Modern Asian Studies 50, 6 (2016) pp. 1846–1887. C  Cambridge University Press 2016 doi:10.1017/S0026749X15000244 First published online 15 April 2016 ‘The Little Brother of the Ottoman State’: Ottoman technocrats in Kabul and Afghanistan’s development in the Ottoman imagination, 1908–23 * MICHAEL B. O’SULLIVAN Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, United States of America Email: mbosullivan@g.ucla.edu Abstract By charting the activities of Ottoman experts in Afghanistan from 1908– 23, this article demonstrates how their arrival precipitated a series of state- building practices rooted in the particular historical experience of Ottoman reform projects. The country thus became the object of an Ottoman mission civilisatrice and the beneficiary, in the eyes of certain figures within the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, of an avowedly Ottoman-Turkish modernity. Sharing this conviction were members of the Afghan royal family and its chief ministers, especially Mah . m¯ ud T . arz¯ ı, who first invited the Ottoman advisers to Kabul. The provision of Ottoman technical assistance took a variety of forms, but is most evident in military, educational, and public health reforms enacted in Kabul in this period. Through the study of previously unexamined Ottoman, Afghan, and British sources, the aim here is to incorporate these events into discussions of Ottoman informal empire, Afghan developmentalism, and pan-Islam. * I would like to extend my gratitude to Professor Nile Green, Giuseppina Chiaramonte, Sohaib Baig, Marjan Wardaki, the participants in the ‘From Sufis to Taliban: Trajectories of Islam in Afghanistan’ conference held at UCLA in October 2014, and my two anonymous reviewers, whose comments substantially improved this article. I reserve special thanks for Mehmet Taha Ayar who, with great patience, helped me to read the many Ottoman texts cited in this article. Without his assistance, this article could not have been written. 1846 use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X15000244 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 128.97.244.19, on 29 Nov 2016 at 15:34:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of