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Contribution long abstract

The mainstream historiography of “development” situates the discipline's origins in the post-World War II era and often frames it as a Western epistemological export directed toward the Global South. This paper excavates the Hamidian period of the Ottoman Empire and its masterpiece, the Hejaz Railway, revealing an earlier, non-Western genealogy of development and challenging chronotype . Unlike other colonial infrastructure projects designed for resource extraction , the Hejaz Railway was financed entirely through a global pan-Islamist donation campaign, positioning it as a unique experiment in the name of “Indigenous Development" and anti-colonial self-sufficiency. This study uses Ottoman poetry, commemorative medals, and travelogues from 1900-1908 to analyze the “infrastructural imaginary” of the late Ottoman intelligentsia. It argues that Ottoman poets did not view the steam engine as a secularizing force of Western intervention, but rather “sacralized” technology. In the literary imagination, the locomotive was anthropomorphized as an “Iron Hajji” that reduced distance to the Holy Cities, thus effectively synthesizing industrial modernity with Islamic piety. The train's smoke is depicted not as pollution but as incense rising toward divine, creating a “Techno-Theology” that legitimizes the Sultan's Caliphate authority. Drawing on Timothy Mitchell's concept of “The Management of Experts” and Brian Larkin's “Poetics of Infrastructure,” paper demonstrates how the railway was used to reflect the visible, material proof of the Islamic state's capacity for ‘development’ rather than “Westernization.” The study concludes that the Ottoman model offered a “proto-developmentalist” paradigm in which modernity was negotiated under local conditions, challenging Eurocentric narratives of technology transfer.