Abstract
Conventional histories portray the Ottoman Darülfünun as a belated, derivative transplant of the European university. Drawing on historical contextualism and discourse analysis, this article reads the reform decrees, ministerial speeches, and by-laws that punctuated the school’s stop-start career as argumentative interventions—windows onto the problems late-Ottoman statesmen believed higher learning could solve and the futures they hoped to inhabit. Three intertwined logics surface: moralised expertise (science valid only when yoked to virtue), linguistic standardisation (Ottoman Turkish as the civic idiom of rule), and territorial patriotism (vatan re-imagined as dynastic homeland). Following the first proposal in 1845 to the Hamidian statute of 1900, these logics reveal how higher education shifted from a pragmatic method of crisis management to a durable methodology of governance, displaying an instance of a nationalizing empire. The Darülfünun endured until 1933, when it was recast as Istanbul University, carrying its imperial-national synthesis straight into the republican era. Its longevity shows that both late Ottoman and Kemalist regimes turned to higher learning to fuse technology, faith, and shared belonging into a single, durable strategy of state-building.
References
Afacan, Ş. (2021). Searching for the soul in shades of grey. European Journal of Turkish Studies, (32). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.7248
Akgündüz, A. (2011). The Ottoman waqf administration in the 19th and early-20th centuries: Continuities and discontinuities. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 64(1), 71–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43282397
Aksan, V. (2007). Ottoman wars, 1700–1870: An empire besieged. Routledge.
Anscombe, F. (2012). The Balkan revolutionary age. Journal of Modern History, 84(3), 572–606.
Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. W. W. Norton.
Ash, M. G. (2006). Bachelor of what, master of whom? The Humboldt myth and historical transformations of higher education in German-speaking Europe and the US. European Journal of Education, 41(2), 245–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-3435.2006.00258.x
Barakat, N. E. (2023). Bedouin bureaucrats: Mobility and property in the Ottoman Empire. Stanford University Press.
Barkey, K. (2016). The Ottoman Empire (1299–1923): The bureaucratization of patrimonial authority. In P. Crooks & T. H. Parsons (Eds.), Empires and bureaucracy in world history: From late antiquity to the twentieth century (pp. 102–126). Cambridge University Press.
Becker, C. H. (1916). Das Türkische Bildungsproblem: Akademische Rede, gehalten am Geburtstag Sr. Majestät des Kaisers in der Aula der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. Verlag von Friedrich Cohen.
Bourner, T., Rospigliosi, A., & Heath, L. (2020). The fully functioning university. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Çiydem, E. (2018). Tanzimat Dönemi Eğitim Islahatının Aynası: Maârif-i Umûmiye Nizamnâmesine Dair Mazbata (Esbâb-ı Mûcibe Lâyihası) [The Mirror of Educational Reforms in the Tanzimat Era: Report on the General Education Regulation]. Turkish History Education Journal, 7(2), 509–531.
Dölen, E. (2008). II. Meşrutiyet Döneminde Darülfünun [The Darülfünun during the Second Constitutional Period]. Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları, 10(1), 1–46.
Drori, G. S., Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., & Schofer, E. (2003). Science in the modern world polity: Institutionalization and globalization. Stanford University Press.
Engelhardt, É. (1882). La Turquie et le Tanzimat: Histoire des réformes dans l’Empire ottoman, depuis 1827 jusqu’à nos jours [Turkey and the Tanzimat: History of Reforms in the Ottoman Empire from 1827 to the Present Day]. A. Cotillon. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Partie exemplaire N° 2, P89/4054 (Microfiche), Identifiant: ark:/12148/cb30400750j.
Erozan, B., & Turan, İ. (2004). The development of political science in Turkey. PS: Political Science & Politics, 37(2), 359–363. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096504004512
Evered, E. (2012). Empire and education under the Ottomans: Politics, reform and resistance from the Tanzimat to the Young Turks. I. B. Tauris.
Findley, C. V. (1980). Bureaucratic reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte 1789–1922. Princeton University Press.
Fortna, B. C. (2002). Imperial classroom: Islam, the state, and education in the late Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press.
Göçek, F. (1996). Rise of the bourgeoisie, demise of empire: Ottoman Westernization and social change. Oxford University Press.
Hanioğlu, M. Ş. (2008). A brief history of the late Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press.
Hasebe, K. (2018). The 1869 Ottoman Public Education Act: Proceedings and participants. The Journal of Ottoman Studies, 51, 181–207.
Heilo, O., & Chovanec, J. (2021). Narrated Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism. Palgrave Macmillan.
İhsanoğlu, E. (2010). Darülfünun: Osmanlı’da kültürel modernleşmenin odağı [House of sciences: The focal point of cultural modernization in the Ottoman Empire]. IRCICA.
İkdam. (1900, September 2 / 1316, August 20). No. 2219. Hakki Tarik Us Collection. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beyazıt State Library, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/asw/tur/htu/list2.html#m
Kolland, D. (2024). A strategic Eurocentrism: The construction of Ottoman evolutionism in an uneven world (1870–1900). Modern Intellectual History, 21, 328–356. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000040
Lohmann, I., Böttcher, J., Mayer, C., & Kesper-Biermann, S. (Eds.). (2021). Wie die Türken in unsere Köpfe kamen: Eine deutsche Bildungsgeschichte. Julius Klinkhardt.
