Book | Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire

Mavi Boncuk | 

Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire 

by Malte Fuhrmann,[1] 

Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) 

Cambridge University Hardcover – October 29, 2020  Press Print publication year: 2020 Online ISBN: 9781108769716 DOI

Eastern Mediterranean port cities, such as Constantinople, Smyrna, and Salonica, have long been sites of fascination. Known for their vibrant and diverse populations, the dynamism of their economic and cultural exchanges, and their form of relatively peaceful co-existence in a turbulent age, many would label them as models of cosmopolitanism. In this study, Malte Fuhrmann examines changes in the histories of space, consumption, and identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century while the Mediterranean became a zone of influence for European powers. Giving voice to the port cities' forgotten inhabitants, Fuhrmann explores how their urban populations adapted to European practices, how entertainment became a marker of a Europeanized way of life, and consuming beer celebrated innovation, cosmopolitanism and mixed gender sociability. At the same time, these adaptations to a European way of life were modified according to local needs, as was the case for the new quays, streets, and buildings. Revisiting leisure practises as well as the formation of class, gender, and national identities, Fuhrmann offers an alternative view on the relationship between the Islamic World and Europe.

 

Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean

pp i-ii

Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean - Title page

pp iii-iii

 

Urban Culture In The Late Ottoman Empire

Copyright page

pp iv-iv

Contents

pp v-vi

 

Figures and Table

pp vii-vii

Acknowledgments pp viii-xii

Part I – Introduction pp 1-36

1 - TheEnigma of Eastern Mediterranean Urban Culture pp 3-9

2 - A Historiography of Disentanglement pp 10-18

The Long Legacy Of The Nineteenth Century

3 - Culture and the Global in Mediterranean History pp 19-36

Part II - Constructing Europe pp 37-92

 

Spatial Relations Of Power In Eastern Mediterranean Cities

4 - The European Dream pp 43-48

5 - The Making of a European Spatial Discourse on the Levantine City pp 49-62

6 - Dreaming of a City in Stone pp 63-69

 

7 - Reinventing the City from the Sea Inward pp 70-92

Part III - The City’s New Pleasures pp 93-210

8 - Visiting, Strolling, Masquerading, Dancing pp 99-121

 

The Consumers Of Europeanism

9 - Staging Europeanness pp 122-137

The Rise Of The Eastern Mediterranean Opera

10 - Theater, the Civilizing Mission, and Global Entertainment pp 138-156

11 - The One World of Workers of the Dramatic Arts pp 157-172

12 - Beer Consumption and Production on Mediterranean Shores pp 173-193

13 - Beer, the Drink of a Changing World pp 194-210

Part IV - Identities on the Mediterranean Shore pp 211-344

Between Experiment And Restriction

14 - Educational Imperialism or Enlightenment? pp 219-233

15 - The French-Language Press

pp 234-242

A Common Forum

16 - Renegotiating Masculinities and Femininities at the Turn of the Century

pp 243-265

17 - Reining in the Free Experiment pp 266-287

Discourses On Class Formation

18 - Urban Milieus vs. National Communities pp 288-301

The Case Of The Levantines

19 - North-to-South Migration and Its Impact on the Urban Population  pp 302-344

Part V - The End of the European Dream pp 345-404

20 - The Lack of an Anti-European Perspective pp 347-356

21 - Economies of Violence and Challenges to the Thalassocentric Order pp 357-363

22 - The Anti-Western Rebellion on the Eve of the Belle Époque pp 364-370

23 - Deconstructing the European Female pp 371-389

24 - The “Unraveling” of Port City Society pp 390-404

Part VI - Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean Revisited pp 405-416

Bibliography pp 417-454

Index pp 455-478

[1] As of September 2016, Malte Fuhrmann is the new DAAD lecturer at the European Institute. Within the framework of the agreement between Istanbul Bilgi University and the German Academic Foreign Exchange Service (DAAD), he will lecture in the International Relations program, advance the institute’s relations to German academic institutions, advise on DAAD scholarship opportunities, and pursue original research.

Malte Fuhrmann is a historian and specialist on German-Ottoman and German-Turkish relations. He studied History and Balkan Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where he received his MA in 1999. He proceeded to write his PhD dissertation on German cultural colonialism in the Ottoman sphere. The book based on his thesis received an award as ‘best book on colonialism 2006/2007’. He has worked as a research fellow at Berlin’s Zentrum Moderner Orient (2006-2008) and Orient-Institut Istanbul (2005, 2010-2013). He has also lectured at a number of Istanbul universities, including Boğaziçi University (2011) and continues to lecture as adjunct and serve as MA advisor at the Turkish-German University (since 2013). In 2014/2015, he was as visiting assistant professor of Cultural History of the Mediterranean Region at Ruhr University Bochum.

Malte Fuhrmann’s research focuses on diplomatic, military, and cultural interactions between different European regions and especially Ottoman and former Ottoman territories. In recent years, his writings have concentrated on the change in Eastern Mediterranean urban culture through the Europeanization paradigm during the nineteenth and twentieth century.  At present he is writing up his second book on this topic. His prior publications include:

Der Traum vom deutschen Orient. Zwei deutsche Kolonien im Osmanischen Reich 1851-1918 (Imagining a German Orient: Two German Colonies in the Ottoman Empire, 1851-1918) Frankfurt (M.): Campus 2006;

The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, London: Routledge 2011 (edited together with Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi, Florian Riedler).

and

‘Beer, the Drink of a Changing World: Beer Consumption and Production on the Shores of the Aegean in the 19th Century’ in Turcica 45 (2014), 79-123.