More than an engineer: Mehmed Hulusi Bey between expertise and patronage

This article examines the career of Mehmed Hulusi Bey to reconsider the relationship between expertise, patronage and bureaucratic power in the late Ottoman Empire. Drawing on archival documents, official correspondence, and printed sources, it argues that technical education and professional competence did not create an autonomous meritocratic order. Rather, expertise acquired administrative and political force only when embedded in networks of patronage and aligned with the state’s centralizing projects. By tracing Hulusi Bey’s trajectory across engineering, public works, provincial administration and wartime service, the article shows that merit and patronage operated not as opposing principles but as mutually constitutive features of late Ottoman bureaucratic modernity.