In nine­teenth-cen­tury Eu­rope, ground­break­ing tech­no­log­i­cal progress was made in the field of mar­itime trans­port and aids to nav­i­ga­tion. Al­ready in the mid-19th cen­tury the French gov­ern­ment, like other Eu­ro­pean au­thor­i­ties act­ing in their own eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests, as­sisted its in­vestors in ob­tain­ing im­por­tant con­ces­sions for in­vest­ments mainly in the field of pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture in the Ot­toman Em­pire, dur­ing the Tanz­i­mat (Re­form) pe­riod of mod­ern­iza­tion and west­ern­iza­tion. The build­ing and op­er­a­tion of the light­house net­work of the de­clin­ing Em­pire is iden­ti­fied with the old­est ma­jor French com­pany, Société Col­las et Michel, which ran the Ad­min­is­tra­tion Générale des Phares de l’Em­pire Ot­toman. At the cross­roads of the de­vel­op­ing Mediter­ranean sea-routes, on the is­land of Crete, then a re­mote do­min­ion of the Em­pire, a se­ries of light­houses were con­structed or mod­ern­ized from 1864 to 1904. This ar­ti­cle traces the his­tory of this busi­ness ven­ture, as it is re­con­structed through the study of the archives of the Ad­min­is­tra­tion Générale des Phares de l’Em­pire Ot­toman, cur­rently held at the Archives Na­tionales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en Provence, France; most im­por­tantly, it out­lines the his­tory and ar­chi­tec­ture of the light­house net­work of the is­land, and ex­plores con­struc­tion meth­ods and ma­te­ri­als, through in situ and archival re­search.