Esra Almas on Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean

International Journal of Middle East Studies (2023), 1–3, 2023

Malte Fuhrmann leads his readers on a formidable tour of three "leading port-cities" of the Eastern Mediterranean, which he intentionally identifies with their old names: Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna (p. 31). With innumerable languages at his fingertips and an impressive familiarity with multiple Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts, Fuhrmann crafts an elegant, if sprawling, narrative of cultural life and Ottoman imperial dissolution in these three maritime locales from the early 19th century to the aftermath of the World War I. He seamlessly weaves together "complex, colorful, well-connected, and yet particularly local cultures" (p. 403) with wider historical processes, addressing the strong, yet tangled, connections between these particular coastal spots, their hinterland, and places further afield. On its glimmering surface, Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean probes the "colorful milieus" (p. 25) of three lively urban centers and builds on the well-established notion that the Mediterranean "had been a two-way route of exchange for cultural goods and phenomena long before the 19th century" (p. 99). Fuhrmann, in particular, is concerned with exploring the "Levant's infatuation with Western culture and the hybrid forms this produced," and proving that such forms offered examples of local negotiation and reinterpretation (p. 7). But churning deeper down and animating his whole work are anguished and far-ranging dilemmas about identity and history. What, ultimately, was these maritime cities' historical role? How did their residents shape their identities? How were dwellers' hopes for reciprocity, cultural exchange, and mutual respect met by an increasingly aggressive European front? "Neither hell on earth nor utopias," Fuhrmann concludes, these port cities were rather sites of contradiction and ambivalence, whose residents could avail themselves of a multitude of identities "neither clearly European nor its Other" (p. 408). The author, then, emphasizes the in-betweenness of these centers and their dwellers and claims that it could result in opportunity, burden, or transitory status, depending on the changing circumstances. The structure of Port Cities is unconventional, and it reads like multiple books nested in one. Incorporating a few of his prior publications, the author has reworked them but, most importantly, has framed them in a unifying yet multicentered analysis. The book's six "parts" are further divided into smaller sections, with Part 1 offering a sweeping historiographical introduction. Part 2 deals with spatial relations of power and shows how the reshaping of Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna and especially their waterfronts impacted locals and were, in turn, shaped by them. Likewise, the author demonstrates that processes of urban remaking came to embody perceptions of a cultural bifurcation between tradition and modernity, home and abroad. Part 3 concerns the forms of entertainment, arts, and consumption that became available in the three port cities. Fuhrmann shows

Cambridge University Press, 2020

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.

HSozKult, 2021

"For years now, Malte Fuhrmann has been working on the life, spatial transformations, material culture and cultural outlook of some of the major port cities of the Ottoman Empire during the last decades of its existence. This book is a synthesis crowning these efforts at pinning down the dynamics of the fascinatingly plural and hybrid world of the Eastern Mediterranean, or, as the contemporaries would have it, the Levant."

Mediterranean Historical Review, 2009

Mediterranean Historical Review 37/2, 2022

"Malte Fuhrmann’s new book largely echoes the methodological frameworks developed in recent scholarship. Steering clear of static binaries of “tradition – modernity,” “West and East,” and “ethnic or religious divides” (6–7), it draws on “dynamic models of change” that consider the “mobility of ideas, practices and agents between different locales” (22). It also seeks to eschew a top-down Ottoman political history in favour of a bottom-up approach that engages local voices in interpreting the urban culture of the eastern Mediterranean. On the whole, the book brims with historiographical commentaries and snippets of everyday life on three late Ottoman port cities – Constantinople, Salonica, and Smyrna – as Fuhrmann chooses to call them."

2009

One of the research questions that were raised during the 2015. Sumer program : Istanbul through the Ages" in the Ottoman module of the program, was concerned with the change of the Urban imagery of the Byzantine Constantinopolis and formation or evolution of the image of the Ottoman city of Istanbul and its authentic character. Presented paper represents initial questions and possible answers that will

The Muslim World, 2002

2016

The urban book series, 2019

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