He furthermore served numerous administrative positions in the Ottoman Empire including minister of foreign affairs in 1856, then ambassador to Berlin in 1876, and to Vienna from 1879 to 1882.

The child, now named İbrahim Edhem, quickly distinguished himself with his intelligence and after having attended schools in the Ottoman Empire, he was dispatched along with a number of his peers, and under the supervision of his foster father, then grand vizier, and of the sultan Mahmud II himself, to Paris to pursue his studies under state scholarship.

Ibrahim Edhem Pasha was the father of Osman Hamdi Bey, a well-known archaeologist and painter, as well the founder of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.

Another son, Halil Edhem Eldem took up the archaeology museum after Osman Hamdi Bey's death and had been a deputy for ten years under the newly founded Turkish Republic.

The architect Sedat Hakkı Eldem, a cousin, is one of the pillars of the search for modern architectural styles adopted by the Republic of Turkey (called the Republican style in the Turkish context) in its early years and which marks many important buildings dating from the period of the 1920s and the 1930s.