Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Osman Nuri Paşa served as the governor of Hijaz, Yemen, and Aleppo. In 1885, he wrote a report outlining his plans for provincial reforms in the Hijaz and Yemen. In reality, what Osman Nuri produced was an ambitious template designed to bring Istanbul’s vision of modernity and civilization to the empire’s turbulent tribal frontiers. Over the next two decades, Abdülhamid II embraced many of Osman Nuri’s policy proposals, particularly his vision of tribal education and his strong emphasis on consolidation and centralization via technological and infrastructural improvement. In this paper, I will argue that Osman Nuri’s proposals represent a signature articulation of a Hamidian “colonial policy” on the empire’s Arab frontiers. Alongside the Hijaz and Yemen, the other territory most frequently included in descriptions of Ottoman colonial experimentation was Trablusgarb. The most obvious problem linking these three provinces was Bedouin policy. As Osman Nuri explains, Muslims from Arab, Kurdish, and Albanian tribal areas all represented a massive, untapped reservoir of military recruits and economic potential. In Yemen, the Hijaz, and Trablusgarb, however, the situation was compounded because even the settled populations of these provinces were exempt from military service. As he laments, the difficulties in recruiting and forcing soldiers from Anatolia and Ottoman Europe to go to these provinces stemmed from the grave risks posed not only by local resistance, but also by disease, poor water and sanitation, and extreme climate. Owing to these dangers, he proposed that these “hot provinces” should be considered as a new kind of administrative unit and earmarked for special reforms. Osman Nuri’s novel comparative perspective reflects the widening gulf between the empire’s Turkish core and the Arab periphery. As he warned, however, even these difficult frontier provinces could not be perpetually treated as recently occupied territories. He understood the need to balance the pressure of centralization with a measure of accommodation and indoctrination. Thus, in 1886, a group of students selected from Osman Nuri’s triad of “hot provinces” was sent to Istanbul. This was the pilot program that ultimately grew into the famous Așiret Mektebi (Tribal School). And in 1892, it was Osman Nuri who was called upon to write the school’s curriculum. While scholars have traditionally attributed virtually every aspect of Hamidian policy-making to the Sultan himself. Osman Nuri’s story demonstrates how novel experiments on the frontier could and did reshape policy-making at an empire-wide level.

In December of 1885, Ahmed Muhtar Paşa, the decorated military commander and Ottoman high official was dispatched to Cairo in order to negotiate the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt. Though negotiations collapsed, Muhtar Paşa remained in Cairo until 1909 as the Ottoman High Commissioner to Egypt. With few exceptions, Muhtar Paşa’s stint in Egypt has been written about as period of exile, having ostensibly fallen out of favor with the Sultan, or otherwise unimportant to his early military and later political career. Yet by the time Muhtar Paşa arrived in Cairo he had extensive administrative experience throughout the empire as a military commander and governor. He was dispatched almost exclusively to provincial hotspots with the mission to extend the reach of the state or prevent European intervention in Ottoman affairs. Between the late 1860s and 1886, he was on the ground during critical moments in Yemen, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Erzurum, Crete and Monastir. Muhtar Paşa also knew and “was known” by European diplomats and high officials and was characterized by Europeans as a strong and effective governor – British officials often compared Muhtar to Mehmed Fuad Paşa, one of the key reformers of the Tanzimat. Rather than treat Muhtar Paşa’s time in Egypt separate from his earlier administrative experiences, this paper contends that he was sent to Egypt precisely because it was a problem spot within the empire. During his thirty-year plus tenure in Cairo, Muhtar Paşa generated an extensive body of policy recommendations for Sultan Abdülhamid II. Experiencing the ‘Scramble for Africa’ first hand, he advised the Sultan to engage European powers directly and to lay claim to Ottoman territorial rights in North Africa and along the Red Sea coast in order to reinforce the Empire against Europe. I show that these recommendations led in part to Ottoman efforts to assert more direct control over provinces bordering Egypt, especially Libya. This paper argues that Muhtar Paşa’s experience at the edges of the empire profoundly shaped his imperial and administrative ideas as well as his policy recommendations once in Egypt. This paper reconsiders the Ottoman involvement in the European Scramble for Africa as well as the importance of Egypt as an Ottoman province after the British occupation in 1882.

In 1893, Ahmet Reşid Bey, the Ottoman agricultural inspector for the Vilayets of Syria and Beirut left his post without permission and made his way via Port Said to Chicago to attend the World’s Columbian Exposition. He was eager to examine the exhibition’s displays of new agricultural equipment and, despite the Sublime Port’s consternation at his unauthorized departure, officials considered the lengthy and thorough report he provided upon his return valuable enough to pardon his impulsive decision. Reşid Bey’s enthusiasm was representative of that exhibited by a growing group of Ottoman officials who, for purposes of food and resource production as well as revenue, were enthusiastic to acquire and apply knowledge about emerging technologies in the agricultural sphere through new administrative policies and practices. This paper proposes to explore the international networks of expertise in which these officials operated and how their interactions and engagements abroad inflected their implementation of policies at home. Despite the importance of agricultural production to the finances of the Ottoman state and the sustenance of its population, the historiography related to these developments in the latter decades of the Ottoman Empire remains quite slim. In particular, the impact of the personal engagement of Ottoman technocrats with their counterparts in Europe and beyond is largely unexplored. This paper aims to respond to this gap by exploring Ottoman participation not only in the Chicago World Exhibition, but also in organizations like the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) founded in Rome in 1905 and events like tractor competitions. Using documents from the Ottoman and IIA archives as well as periodicals from the period, this paper will demonstrate how Ottoman participation in these activities inspired the planning of Ottoman exhibitions and privileged the construction of a web of model farms and agricultural schools and the cultivation of a network of specially-trained experts within the empire to staff them. This paper will argue that Ottoman technocrats were an integral part of networks engaged in learning about, experimenting with, and disseminating these new methods, albeit with an enthusiasm tempered by a desire to ensure that technology developed elsewhere was adapted to the ecological exigencies of the Empire. Drawing on a framework of space, it will demonstrate how these officials’ engagement with international bodies and networks of expertise abroad was intimately connected to the formation of inter-empire networks and the establishment of a web of domestic agricultural institutions.

During the Young Turk era (1913-1950), men educated in Ottoman military and law schools dominated the politics of the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. These schools were incubators for the new political elite and the personal networks created in these institutions had long-lasting significance. Indeed, such men also came to dominate domestic politics in nearby Ottoman successor states such as Iraq and Syria. In Turkey, Süleyman Demirel’s ascent to the premiership in 1965 heralded a shift in the educational background and outlook of Turkey’s leaders. For the next several decades, political elites trained in engineering or business more often than not occupied the country’s highest offices. This paper examines this shift and its consequences for Turkish politics, arguing that Turkey’s interwar focus on autarkic development and laicism, the advent of multi-party elections after the Second World War, and significant changes in the state’s bureaucratic structure made possible a new kind of political class. This political class had very different ideas about the problems facing Turkish society and how best to exercise political power. From the perspective of global history, the rise of the mühendis in Turkish politics paralleled similar changes in other developing countries, most notably China, after the Second World War. This paper will examine the political development of other Ottoman successor states in this respect and discuss the postwar fate of the Ottoman-educated political classes ruling in neighboring countries.