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Central Asia Workshop: Ottoman Visions of Modernity

Presentation by Mike O'Sullivan

Thursday, January 29, 2015
10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Bunche 11377



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This week's presentation, titled "Ottoman Technocrats in Kabul and Visions of Afghanistan's progress in the Ottoman Imagination, 1908-23", is lead by Michael O'Sullivan, a graduate student from history.   By examining the activities of Ottoman experts in Afghanistan from 1908-23, this paper demonstrates how their arrival precipitated a series of state-building practices rooted in the particular historical experience of Ottoman reform projects. Afghanistan thus became the object of an Ottoman mission civilisatrice and the beneficiary of an avowedly Ottoman-Turkish modernity in the eyes of certain figures within the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, The approximately three dozen Ottoman experts who resided in Kabul from 1907-22 were enthusiastic proponents of the discourse of Ottoman reformism, itself the product of the widespread institutional and structural transformations of the nineteenth century. The tropes of backwardness and progress inherent to this discourse were harnessed in the effort to integrate peripheral areas of the empire, to inculcate the peoples of the empire into an official Ottoman nationalism, and to raise 'minority' populations of the empire to a level of civilization commensurate with that of self-described Turkish technocrats. My research looks at how the habitudes intrinsic to these practices and ideas were brought to bear upon Afghanistan through military, public health, and political reforms, and how the country was perceived in the Ottoman imagination as a laboratory for social experiment and imperial revival. Sharing this conviction were members of the Afghan royal family and its chief ministers, especially Mahmud Tarzi, who first invited the Ottoman advisers to Kabul. Through the study of previously unexamined Ottoman, Afghan, and British sources, the aim here is to attest to a radically different genealogy of Afghan state-building and Ottoman modernization projects.