Soon after the signing of the Mudros armistice in October 1918, British troops arrived in Istanbul to begin what would become the formal occupation of the city by Allied forces (until 1923). The stated rationale for the occupation was to observe Ottoman Turkish treatment of Christian minorities and guarantee that the Turks would observe the terms of the armistice. British administrative documents illuminate, however, the ways in which occupying forces created infrastructure in Istanbul to maintain postwar geopolitical and territorial control within and beyond the city, for the interests of the British Empire. This infrastructure included the material elements of transportation and communication that facilitated control over the city and brought the British into encounter with diverse Turks. This infrastructure also facilitated Istanbul's material and social interconnections with British imperial nodes such as Malta and Calcutta. This paper builds on recent research that focuses on Istanbulite Turkish experiences of occupation, with an effort to understand Turkish and British experiences of the armistice era in Istanbul as relational and interdependent. I study primary sources from the British National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, and the British Postal Museum and Archive that document the complex processes of dismantling the occupation in 1923. These documents record the challenges involved in closing the post office, removing war equipment and material from warehouses at Tophane and the port at Karaköy, transferring the British ownership of private properties throughout the city, vacating Ottoman state administrative buildings and schools, and providing for the material needs of the many British and Ottoman citizens who worked for the empire but who were being evacuated to Greece, London, or various places in the British Empire. Studying the dismantling of the infrastructure of occupation reveals how embedded the British administration and its individual employees had become in the urban and social environment of the city. Indeed, the people who worked in the administration of empire were themselves influenced by the material and practical experiences of the occupation. This research thus helps scholars consider how the urban environment of the perishing Ottoman capital city played a role in shaping British perceptions and expectations for postwar national futures.

After concluding the laws and regulations for the privileges given to the foreign investors and Istanbul’s electrification, the Ottoman government made a call for bids to develop an urban-scale electrical plant in Istanbul in 1910. The Ministry of Public Works considered Austrian-Hungarian Ganz Company as the most suitable bidder among the eight tenders filed by foreign companies. A contract was signed on 1 November 1910, between the Minister of Public Works and the representatives of Ganz Company. Just one year later, the company established the Ottoman Electric Company with the financial and technical support of multinational banks and companies from France, Belgium, and Germany. Following the foundation of the power plant in Silahtara?a, building an electricity distribution network remained remittent due to many reasons mostly related with everlasting wars (the Balkan War, Great War and War of Independence): increasing prices of supply materials, limited transportation capability from abroad, lack of coal, and the tension between the Ottoman authorities and the multinational representatives of the electrical company. A systematic network of electricity for public use in the city started to function in the early 1920s and played a crucial symbolic role in the embodiment of the new Republican regime’s efforts to promote progress, industrialization and national identity. This paper relies on the records of the Prime Ministry Archives located in Istanbul and Ankara, Deutsche Bank Archives in Frankfurt, and State Archives in Brussels. It centers on the human and non-human actors of electrification infrastructure starting from the foundation of the Silahtara?a Power Plant until the nationalization of the electrical company in 1937. It deals with the question of how the electricity network of artifacts, knowledges, labor, and political ideologies had altered and reinforced existing hierarchies and inequalities in institutions, altering political regimes and daily practices. In the period under scrutiny, the utilization of electricity increased the flow of people and knowledge through public transportation and communication, generated new consumer desires based on electrical lighting and tools, and transformed the ways people experienced and sensed the city. However, as reliability and integration to electricity’s built environment increased, so did the vulnerability. Blackouts, fatal working accidents, and claims of corruption were quite undesirable but very frequent and evoked many debates among the multiple actors of the electrical network which ended up with the elimination of international companies and foreign investment from the electrical scene of Istanbul in 1937.

This paper examines the relationship between the transforming spatial materiality of the city’s built environment and the evolution of property rights in Istanbul. Seeing the city as an environment where geopolitical strategy, infrastructural orientation, affective experience and everyday logistics intertwine, the paper argues that it is the spatial materiality of that environment that produces the politics through which property rights regimes evolve rather than inter-group conflict. In doing so, the paper seeks to challenge arguments in political science that treat the city and its “property” as inert and fungible resources in a redistributive struggle between class coalitions seeking to transform property rights regimes in their favor. Drawing on Istanbul’s evolving property regimes since the inception of the Republic, the paper brings that environment to life in rethinking how property rights evolve. More specifically, the paper examines how a) the changing geopolitical position of Istanbul in the aftermath of WWI; b) the transformation of its infrastructural orientation from imperial center to regional industrial hub to outward-facing global city; c) the affective experience of the city and especially the politics of hüzün or melancholy in Istanbul; and d) the physical materiality of the city’s built environment (decay, aesthetics, everyday logistics) come together to produce Istanbul as an environment, and the topography of “property” over which classes struggle in the city. Ultimately the paper argues for seeing “class” itself as manufactured through spatial material experience in the city. The paper reads historical secondary source materials through the lens of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Turkey since 2012 and various literary texts and audio-visual sources to bring together geopolitics, infrastructure, affect and everyday logistics in analyzing the spatial materiality of Istanbul as an environment.