Daniel Kolland’s dissertation project engages with the Istanbul-based, Turkish-language illustrated weekly Servet-i Fünûn (Wealth of Applied Sciences; 1891-1914) as a central actor in processes of global integration in the age of empire. Somewhat following McLuhan’s dictum “the medium is the message,” the founder Ahmed İhsan opted for the most technologically sophisticated and ‘modern’ format of the age, the illustrated periodical, to offer his middle-class readership new vistas at a swiftly changing world: the ‘discovery’ of the north pole, the manifold new applications of electricity, women entering institutions of higher education, the Darwinian revolution, or the effects of nervousness, the disease of modern civilization.

As this dissertation traces the making of a new global audience, it seeks to uncover the socio-political conditions in which global communication became relevant and necessary. From the outset, Servet-i Fünûn was a Eurocentric window to the world. The weekly’s emphatical reproduction of narratives of European civilizational superiority and of colonialist representations of other peoples were owed to an utter dependence on European news networks but also an identification of Europe with universal progress on the part of the Ottomans. In a similar vein, the weekly was the mouthpiece of two generations of Muslim men of letters, and state servants who followed an internal mission civilisatrice. As they strove to turn their middle-class readers into a global audience familiar with new, European forms of knowledge, literature, sociability, science, and living, in general, they ultimately aimed at supplanting those inherited customs and allegedly outdated Islamic cultures of knowledge which prevented Ottoman-Turkish society from joining the ‘civilized world.’ This dissertation projects asks, firstly, how such Eurocentric conceptions of progress in Ottoman intellectual life were entangled with new and global communication networks. Secondly, it takes a closer look at the concepts, global tropes and imaginations with which this notion was communicated, inflected, or contested.