the political sovereigns on the other hand. Finally, by drawing on a moment in which world war, political and economic competition between global powers, and rapid technological innovation resulted in dramatic transitions, I show the changes in popular and elite imaginaries of the future as reflected in material infrastructures.