of the persistent and unanswered questions in the 'West against the Rest' debate embedded in recent world histories asks why the rest, including the Ottomans, did not keep up with Europe.1 Why did the Ottomans not adopt Western technology, for which one is to read weapons, or clocks, when their own military systems began to fail them so badly after 1700? However unsatisfactory, there are now several alternatives to the stereotypes of religious obscurantism, conservatism, and backwardness most often proffered as the primary cause of the Ottomans' ineptitude.2 Assumptions about the role of culture, in particular religion, in the military context, and the sources we choose as evidence when analysing the reorganization of society, often prove inadequate to explain Ottoman history. This article on the influence of sources and the debate on the relationship between reform and technology argues for multiple causality, and privileges the role of technical exchanges, or 'conversations',3 over the hierarchy of knowledge and power embedded in Enlightenment debates about Ottoman civilization which persist to the present. The period under consideration, 1760-1830, covers the transformation of the Ottoman ancien regime during the reigns of Mustafa III (1757-74), Abdulhamit I (1774-89), Selim HI (1789-1807), and Mahmud II (1808-39), the last considered to be the architect of nineteenth-century Ottoman