Reconfiguring Trans-Ottoman Mobility: Transport Infrastructure in the Ottoman Danube Province in the Second Half of the 19th Century

• In Event: Traveling down the Danube: Knowledge, Networks, and Infrastructure in the Late-eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire redefined its connections with the world by modernizing its transport infrastructures such as roads, and by introducing new transport technologies such as railways and steam shipping. This paper will explore the imprint this modernization of infrastructure had on trans-Ottoman connections with east-central Europe by focusing on the Lower Danube. An area regulated by the International Danube Commission moved into the focus of international investors and, after the creation of the Ottoman Danube Province in 1862, became a target area of Ottoman reform policies. Taking into account the way different economic and political priorities of Ottoman and non-Ottoman actors as well as their mental maps, this paper will examine the planning processes and the implementation of infrastructure projects. Ottoman actors (political, economic, local, and national) who expressed their needs and wishes through petitions to the government make up the main focus of this paper. The history of transport infrastructures opens up the opportunity to understand the rapid transformation of mobility spaces against the backdrop of older forms of entanglements between the Ottoman world and east-central Europe. It is a central thesis of the project that infrastructural modernization not only followed the logic of European imperialist penetration, but was also influenced by specific Ottoman dynamics.

Author

• Florian Riedler, U of Giessen (Germany)