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

A fascinating history of nineteenth century Eastern Mediterranean port cities, re-examining European influence over the changing lives of their urban populations.

Malte Fuhrmann (Author)

9781108708623, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 June 2022

489 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.651 kg

'… I would compare Fuhrmann's achievement to a challenging, but very successful balancing act. He uses textual sources of a dominantly anecdotal and often subjective nature, but with a rigor that wards off most of the dangers inherent to this kind of material. He navigates back and forth in a period of about a century with some liberty, but manages to maintain the required level of consistency while doing so. He focuses on a number of individual cases and moments in the life and culture of these port cities, yet he also manages to provide them with a theoretical and historiographical framework, which is extremely useful for the readers, especially if they are not familiar with this complex and multilayered context.' Edhem Eldem, H-Soz-Kult

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.

1. Introduction
2. Constructing Europe: spatial relations of power in Eastern Mediterranean cities
3. The city's new pleasures
4. Identities on the Mediterranean shore: between experiment and restriction
5. The end of the European dream
6. Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean revisited.

Subject Areas: Middle Eastern history [HBJF1], Asian history [HBJF], Regional & national history [HBJ], General & world history [HBG], History [HB], Humanities [H]