Analyzing Ottoman Road Networks with Digital Tools (GIS): New Interpretations and Analysis

Abstract: 

Following the Turco-Mongolian statecraft of ensuring safe and rapid movement of information, armies, and merchants through the lands, Ottoman state paid close attention to the network of roads and messengers on horseback. The maps that I made draws their raw data from a register located in the private library of Hüsrev Paşa (d. 1855), the renown commander-in-chief of the reformed, European style Ottoman army in 1820s-30s. The document lists the names of the postal stations (menzilhane) along the major land routes circa 1830s and distances in hours between them. Such “catalogs” could be found in various Ottoman archival repositories, however, the document from Hüsrev Paşa’s library is rare in the sense that it is strikingly comprehensive; it covers most of the major and minor routes within the Ottoman Empire.

One of the maps I made visualizes some 150 postal stations through the main routes. These represents the right, centre, and left route (sağ, orta, sol kol) in the Balkans, and the right, centre, and left routes (sağ, orta, sol kol) in Anatolia, Iraq, and Syria. A complete digital map could thus be drawn for the entire empire, which would visualize a) all the minor as well as major routes in the empire and b) the distances between postal stations in hours. Creating the map digitally brings in the crucial advantage of editing, altering, and updating the existing versions with considerable ease. An exciting and perhaps novel part of this undertaking will be creating a cartogram (i.e. a “tempered” map so to speak) based on these maps. These could show the “iso-chronic” zones which would help the reader to better recognize the actual distances in between the major urban centers terms of time.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Veysel Şimşek, PhD - Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University

I am a faculty lecturer at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. I completed my doctorate in Ottoman history at McMaster University under the direction of Dr. Virginia H. Aksan. Prior to my current appointment at the Institute of Islamic Studies, I held a Chauncey Postdoctoral Fellowship in Grand Strategy with International Security Studies of Yale University (2016-18), and served as a postdoctoral research fellow and interim codirector of the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) of McGill University (2015-16).

My broader research interests include political, social, and intellectual history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic (c. 1750–1950), and I have taught various courses on Ottoman, Middle Eastern and World History at Yale, McMaster, and Bilkent. My current book project, Remaking the Ottoman Empire, 1789–1856: Imperial Ideology, Military Power, and the Politics of Islam, explores the unprecedented reconfiguration of the Ottoman state and society and focuses on the intersections of modern state formation, organized violence, and confessionalization. Concurrently, I also have been studying and publishing on the subjects related to war and society in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Worlds, c. 1910-1925.