ABSTRACT
Bülent Bilmez Introduction The main aim of this article is to discuss some general characteristics of the Ottoman railways as foreign investments, while giving a brief history of plans, projects and concessions relating to those railways and their construction and operation, from the beginning in the 1850s up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 with the end of major railway construction in the Ottoman Empire. As a secondary aim, I attempt to offer guidance for further studies on the Ottoman railways by drawing a thematic, conceptual and chronological framework, and through references to directly related sources for each railway network. Railways as an ‘idea’: remedy for underdevelopment and means of ‘civilisation’ In his speech at the British Royal Geographical Society on 11 May 1908, Noel Buxton, who had been a fellow of the Society since 1858, stated that ‘nothing is more needed for the industrial development of the Balkans than railways. But so far, over a large area, the few railways that exist are built for strategy alone. There must be really commercial, non-political railways.’1 Leaving aside the longstanding question of the core function of railways in the Balkans and in the Ottoman Empire until 1908, the belief in the need for railways as a means of economic development in the Empire had already been dominant among the Ottomans and Europeans for decades:
If there was one thing which both resident Europeans and Ottoman reformers were agreed on it was that there would be no real economic development without the construction of proper roads and railways, thus reducing the cost of carriage and allowing cultivators in the interior to start producing for the foreign market. Consular report after consular report provided facts and
1 N. Buxton, ‘Balkan Geography and Balkan Railways’, The Geographic Journal,
32, issue 3, 1908, 217-34, here 230.
