While historians of Ottoman architecture have begun to examine the development of fortification systems in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Thys-Şenocak, Ostapchuk and Finkel), the process of commissioning and constructing military architecture in the later years of the empire remains relatively unexamined. This paper will specifically address the role of one provincial power-holder—Tepedelenli Ali Pasha—in the defense and negotiation of a maritime frontier zone at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over his more than thirty year tenure as the governor of Ottoman Epirus, Ali Pasha launched an ambitious building program of military works that included the repair and construction of no less than eleven fortifications along the Ionian coast, what is now Albania and northern Greece. Contemporaneous European travel accounts as well as later military historians often disparage the effectiveness of Ali Pasha’s coastal fortifications, citing their bad design and poor construction. In this paper, I aim to re-consider these structures, not according to the more pragmatic concerns of their defensibility against modern artillery and siege tactics, but more in light of their “image power,” i.e. how Ali Pasha’s fortifications would have appeared at a distance, especially to his neighbors on the Ionian Islands. I argue that the governor prioritized a fort’s ability to demarcate political territory and serve as a prophylactic to deter potential invaders, rather than performance in combat. By the end of the eighteenth century, expertise in European military engineering, especially in the tradition of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (d. 1707), was a much sought-for commodity. For several of his fortifications, Ali Pasha brought in European architects to get what he considered to be the best in technological know-how. Interestingly, the views of the pasha sometimes clashed with these hired consultants when their proposals—although technically sound—proved to be visually under-whelming. This paper utilizes documents from diplomatic archives, including an unpublished report by one of the French engineers who was sent to serve Ali Pasha, as well as a careful examination of how the architectural monuments themselves are situated in the broader topography. With this material, I consider the more performative aspects of constructing military works, noting how coastal fortifications were designed not only to defend but also to serve as icons of power, marking the liquid landscape.

This paper proposes that a “borderlands” is a functional category of analysis focusing on spatial overlap of political units and cultures, while a “frontier” is the perceived boundary of human activity or normative cultural behavior. By adopting this paradigm, a comparison is made of seascapes and wastelands as frontiers in the context of Ottoman dominium over the Black Sea and the adjacent deşt-i kıpçak in the 16th century. Further comparison is made of the administration, conceptualization, and utilization of space and resources in both cases. Ultimately, the north Black Sea coast is examined as a “figurative littoral” separating two spaces, sea and steppe, which posed numerous shared challenges to Ottoman rule.

The Ottoman Mediterranean was a place of intense imperial interest in the eighteenth century, yet our understandings of that century are still overshadowed by European naval ascendance, the defeat at Çeşme in 1770, and the beginnings of reform under Selim III . However, this paper will demonstrate the eighteenth century was a period of significant investment in naval resources, and development in maritime legal practices. Linked to new notions of maritime sovereignty and territoriality that emerged from concurrent ideas on land following the treaties of Carlowitz (1699) and particularly Passarowitz (1718), naval protection missions (Bahr-ı Sefid muhafazası) took on a new purpose of not simply defending Ottoman coasts and waters, but asserting maritime territoriality. The endemic threat of foreign corsairs, particularly Maltese, and local pirates, especially Maniots, necessitated increasing investment in naval patrols as a regular safeguard for trade and sovereignty, ensuring a regular imperial presence in the coastal provinces. In addition to this threat, the numerous wars between friendly European powers, particularly the British and French, saw increasingly destructive privateering wars that affected Ottoman shipping and subjects. This resulted from the 1690s in 'maritime regulations', şurut-u derya, that forbade armed European ships from entering extended Ottoman maritime space in times of war. Based on research on the administrative and legal documents relating to the Ottoman navy throughout the eighteenth century, this paper will chart these two concurrent developments - enhanced naval patrols and legal innovation - between 1690 and 1790 to demonstrate that the Ottoman state reacted to both foreign and domestic challenges in its maritime spaces (coastal and in the open sea) in the Mediterranean by using force, law, and diplomacy to enforce and consolidate its claims over its littoral territory and maritime trade routes and to solidify a dependent relationship local actors in the provinces.

Scholarship on nineteenth-century Ottoman hydraulic works in Iraq tends to focus on the particular challenges posed by the construction of the Hindiyya barrage on the middle Euphrates in the province of Baghdad. To be sure, there is good reason for such a focus: up until William Willcock’s design for a new Hindiyya barrage during the early twentieth century, excessive amounts of the Euphrates’ waters entering the Hindiyya canal and changing the main channel of the middle Euphrates constituted one of the most difficult environmental problems in the administration of Ottoman Baghdad during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, without denying the significance of the Hindiyya barrage in the environmental history of Ottoman Iraq, this paper suggests that such a narrow focus obscures much more than it reveals as it overlooks not only the diversity of the profile of nineteenth-century Ottoman hydraulic works on both the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, but also what Ottoman attempts to manage these two rivers can reveal about the nature of Ottoman modernization efforts in Iraq during the nineteenth century. Drawing on Ottoman, British, and French archival records, this paper highlights lesser-known nineteenth-century Ottoman hydraulic works on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, focusing particularly on those portions of the rivers running through the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad and Basra. It offers examples of state-tribal cooperation in a region of the Ottoman Empire in which scholars have often emphasized the contentious relationship between both groups, while at the same time offering examples of sanitary concerns (such as frequent outbreaks of cholera) as an impetus for improved water management in a region of the Ottoman Empire in which scholars are just now beginning to consider the importance of microbes in the writing of history. In so doing, this paper not only demonstrates the centrality of careful water management to Ottoman administration of Baghdad and Basra, but also the importance of environmental concerns in general to Ottoman modernization efforts of the nineteenth century.