From Procurement to Construction: Networked Materialities of Early Ottoman Railways

Modern infrastructures, from dams to railways, depend on materials extracted from the very earth they are constructed upon, merging sites of construction with sites of material procurement. Yet, production of modern infrastructure often occurs at the intersection of local and global networks of material circulation. Activation of such local and global networks exposes the complex matrix of legal, economic and political frameworks that play a role in the making of infrastructure.

The first railways of the Ottoman Empire connected the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir with the fertile river valleys of western Anatolia. They were constructed within a British railway building paradigm but under conditions dictated by an Ottoman state eager to modernize its transportation infrastructure. Railway companies obliterated massive rock formations and plundered the archaeological sites in their quest for easily accessible construction materials. Sand and stone quarries and lime kilns dotted the landscape along railway routes. Simultaneously, Ottoman networks were leveraged to bring materials such as timber from forests belonging to the Ottoman Arsenal. Sailing vessels flocked into the port of Izmir with pozzolana and tiles from locations around the eastern Mediterranean. Steamers arrived with everything from rivets to doorknobs and bells from England.

In sum, during the second half of the 19th century in western Anatolia, in all aspects of railway construction, local and global networks intersected. This intersection created a dialectic that resulted in the particular reformulation of land accentuating both the local characteristics of western Anatolia while at the same time highlighting the global nature of railway building enterprises in general. Tapping into a variety of sources such as company records, newspaper articles, travel narratives and bureaucratic correspondence ranging from railway contracts to bills of lading, this paper analyzes and contextualizes the local and global logistics networks of railway building in the Ottoman Empire.