Ottoman Izmir: The rise of a cosmopolitan port, 1840-1880
, ville portuaire, histoire urbaine, espace urbain, cosmopolitisme, modernisation, urbanité, Ottoman Empire, Empire ottoman, Izmir, Smyrna, Smyrne, Zandi-Sayek Sibel, nineteenth century, dix-neuvième siècle
<div><b>Abstract from the publisher:</b></div> </div> Between 1840 and 1880, the Eastern Mediterranean port of Izmir (Smyrna) underwent unprecedented change. A modern harbor that welcomed international steamships and new railway lines that transported a cornucopia of products transformed the physical city. Migrants, seasonal workers, and transient sailors thronged into an already diverse metropolis, helping to double the population to 200,000. Simultaneously, Ottoman officials and enterprising citizens vied to control and reform the city’s administrative and legal institutions.<br /> <br /> Ottoman Izmir examines how urban space, institutional structures, and everyday practices shaped one another in the thriving seaport of Izmir during a volatile period of growth. Sibel Zandi-Sayek investigates a variety of urban actors—Muslims and non-Muslims, Ottomans and Europeans, newcomers and native residents, merchants, investors, civil servants, and press reporters—who were actively engaged in restructuring the city. Concentrating on the workings of urban committees and on laws and policies that were written, rewritten, but never fully implemented, Zandi-Sayek exposes how modern interventions sought to impose clear-cut concepts of public and private, safety and danger, and hygiene on a city that previously had a wide range of customary regulations.<br /> <br /> Ottoman Izmir shows how Izmir’s various stakeholders contested its built environment. In so doing, it offers a new view of the dynamics of urban modernization.</div> </div> <b>Sibel Zandi-Sayek</b> is associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the College of William and Mary.</div> </div>
Sibel Zandi-Sayek
University of Minnesota Press
December 2011
288
Ouvrage
Levant : Splendour and catastrophe on the Mediterranean
Smyrna, Alexandria, Beirut, Beyrouth, Alexandrie, Smyrne, Levant, Middle East, Moyen Orient, histoire urbaine, culture urbaine, cosmopolitisme, Mansel Philip
<div><b>Abstract from the publisher : </b></div> </div> Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.<br /> <br /> Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.<br /> <br /> Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.</div> </div> <b>Philip Mansel</b> is a historian of France and the Ottoman Empire. His publications include histories of Constantinople and nineteenth-century Paris, as well as biographies of Louis XVIII and the Prince de Ligne.</div> </div>
Philip Mansel
John Murray (UK) Yale University Press (US, forthcoming)
November 2010
480
Ouvrage