I was reading about the power outages in Aleppo recently and I started wondering about when and how Electricity reached the Middle East. Did Edison incorporate power companies in the Ottoman Empire like he did in Europe during the 1880s? Did electricity become common in Islamic Cities by the end of the First World War? or was the basic infrastructure built afterward WWI by Colonial powers? or did electrification emerge as apart of the Nationalist Modernization efforts during the Cold War?
This is actually a very interesting question. The first full scale power plant in the Ottoman Empire was Silahtarağa Power Station, built in Constantinople in 1914. The plant was largely built to electrify the city's tram network (also the only one in the Ottoman Empire) as there were very few places with electric lighting in the city at the time. Thomas Edison's companies did not extend their area of operations to the Ottoman Empire to my knowledge. It was largely during the post ww1 era that many of the cities of middle east began to have power stations built for lighting and tramways. In Aleppo in particular the power system and tramways were built by a French company during the Mandate period in the 1920s; a similar situation existed in many other cities under European rule or influence.