A critical perspective on scientific and technological input in late Ottoman cotton cultivation, 1840–1876

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of scientific and technological input as a transformative and driving force in Ottoman cotton cultivation between 1840 and 1876. These two entities, with their controversial coexistence, make an alternative view in historiography demandable. The new cotton production methods and techniques, emerged in parallel with the perception of science that started to be institutionalised in the nineteenth century, shaped cotton cultivation and production patterns with a sense of association rather than a societal understanding. These associations exhibit a dynamic nature rather than the static structures often encountered in different social science theories, rendering all human-centred approaches that accept the agent as exclusively human and based on the world-human duality ineffective. Focusing on the dynamic partnerships of local and foreign actors/objects that were established, disintegrated, reunited, and transformed, this thesis explores the structures that remoulded the Ottoman cotton production process in “non-radical chaotic systems” created by non-human agents through the combination of scientific and technological input engendered by various partnerships, not based on a single intermediary, supplydemand, and a state-centred approach. Thus, especially during the years of the American Civil War, the agents directing cotton production in the Ottoman Empire and the networks of these agents become visible. The thesis proposes to evaluate these non-/human agents under three categories: sensory, entrepreneurial, and transmitter actors. These actors’ fluid decisions, behaviours, and actions have shaped and transformed the cotton production process in the late Ottoman era.