A Land of Opportunities: Foreign Engineers in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Hundreds of foreign engineers worked in the vast lands of the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. These engineers and the works they carried out are worth exploring from the perspective of the circulation of experts in a global context. A closer look at the patterns of their employment contributes to developing a better understanding of the formation of engineering as a profession in the Ottoman context. This article studies the motives of foreign engineers for moving to the Ottoman lands, the projects they were involved in, their countries of origin and their relationships with local engineers. We argue that the presence of foreign engineers in the Ottoman lands was beneficial to all parties involved. Foreign engineers obtained prestigious jobs and brought with them access to a kind of expertise that distinguished them from their less mobile colleagues. The Ottoman Empire in turn benefited from their work and expertise at many different levels of administration, in public works, in upgrading infrastructure and in education. Foreigners had served Ottoman sultans since the early years of the Empire. There was nothing exceptional in that; anyone whose skills were considered useful could establish a relationship of personal loyalty with the sovereign, independently of his or her origins. This does not mean that being part of a specific ethnic or religious group was of no importance.While being non-Muslim could be a barrier to accessing many posts and ranks (particularly in the armed forces), certain groups were nevertheless associated with desirable knowledge and skills, and their members were sought after and their services prized for that reason. In the eighteenth century, the idea that Europe (Avrupa) was gaining important advantage over the Ottomans in specific strategic areas—such as arts and sciences linked to warfare (e.g., military drills, artillery, fortification, shipbuilding and cartography)—gained ground among the Ottoman ruling elites. This had major repercussions for the practice of employing foreigners. People coming from European countries became associated with this superior knowledge and skills, and were thus offered advantageous conditions of service. At the same time, the notion of European superiority in terms of knowledge and skills was Darina Martykánová, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Meltem Kocaman, University of Istanbul OpenAccess. © 2018 Darina Martykánová and Meltem Kocaman, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-018 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 4:01 AM becoming deeply rooted in the minds of the Europeans themselves, which made them more self-confident, more demanding and less willing to fully shift their allegiance and sense of belonging from a European sovereign and country to the Ottoman ruler and lands. These trends subsequently shaped patterns of recruitment and of service (Ágoston 2005; Aksan 2002; Kaçar 1996). As in the past, foreign individuals, including technicians and military experts, continued to offer their skills to the sultan—sometimes moved by the need to seek refuge from a dangerous situation they faced in their own country, or from shameful personal circumstances. In these cases, conversions to Islam were still common for those who wished to integrate into the Ottoman military structures—although since the Hungarian baron Ferenc Tóth (François de Tott) undertook a partial reform of Ottoman military training in the 1770s, many foreign experts were commissioned to carry out military and naval tasks without the requirement of conversion. This trend was further strengthened when official inter-governmental collaboration was established between France and the Ottoman Empire, and Louis XVI sent several groups of expert officers and craftsmen to improve the performance of the Ottoman navy and armies by introducing new shipbuilding techniques, reshaping and enhancing military education and training, and innovations in weapon production, artillery and fortifications. This collaboration continued under the French revolutionary government and, later, several other countries followed France’s example and put their experts at the sultan’s disposal (Kaçar 1996; Firges 2014). In their turn, the Ottoman rulers (as well as their highly autonomous Egyptian vassals) began to send students, apprentices and experts of all ethno-religious origins to foreign—mostly European—schools, workshops and military establishments, as did Ottoman families. Ottoman Christian elites (particularly the Greeks, and some Jewish groups— mainly those with ties to Italian lands) had always sent their sons to European universities, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, this practice was being adopted by Ottomans of all ethno-religious groups. Several sons of powerful Ottoman pashas were educated in prestigious engineering schools in Europe and went on to actually work as engineers: this was the case of Mehmed Refik, Yusuf Razi and Kamuran Sırrı. Employing foreign experts via intergovernmental collaboration had important advantages, the most significant being that, unlike in the case of individual ‘fortune-seekers’—who tended to exaggerate their knowledge and skills, or to fashion themselves as experts in strategic fields despite their limited experience—the expertise of the men sent by foreign governments was guaranteed. Among the disadvantages of this practice was the fact that these foreign experts gave detailed reports on Ottoman military issues (including maps of strategic places and plans of fortifications) to their governments—and their missions 238 Darina Martykánová and Meltem Kocaman Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 4:01 AM were sometimes abruptly interrupted when their country switched its alliances and/or entered in war with the Ottoman Empire. This type of intergovernmental collaboration continued until the end of the Ottoman Empire (and beyond): high-ranking officials of the French corps of ponts et chaussées engineers were employed as technical advisors at the Ottoman ministry of Public Works; officers of the British Royal Navy served in the Ottoman Navy for many years; and German and Austrian officers not only trained Ottoman officers and advised Ottoman officials, but even came to command Ottoman troops (Martykánová 2016–2017; Soydemir 2007; Ortaylı 1981). Sometimes, the nationals of small states were explicitly preferred, such as when Belgian general Henri Alexis Brialmont was commissioned in 1892 by Ottoman imperial authorities to draft plans for an improvement of the fortifications of the Straits (Alloul 2017, pp. 21–22). Occasionally, foreign engineers might have found themselves in the midst of highly delicate political issues. Their tasks could create a conflict of political and economic interests involving different parties, including their own countries. Between 1845 and 1858, the region of Mount Lebanon experienced severe political turmoil. The region’s social structures began to dissolve due to multi-directional struggles, including ethnic and religious conflicts, center versus province rivalry, and inter-communal struggles and tensions between feudal lords and villagers. In addition to the Ottoman administration, France, the British Empire, Austria, Russia and Prussia were actively involved in the region. The Ottoman government had been searching for solutions to stabilize the region, to provide security for its people and also to collect taxes by negotiating with local forces and their ‘protector’ countries. In these circumstances, with the expectation of solving political problems, the government created a commission to make a cadastral survey of the region that would lead to a more equitable distribution of taxes among subjects. Two Prussian engineers were appointed to carry out a cadastral survey of the region. Nonetheless, different actors and groups who did not agree with the project or with the way it was supposed to be carried out fiercely opposed the engineers’ presence in the region. Even the Prussian consul was annoyed with the Ottoman government for placing Prussian subjects under the command of the Ottoman governor, and he made his discomfort clear to the engineers. The Ottoman authorities made an effort to minimize these tensions by appointing local men to escort the Prussian surveyors while they were making their reconnaissance. In spite of these measures, the lives of the two foreign engineers were threatened many times during the course of their duty (Farah 2000, pp. 477– 487). With the growing integration of the Ottoman Empire into the European concert of powers, and increasing contacts between the sultan’s subjects on the one hand, and nationals of different European countries on the other hand, the OttoA Land of Opportunities: Foreign Engineers in the Ottoman Empire 239 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 4:01 AM mans often took the initiative and recruited skilled persons themselves. Such an initiative played a pivotal role in the story of the Polish engineer ‘Vankovitch’, recorded by British Army intelligence officer Fred Burnaby (1842–1885). This Pole, who was to become a chief engineer in several provinces of the Ottoman Empire, was most probably Teodor Wańkowicz, born in 1846 into a Polish noble family from a region near Minsk in today’s Belarus, and also known as Teodor Bej (Bey).Wańkowicz, who was a subject of the tsar of Russia, graduated as a military engineer from the Military College of St. Petersburg.When the Polish insurrection against Russian rule (the January Uprising of 1863– 1864) had broken out, he joined the rebels. He fought against Russia as a commander of a group of insurgents. After the revolt was suppressed, Wańkowicz escaped and, after a troublesome journey, he found himself in Istanbul, penniless. To make his own living, he started to work on the co