Review: Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure, by Peter H. Christensen

Abstract

Peter H. Christensen Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017, 204 pp., 77 color and 66 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300225648 Indispensable—if ubiquitous and seemingly ordinary—components of everyday life, infrastructures shape how space and time are organized across multiple scales. As sizable interventions on the land, they require a sustained investment of substantial human, economic, and material resources. Consequently, infrastructures engender productive avenues of inquiry, and in recent decades, following the imaginative work of historians of technology and geographers, architectural and urban historians have begun demonstrating a keen interest in this subject. With his astute site and period selection, Peter H. Christensen introduces a valuable international geopolitical dimension to this literature. Germany and the Ottoman Railways presents the world of complex interactions and unexpected synergies that occurred between a waning, yet still sovereign, Ottoman Empire and the robustly industrial neophyte German state as it entered the colonial race long dominated by Britain and France. This was neither internal colonization to achieve territorial cohesion nor imperial colonialism for resource extraction and labor exploitation, but, in its ambiguity, Christensen suggests, the railway project opened up a vast gray zone for tactical interventions by actors from both countries, despite the obvious asymmetries between them. Examining railway construction from inception to completion, Christensen traces changing loyalties, opportunistic moves, and the ebbs and flows of enthusiasm, funds, and resources. The volume consists of two parts. In the first, chapters titled “Politics,” “Geography,” “Topography,” and “Archaeology” examine constructions of knowledge and imagination, moving from the abstract macroscale of geopolitics to the microscale of archaeological remains in specific sites. Next, chapters titled “Construction,” “ Hochbau ” (meaning aboveground structures), “Monuments,” and “Urbanism” explore the generation of physical form at successively larger scales. By the late nineteenth century, reform-minded Ottoman officials had recognized how railroads could …