Peter Christensen’s book Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure examines the geopolitical, economic, cultural, and architectural dimensions of the construction of four discrete subsections of the Ottoman rail system; namely, the Rumelian railways (constructed 1871–1891), the Anatolian railways (1873–1899), the Baghdad Railway (1899–1918), and the Hejaz Railway along with its Palestinian branch tracks (1900–1908). Viewing the history of Ottoman railways as a collective experience, Christensen’s book is distinct in that it intends to bring the voices of railway personnel to the fore by investigating the rich human legacy of the Ottoman rail system. His study draws upon an extremely rich array of different sources—among them expedition reports, topographic studies, railway paintings, photographic albums of the Anatolian and Baghdad railways and their environs, Ottoman and German periodicals, archaeological surveys, and Ottoman imperial orders—all of which are scattered over a number of libraries and archives in Britain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Israel, and France.

The book is organized into two main parts, consisting of a total of eight chapters. In the first part, Chapters 1–4 discuss the development of ethnographic, topographical, and archaeological knowledge of the Ottoman railways. Subsequently, in the second part, Chapters 5–8 elucidate how the changing economic and political realities of railway infrastructures in Ottoman territory produced various types of monumental buildings and urbanization patterns in the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arabic-speaking provinces.

In the first part of the book, Chapter 1 explores the ways through which the fate of the Ottoman railway lines was sealed by the geopolitical and economic maneuvers of German investors and statesmen as well as by changes in Ottoman politics during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) and the subsequent Young Turk period. Chapter 2 presents a discussion of the growing corpus of Ottoman and German geographical knowledge of the areas on and around the railways within the context of Friedrich Ratzel’s theory of anthropogeography, and concerns itself specifically with the schemes of David Fraser, Ewald Banse, and Karl Kannenberg; the writings published in the Ottoman journal Servet-i Fünûn; and the albums of Theodor Rocholl. This chapter reveals the long-lasting impact of the Ottoman railway building program on the “discovery” of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Chapter 3 pays special attention to Wilhelm von Pressel’s colorful portrayal of cities and towns along the railways, to Josef Černik’s and Karl Auler’s maps of the railway lines; and to the report of the Wilhelm Stemrich commission. This chapter offers valuable insights into how the ontology of topographic mapping determined the demographic, economic, and political significance of railway-building efforts. Finally, Chapter 4 provides a general overview of the development of German archaeological undertakings in Ottoman Anatolia and Mesopotamia. The principal question addressed in this chapter is the matter of how and why the archaeological discoveries and documentation of Gustav and Alfred Körte, Guillaume Gustave Berggren, Gottlieb Schumacher, and Ernst Herzfeld transformed the Anatolia-Baghdad-Hejaz railways into an Ottoman-German archaeological enterprise.

The second part of Christensen’s monograph opens with an inquiry into the working conditions at railway sites. The innovative core of Chapter 5 is represented by an analysis of the human resources of the railway companies and the nature of railway work as seen through the prism of asymmetrical labor relations. The main objective of the subsequent two chapters is to underscore how the dynamics of art, engineering, economics, and politics laid the groundwork for the spectacular development of the “organic bodies” (p. 1) of railroads, which included bridges, tunnels, stations, and commemorative monuments. Chapter 8 focuses carefully on one important question; viz., how the locations of railway stations and lines changed urban planning in non-port cities across the Ottoman lands.

Overall, Christensen’s book analyzes the construction of railways in Ottoman territory through the art-historical prism of such railway objects as train stations, paintings, urban byways, maps, bridges, monuments, and archaeological artifacts. At first glance, the three elements of the book’s subtitle—art, empire, and infrastructure—might lead one to expect a static illustration of Ottoman railway architecture through the cliché concepts of multiculturalism and hybridity. Yet the greatest merit of the book is how it avoids presenting a Eurocentric account of Ottoman railway architecture and provides deep insight into the sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical bases of architectural objects. Christensen’s study examines the multilayered socioeconomic and cultural processes through which railways became constitutive of the geopolitics of the German-Ottoman alliance. As formulated by the Stemrich commission’s report, railway surveys and drawings not only contributed to the construction of an imperial railway system, but also charted that system’s environs in demographical, economic, geopolitical, and cultural terms.

