La formation et les carrières d’ingénieurs des non-musulmans dans l’Empire ottoman, des Tanzimat à la Grande Guerre (1839-1914)

Excluded from military engineering schools, Armenians, Greeks and Jews gradually gained access to civilian engineering training in the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th century onwards, driven by the Tanzimat reforms proclaiming equality among all subjects of the empire regardless of nationality or religion. Although certain specialised schools offered opportunities within the state’s technical corps, these advances remained fragile. Under Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), policies to Islamise education and the engineering corps once again restricted non-Muslims’ access to these programmes, forcing some to train in Europe or go into exile. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 briefly revived the project of egalitarian technical training, but this was quickly compromised by the Great War. In light of these findings, this paper analyses the integration and trajectories of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects within the training programmes and engineering careers established by the various political regimes in the Ottoman Empire, from the Tanzimat era to the Great War.