Since the Crimean War, Constantinople was buzzing with foreign engineers. The participation in an international alliance against Russia and the involvement of the Ottoman government in the global financial markets sped up the integration of the Ottoman domains into the world economy, which included an increased activity of foreign investors and a growing demand for technical expertise, as many of the most desirable investment opportunities were linked to technologies that were considered to require expert knowledge and skills. Mining, infrastructures, irrigation, but also urban development and manufacturing were among the most dynamic areas in which manual workers, technicians and even managers were often expected to have specific technical knowledge and skills. While some technologies did indeed rely on skilled persons for their adaptation, installment, operation, and maintenance, the demand for engineers was, in a way, boosted by the engineers themselves. They were successful in disseminating the idea that they were necessary and profitable. The governments in Europe, America and the Eastern Mediterranean had been investing in training engineers for decades, but by the mid-nineteenth century, bankers and businessmen began to send their sons to engineering schools, too. In many countries such as France, Spain or Russia, engineers were high-ranking civil servants. But most of the engineers worked for private companies, as partners, employees or professionals hired for specific tasks. Many came to hold managerial posts. We tend to see the engineers as useful tools, but they were much more than that. They shaped the central and municipal governments’ policies concerning public works from within the administrative apparatus, but they also shaped investment and infrastructure development as partners in businesses, as investors and as employees granted a key role in decision-making. What’s more, they intervened in public opinion, publishing letters and articles in general and professional press, appealing to the Parliament and, sometimes, actively engaging in institutional politics. Thus, the question of their allegiances, of their loyalties and of their worldview arises. There has been a robust discussion in history, sociology, and political science on the “nationality of capital”. Is capitalism shaped by political and national loyalties or is it, by nature, cosmopolitan, driven only by profit? The same could and should be asked for technical expertise. Here I will use the case study of an engineer linked to Poland, Russia, France, Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire (and, indirectly, India), to examine the notion of engineers as agents of informal imperialism.

In the course of the nineteenth century the Ottoman imperial rule over the island of Crete in Southeastern Mediterranean was to be defied time and again, until the island’s eventual unification to the Kingdom of Greece in 1913. One of the Ottoman Government’s responses to these contestations against the Sultan’s rule destabilizing this precious Mediterranean possession, given the island’s significant geostrategic position both for the protection of the Ottoman Archipelago and the route to Egypt, were a series of submarine cable infrastructure projects which would integrate Crete into the Ottoman telegraph network under development. Crete’s insularity meant that this integration to the telegraph network could only take place by resorting to the new, in the mid-nineteenth century, technology of submarine telegraphy, which was dominated, in the first period of global telegraphic communications development, by the British.

By taking the story of Crete’s submarine telegraphic connections and disconnections as the point of departure, this contribution aims at bringing to the fore the interplay among the state and non-state actors’ telegraphic policies, at the local, regional and global levels. In particular, it will focus on the negotiations concerning the submarine telegraph infrastructure projects in Eastern Mediterranean in which Ottoman and British governmental agents, British engineers, businessmen and companies, the authorities of the Cretan Autonomous State, as well as the representatives of neighboring Mediterranean states, participated. Their diverse voices, traced in the Ottoman, British and Cretan archives, illustrate how the Ottomans managed to navigate the transition from a period of British informal telegraph imperialism to one of consolidation of the British informal empire of communications by adhering to the principle of safeguarding the control over the new technology. Even more, the adherence to this principle allowed the Ottoman government to develop a multifaceted telegraphic diplomacy and to use the telegraph, terrestrial and submarine, both as a tool for the reaffirmation of the Ottoman imperial rule over the Empire’s provinces like Crete, and as an arena for the negotiation of power relations with the Empire’s neighbors, like Greece.

My paper proposes to trace the global entanglements of the late Ottoman Empire through the diplomatic activity of Austria-Hungary, its sister empire immediately to the West. To this end, I follow the careers of several Habsburg consuls from their initial postings in the Ottoman Balkans—the traditional focus region of Austrian expansionist ambition—to their new emergent roles across the oceans, where these officials were tasked with managing migrations, commercial relations, colonialist ventures, and much more. A key question I explore is how the consuls’ training and experiences in an Ottoman context played out overseas; and conversely, how globally entangled their activity in Ottoman locales and interaction with Ottoman actors had, in fact, already been.

My approach understands the Habsburg consular service as a transnational/transimperial bureaucracy formed by the diplomatic actors through the institutional practices in which they engaged. I draw on recent social and cultural approaches to studying diplomacy and public administration to work towards a global (micro)history of late-Habsburg diplomacy. My work privileges administrative sources such as the varied documents found in the consuls’ personnel files over their better-known political reports and brings new questions—including from histories of emotion, gender, and material culture—to the study of Habsburg consulship and the foreign-policy bureaucracy as a whole.

Overall, my argument aims to contribute to the ongoing revaluation of the Habsburg Empire as having been anything but an “anachronism”. Instead, it sees it as a vibrant, uniquely diverse polity among other empires and nation states—which, in competing and cooperating with each other, shaped a rapidly modernising world, and employed consuls as their most active agents abroad. Such an approach not only opens up a comparative perspective between the late Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, but goes beyond this by highlighting the shared global dimension of both empires’ history, using the example of diplomatic Intermediaries.

