Was There an Ottoman Science? Circulation of Knowledge and the Making of the Agronomic, Forestry, and Veterinary Disciplines (1840–1940)

This thesis examines the circulation of scientific knowledge between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the long nineteenth century, focusing on three emerging disciplines – agronomy, forestry, and veterinary medicine. I analyse these fields together to avoid imposing anachronistic disciplinary boundaries, since contemporary practitioners regarded them as an ‘indissociable whole.’ By tracing the movements of Ottoman students sent to Europe and European experts dispatched to the empire on scientific missions, I reconstruct how cross-border knowledge flows shaped these disciplines in their formative decades. While human mobility forms a central thread, the study also follows the movement of technoscientific instruments, exploring their adaptation to local contexts and the challenges of maintenance and repair. By foregrounding marginalised professions in the historiography and examining the often-overlooked routine scientific exchanges between Western and non-colonial spaces, this research contributes to decentring the history of science and technology.