In Christensen’s view, the railways functioned as sites of the Ottoman Empire’s idiosyncratic modernity. He further suggests that the Ottoman railway network does not represent simply a unidirectional process of scientific and technological transfer from the German core to the periphery, but rather a vernacularization of expertise and knowledge on the Orient. Based on Theodor Wiegand’s pamphlet, Pressel’s topographic studies, a wide array of cartographic works by Černik, the archaeological surveys of Schumacher, and the dispatches of the Stemrich Expedition and Karl Auler, Christensen argues that the German personnel engaged in the process of laying track not only acted as skilled experts, but also turned into dual engineer-archaeologists. In fact, it is the study’s in-depth analysis of the ambiguous relationship between archaeology and the imperial railway system that constitutes one of its most important contributions to scholarship. In doing so, Christensen clearly demonstrates that the Ottoman railways were a major spur to the development of the German Empire’s cultural business with the Ottoman Empire, as the Deutsche-Orient Gesellschaft (DOG) became a state-funded association of German orientalists, bankers, politicians, professors, and classicists. It is all the more ironic, then, that the influx of German expertise into the Ottoman domains helped Ottoman engineers professionalize in a more liberal direction, whereas their German counterparts were instead encouraged to take special interest in antiquities, archaeological sites, and excavations in the Ottoman lands.

Through a meticulous comparison of German maps of East Africa (now Tanzania) and the Ottoman Empire, Christensen maintains that the railroad designs of the German and Ottoman engineers were neither static nor scripted, but rather successful adaptations to the numerous topographical, economic, and technical challenges to be found in their locality. One of the best examples of such flexibility and adaptability is especially well illustrated through the railways’ human resources policy. Racial, ethnic, regional, linguistic, and religious diversity within workforces initially shaped the workings of the railway companies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this multinational character dramatically dwindled due to the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912, the use of Ottoman apprentices, a reduction in the number of Italian laborers, and the dismissal of British workers. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this trend was itself reversed with the incorporation of prisoners of war into the workforce during World War I.

By focusing on the dynamic nature of the thriving Ottoman-German partnership that came into being during the work of laying track, Christensen successfully challenges the common depiction of railways as a preeminent tool of German imperialism in Ottoman territory. In line with Jonathan McMurray and Murat Özyüksel’s observations on the Anatolia, Hejaz, and Baghdad railways, the author asserts that Ottoman bureaucrats, provincial governors, and the labor force were not simply passive victims of German economic and technological superiority. In his view, these Ottoman actors contributed to all stages of railway construction, while the Ottoman polity used railways as a means of consolidating the state’s presence in provinces and “taming” the Ottoman outback in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Arabic-speaking regions. From a theoretical perspective, Christensen’s views on geopolitics perfectly reflect the matrix of nation, economy, and state as discussed in Friedrich List’s Das Nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie (1841). Regarded as one of the foremost advocates of the national economy, List considered railways to be a symbol of national unification that would promote industrialization and the sovereign state. In this vein, by situating List’s formulations within a more profound international and transnational setting, Christensen reveals a connection between the railway policies of Ottoman bureaucrats in the post-Tanzimat period and German ideals of the national economy.

While all of the book’s chapters are highly informative, it should be noted that readers expecting a comprehensive debate about the socioeconomic processes lying behind railway architecture are likely to be disappointed. While it is true that, especially in Chapters 5 and 8, the study deliberately discusses both the labor dynamics at railway worksites and the changing substructures of Rumelian, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian towns during the railway era, the book nevertheless contains only very limited discussion of the day-to-day politics of workers, locals, and middle-ranking officers regarding the laying of track, a process that to a large extent created the localized railway objects. The main reason behind such a limitation is the undue emphasis placed by Christensen on the ideas and tactics of engineer-archaeologists, along with the near absence of laborers’ own voices. Despite this shortcoming, the book adopts an innovative approach that does not simply rely on the diplomatic metanarratives of Ottoman railway history, but rather sheds light on the geopolitical, economic, and cultural dimensions of Ottoman railways via an interdisciplinary reading of maps, train stations, and topographical surveys.