This paper examines the Bakteriyolojihane-i Şahane (Imperial Bacteriology Institute), founded in 1893, as a key site of scientific and imperial contestation, highlighting how both the Ottoman Empire and France viewed and utilized the institute in different ways. For the Ottomans, the institute was part of a broader effort to harness foreign expertise for pragmatic, locally relevant purposes, such as combating cattle plague and rabies. The Ottomans instrumentalized this scientific knowledge to strengthen state capacity and improve public health. Conversely, for the French, the Bakteriyolojihane-i Şahane represented a battleground for scientific supremacy, where they could counter the influence of other foreign powers, particularly Germany, and expand their own informal scientific empire in the Mediterranean.

Although French scientists held key positions at the institute until 1914, the Bakteriyolojihane-i Şahane had no official ties with the Pasteur Institute, predominantly employed Ottoman scientists, and was fully funded by the Ottoman government. Nevertheless, the French persistently referred to the institute as the “Institut Pasteur de Constantinople”, a misnomer that symbolized their desire to incorporate it into their network of colonial institutes, such as those in Tunis and Casablanca. This strategic rebranding was part of France’s broader ambition to assert intellectual dominance and gain economic control over the lucrative production of vaccines and serums at the institute.

Focusing on this institution offers a nuanced perspective on the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with foreign scientific expertise and challenges conventional narratives of Ottoman Westernization. Far from being passive recipients of European knowledge, Ottoman scientists at the Bakteriyolojihane-i Şahane were active producers of scientific research that shaped the global scientific landscape—including groundbreaking discoveries that received recognition in European academies of science. By analyzing competing visions for the Bakteriyolojihane-i Şahane—Ottoman pragmatism versus French imperial ambition—this paper proposes another framework to study Ottoman engagement with foreign expertise, casting Ottomans as actors with strategic intents as opposed to the “sick men” who are passive objects of foreign machinations

For the early modern era historians, the question of whether the Ottomans were a sea power and what the Ottoman Mediterranean looked like raised prominent discussions. However, for historians of the modern era, whether the modern Mediterranean existed and how Ottoman regional and global connections shaped it remain contested. This paper, approaching the question of connections in the long nineteenth century through case studies of road networks and the arrival of cars, claims that the Ottoman interest in surviving as a Mediterranean state continued despite the land loss in the Balkans, the islands, and the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest road-building efforts in Samsun and Beirut from the 1840s connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, allowing the use of cars in the Principality of Bulgaria as early as 1906 when cars were banned in historical cities such as Istanbul, sending automobiles to the Ottoman military in Yemen in 1907 reflect the Ottoman anxiety ensuring the continuation of geopolitical connections in strategic places including ports and the interior hinterland. In a way, investing in overland transportation was initially an effort to keep the state connected around the greater Mediterranean; however, this “regional and maritime” state was gradually replaced by the “national and territorial” markers. In the coming decades, land transportation served to create the “nation” in practice and symbolism as trains and cars became the insignia of progress and modernisation. Later, historians approached the idea of a sea state primarily as a naval power, as in the case of the Dutch or British empires, dismissing the state built around the sea with control over strategic straits as a sea power.

This paper explores the formations of the 'colonial' in Libya, within the broader context of the Mediterranean Sea, through the lens of submarine telegraphy. It traces the history of submarine telegraphs that were first connected with the coast of present-day Libya in 1861 by the Ottoman government, and then rebuilt by the Italian one in 1911. The work extends the temporal scope of modern Libya by situating its origins in an Ottoman context, while also exploring its spatial dimension within the depths of the Mediterranean. The conducting wire of this dissertation is the submarine telegraph cable, which I see as a historical repository of colonial entanglements, a term I borrow from Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. I use their agential-realist methodology to trace the ways in which politics, technology, culture, science, human and non-human emerged from material-discursive intra-actions in the context of modern Mediterranean colonialism. I pay special attention to the submarine environment of the telegraph cable: what were the consequences of including this previously ignored liquid dimension to the conceptual reality of the terrestrial world of men?

How were terrestrial ideals applied to the depths of the sea and how did the materiality of water inform terrestrial discourses? In a context of violent colonial expansion, how is sovereignty established at sea? Submerging my analysis in the depths of the sea allows me to overcome national and Eurocentric perspectives of the Mediterranean. An exploration of submarine infrastructure contributes to subverting historiographical colonial hierarchies, shedding light on less studied interactions, such as those between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, the Maghrib, the Middle East and the Levant. In so doing, the work calls for a repositioning of “the Mediterranean” in global histories and histories of modern imperialism, arguing that the Internal Sea was a major center of late modern colonialism. This methodological approach allows me to move between and interrogate the establishment of different scales - global, Mediterranean, Ottoman, Libyan, Italian -, participating in attempts to de-essentialise the concept of “the Mediterranean”, while at the same time recovering its usefulness as a historical object of late modern colonial analyses. Through the case study of the marine dimension of Libya’s colonial history, I argue that contemporary strategies of territorialization of the Mediterranean Sea follow a neo-colonial matrix rooted in the emergence of deep-water science and technology during the mid-nineteenth century.