Crossing the Mental Borders of 19th century Istanbul: Migrant Ideas from the Margins of the Empire To the Margins of the Capital The study of the Ottoman Empire in her catch- up strategies with the rising powerful forces in the late 19th century leads us to examine both the new understanding of policy change and the new policy makers. A study on the émigré intellectuals, constituting a group of these policy makers from the lost territories of the Ottoman empire in the 1880s, reflects us their rivalry with the traditional imperial elites in Istanbul which is significant to investigate how cultural backgrounds of metropolitan intellectual elites clashed with the orientations of émigré intellectual coming from the margins of the empire. This paper aims to mingle together a new theoretical outlook with a new empirical basis. The recent literature about the émigré intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire focuses on their role in disseminating Pan-Turkist ideas and limits the research agenda within the limits of nationalism studies. This paper aims to provide a new framework for this social group as an ascending technocratic intelligentsia positioning themselves against the existing intellectual setting in Istanbul. Thus, I propose the idea that intellectual milieu of Istanbul in the last quarter of the 19th century can be also problematized in terms of intensifying tensions between the two wings of intellectual strata: the existing courtly intellectual circles coming from the ‘human science backgrounds’ and the ascending technocratic intelligentsia constituted by the intellectuals crossing the Balkan Peninsula and Caucasia. In order to have a broader perspective towards the rise of this new technocratic intelligentsia in the cosmopolitan structure of Istanbul, this study combines the new sources ranging from the manuscripts from Library of Kazan University to the records of Translation Office in Istanbul. Through the use of these new sources, I aim to explore their individual background and their products before their life in Istanbul and to have a different outlook for what they have produced in their later career. Contrary to the existing presumptions seeing nineteenth century Istanbul within a framework of a deviant or peripheral metropolitan zone in terms of intellectual and scholarly activities, through the examination of these marginal figures, I propose a different view for Istanbul to emphasize how, on the one hand, it resembled other capital cities in general, and how, on the other hand, its specific historical and geographical situation individualized it.