Mardin, Ş. (2000). The genesis of Young Ottoman thought: A study in the modernization of Turkish political ideas. Syracuse University Press.
Mecmua-i Fünun (1279/1863). No. 7. Hakki Tarik Us Collection. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beyazıt State Library, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Retrieved September 21, 2024, from https://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/asw/tur/htu/list2.html#m.
Mehmed Esad. (1893). Mir’ât-ı Mekteb-i Harbiye [The Mirror of the War Academy]. Artin Asaduryan Matbaası. Süleymaniye Vakfı Archives.
Mills, A. (2008). Streets of memory: Landscape, tolerance, and national identity in Istanbul. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Nelson, A. R. (2024). Capital of mind: The idea of a modern American university. University of Chicago Press.
Nelson, A. R., & Wei, I. P. (2012). The Global University: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives.
Okumuş, O., Tuğluloğlu, F., & Yıldırım, C. (Eds.). (2022). 20. Yüzyılda Türkiye-Batı ilişkileri [Turkey-West relations in the 20th century]. Eğitim Yayınevi.
Özata, M. (2007). Atatürk, bilim ve üniversite [Atatürk, science, and university]. TÜBİTAK Popüler Bilim Kitapları.
Palabıyık, M. S. (2015). International law for survival: Teaching international law in the late Ottoman Empire (1859–1922). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 78(2), 271–292. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X14001037
Pamuk, Ş. (1987). The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, investment and production. Cambridge University Press.
Popkewitz, T. S. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education, and making society by making the child. Routledge.
Roshwald, A. (2001). Ethnic nationalism and the fall of empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914–1923. Routledge.
Rüegg, W. (Ed.). (2004). A history of the university in Europe: Volume 3, universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1800–1945). Cambridge University Press.
Salnâme-i Nezaret-i Maarif-i Umumiyye [Yearbook of the Ministry of Public Education] (1321/1903). ISAM Digital Archive. Retrieved October 1, 2024, from https://isamveri.org/salname/sayilar.php?sidno=D02473
Schreiben des Hrn. Dr. Busch an Prof. Brockhaus. (1863). Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 17(4), 711–807.
Skinner, Q. (2002). Visions of politics: Volume I: Regarding method. Cambridge University Press.
Somel, A. (2015). 1869 tarihli Maârif-i Umûmiyye Nizâmnâmesi, esbab-ı mucibe layihası ve ideolojik temelleri. In K. Kahraman & I. Baytar (Eds.), Sultan Abdülmecid ve dönemi (1823–1861) (pp. 136–167). İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür A.Ş. Yayınları.
Takvim-i Vekayi. (1261/1845). No. 280. Hakki Tarik Us Collection. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beyazıt State Library, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/asw/tur/htu/list2.html#t(Accessed May 15, 2024).
Takvim-i Vekayi. (1262/1846). No. 303. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, National Library Directorate, National Library. Retrieved April 7, 2024, from https://dijital-kutuphane.mkutup.gov.tr/tr/periodicals/catalog/details/952.
Takvim-i Vekayi. (1280/1863). No. 710. Hakki Tarik Us Collection. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beyazıt State Library, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Retrieved November 18, 2024, from https://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/asw/tur/htu/list2.html.
Takvim-i Vekayi. (1286/1870). No. 1192. Hakki Tarik Us Collection. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beyazıt State Library, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/asw/tur/htu/list2.html#t(Accessed April 25, 2024).
Takvim-i Vekayi. (1286/1870). No. 1193. Hakki Tarik Us Collection. TC. Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beyazıt State Library, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://www.tufs.ac.jp/common/fs/asw/tur/htu/list2.html#t(Accessed April 25, 2024).
Taşdemirci, E. (2010). Türk eğitimi tarihi [History of Turkish education]. Gündüz Eğitim ve Yayıncılık.
Topal, A. E. (2020). Order as a chronotope of Ottoman political writing. Contemporary Levant, 5(1), 24–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2020.1710668
Topal, A. E. (2021). Political reforms as religious revival: Conceptual foundations of Tanzimat. Oriente Moderno, 101, 153–180. https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340249
Topal, A. E., & Wigen, E. (2022). Diagnosing the state: Medical metaphors in Ottoman political writing. Die Welt des Islams, 62(3), 299–324. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607-00623A02
Turnaoğlu, B. (2017). The formation of Turkish republicanism. Princeton University Press.
Yalçınkaya, M. A. (2015). Learned patriots: Debating science, state, and society in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. University of Chicago Press.
Yalçınkaya, M. A. (2022). Globalizing ‘science and religion’: Examples from the late Ottoman Empire. The British Journal for the History of Science, 55(3), 445–458. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000292
Zürcher, J. E. (2010). The Young Turk legacy and nation building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. I. B. Tauris.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2025 Symphony