Change in the School Maps of the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

In the mid‐1890s school maps in the Ottoman Empire underwent a simple but important change: maps that represented the empire in its entirety confronted students in the growing number of Ottoman state schools. These new maps, which showed the empire's far‐flung territory within a single frame, began to replace older maps based on European models that had depicted the Ottoman domains as marginal lands clinging to the fringes of Europe, Asia and Africa. This shift in design should be understood within the context of late Ottoman educational policy, which was attempting to inculcate a strong sense of loyalty to, and identification with, the empire as an historical, political and geographical construct. While this effort produced some of the intended results, the attention to geography occasioned by the new emphasis on maps also raised some awkward questions. Students so recently attuned to studying geography naturally wondered why their empire was shrinking, and why its political leadership had allowed this to happen. The change in late Ottoman educational cartography thus highlighted not only the advantages and disadvantages of using maps for socio‐political purposes in general, but also the extent to which the late Ottoman state had chosen a particularly difficult moment to summon the concision and power that maps afford.

Keywords:

• Ottoman Empire
• school maps
• Sultan Abdülhamid
• Heinrich Kiepert
• Hüseyin Cahid Yalçin
• Şevket Süreyya Aydemir

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank my colleagues Palmira Brummett, Thomas Goodrich and David Roxburgh with whom I participated in the panel on Ottoman cartography at the Twentieth International Conference on the History of Cartography in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 2003. This article is an expanded version of the paper I presented there. I should also like to thank the editor and the anonymous Imago Mundi reviewers; they have all made suggestions which directly improved this piece of writing.

Notes

Paper presented at the Twentieth International Conference on the History of Cartography, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, June 2003. Revised version received February 2004.

Benjamin C. Fortna is lecturer in the modern history of the Middle East at the School of African and Oriental Studies.

Joseph Szyliowicz, ‘The Ottoman educational legacy: myth or reality’, in Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East, ed. L. Carl Brown (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), 293.

Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002).

Stephen Duguid, ‘The politics of unity: Hamidian policy in eastern Anatolia’, Middle Eastern Studies 9 (1973): 139–40; Selim Deringil, The Well‐Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London, I. B. Tauris, 1998), 47.

There was, of course, a long‐standing internal impulse to reform the empire that dated right back to the ‘golden age’ of the sixteenth century. For accounts of internal reform in the nineteenth century, see, for example, Butrus Abu Manneh, ‘The Islamic roots of Gülhane’, Die Welt des Islams 34 (1994): 173–203, and David Dean Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria (New York, Oxford University Press, 1990).

Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘Abdülhamid II's attempt to integrate Arabs into the Ottoman system’, in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, ed. David Kushner (Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1986), 74.

Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, Istanbul, hereafter BOA), Yıldız Mütennevi (Y Mtv.) 185/8. 3 Şaban 1316 (17 Dec. 1898); Y Mtv. 189/108. 15 Zilhicce 1316 (26 Apr. 1899); and Mahir Aydın, Şarkî Rumeli Vilâyetleri, Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları 14/12 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1992), 218.

The following discussion draws on Ahmet T. Karamustafa's contributions to The History of Cartography, Volume Two, Book Two: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Introduction to Islamic maps’, in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, Volume Two, Book Two (see note 7 ), 5.

Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire in the Classical Age, 1300–1600 (New Rochelle, NY, Caratzas, 1989), 180.

Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Introduction to Ottoman cartography’, in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, Volume Two, Book Two (see note 7 ), 206.

This map is dated 1317 ah, i.e., 1899–1900 ce (British Library, Maps 43305.(59)). That the new Ottoman map wasmodelled on one by Kiepert was a normal occurrence; many of the maps and atlases produced in the empire during this period were ‘translations’ of western European originals, though not all indicated their source.

BOA, Sadâret Resmî Mâruzât Evrâkı (YA Res.) 120/53. 27 Muharrem 1321 (April 25, 1903).

Ibid.

Ibid.

BOA, Bab‐ı Âli Evrak Odası (BEO), 178072.

Ibrahim Hilmî, Memâlik‐i Osmaniye Cep Atlası [Pocket Atlas of the Ottoman Empire] (Istanbul, Ibrahim Hilmî, 1323 [1907]).

Stanwood Cobb, The Real Turk (Boston, The Pilgrim Press, 1914), 136.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, Verso, 1991), 175. Anderson acknowledges the influence of the dissertation written by Thongchai Winichakul, whose research, since published (see note 19 below), builds on Anderson's notion of the imagined community but ultimately insists on the power of geography to shape the concept of the nation. Several parallels between Thailand and the Ottoman Empire in this period (indirect foreign control over some aspects of Thai and Ottoman affairs, selective official importation of Western culture, the long reign of a powerful king in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the displacement of an older geography by the new), make for suggestive comparison. There were, however, important differences, chief among these was the fact that the Ottoman ruler combined both religious and political authority.

Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo‐Body of a Nation (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994), x.

Hüseyin Cahid Yalçın, ‘Meşrutiyet Hatıraları, 1908–1918’, Fikir Hareketleri 82 (1935): 54.

Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, Suyu Arayan Adam [The Man in Search of Water] (Ankara: Öz Yayınları, 1959), 45.

Ibid., 46.

Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), 27.

Étienne Copeaux, Une vision turque du monde à travers les cartes de 1931 à nos jours (Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2000).