Download PDF | Cities of the Mediterranean, From the Ottomans to the Present Day,Edited by Biray Kolluoglu and Meltem Tokséz, I.B. Tauris Publishers (2010).
257 Pages
Biray Kolluoglu is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bogazic¢i University, Istanbul. She has published on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Izmir. Her research interests include historical sociology, nationalism, sociology of space and memory.
Meltem Toks6z is Assistant Professor of History at Bo§azic¢i University, Istanbul. She has published on the history of Ottoman Mersin, the port-city, and on the regional history of Cilicia. Her research interests include historiography, the social history of the commercial elites and the modernization of state and society in late Ottoman history.
Mapping Out the Eastern Mediterranean: Toward a Cartography of Cities of Commerce Biray Kolluoglu and Meltem Toks6z Our mental mapping of the globe through continents rests on an imagery of large bodies of water constituting limits, boundaries and obstacles to the free flow of peoples, goods, information and knowledge while land masses connote integration and belonging. Perhaps the Mediterranean stands out as the only body of water representing historical connectedness and unity. Here the sea, at least until the nineteenth century, overshadowed the lands around it, thus rendering possible the question ‘is it the sea surrounded by land or land by a sea?’' The Mediterranean seems to have lost this eminency in the last century.
The unprecedented dynamism and dizzying speed of the modern world has so destroyed all former worlds, turning them into fading memories, that today our hegemonic geographic discourse is shaped by wests, middles, and easts of a continent. That is perhaps why the Mediterranean, after it surfaced from the whirlpool of capitalist social change, has mostly glittered on its northern and western shores. Indeed, when it is the dazzle of change that shapes our imaginary, it is not surprising that historical continuity is discarded as dreary. The centuries-old continuity of the Mediterranean, especially the role of its eastern shores, is buried under layers of rapturous social change.
This book is about the cities of commerce of the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean that have been the spaces of links, networks, and riches, also awash by conflicts, wars, and boundary contestations. These cities have occupied a central geo-political, commercial, and cultural place in the ever-expanding and ever-intensifying circuits of global exchange since the sixteenth century. We began to imagine this book in early 2004 in a city in the north, namely in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg. We were invited to this Institute of Advanced Study as part of a working group on ‘New Approaches to the History of Merchant Cities in the Ottoman Empire and Its Successor States’. Our working group was only one among many if one considers the large number of conferences and workshops, post-graduate research programs, and dissertations, articles and books on the Mediterranean cities of commerce of the nineteenth century, testifying to an explosion of interest in these spaces since the closing decade of the twentieth century.
‘Ottoman port-cities’ made their debut on the scholarly scene more than a decade ago via the world-system perspective, radiating out of the Fernand Braudel Center.” This group of scholars had set out with a specific agenda. They were not interested in port-cities per se but focused on the processes of peripheralization, not only of the Ottoman Empire, but also of India, and China. Eastern Mediterranean ports forced themselves onto their desks within the framework of the questions they asked as apparent nodes of commodity exchanges and other forms of capitalist encounters. In their research agenda, port-cities came to be treated as suitable means for the confirmation and further proliferation of the world-system analysis.
Today, the locales that this line of inquiry is taken up are multiple and varied. The above-mentioned conferences, workshops, post-graduate research programs, dissertations and books that are attempting to understand the dynamism of cities of commerce in history constitute a disconcerted effort. While the world-system perspective diffused an overly structured analysis, contemporary research is dispersed. The latter is being carried out not around a common perspective, but rather around a shared set of concerns meshed with those of urban history. Both the world-system perspective and the contemporary research have their pitfalls. The world-system perspective in its first attempt ended up drawing a picture in which the colors of the world-economy were exaggerated and colors of the local remained faint and shady. The shortcoming of the current research is its severely disparate character. While it is always incredibly important to gather detailed historical information about individual the Ottoman imperial center.’ In other words, the specificity of such ‘city histories’ does not only render them separate from one another, but connected to a larger polity, the Ottoman state.’ This ironically puts them in a structural position similar to the one in the world-system perspective. The world-system perspective ties the cities to an economic structure, whereas the current research places them at the mercy of the reforming Ottoman state’s political power.”
As we were pondering the reasons behind this surge of research into Ottoman port-cities, we found ourselves rethinking the spatial, historical, and socio-political contours of the Mediterranean Sea. Although some of the new scholarship has reposited the Mediterranean not only as a viable unit of analysis but also as an economic, cultural, and socio-political unity, very little has been said on what made that unity last, from its inception per se in the sixteenth century to the first quarter of the last century.° The dominant tendency has been to construct micro-scale urban histories superimposed on a unity, without necessarily exploring the directions and venues of the connections. Hence, our pivotal concern crystallized as the quest for the venues, directions, and spaces of connections and flows that make and remake the cartography of the Mediterranean. Rendering the wide spectrum of networks between cities visible has become our agenda here.
This book is a cartographic project that attempts to map out the roads on the sea that are constantly washed away by its waves. This cartographic project demanded the contributions of historians of art and architecture, sociologists, economists, ethnographers, urbanists, and social and cultural historians, and Beirut (which only recently regained its distinctive reputation as a node of different scales, levels and kinds of exchanges) presented itself as an idyllic space for a meeting of such a diverse group. The following collection is the outcome of a workshop held in Beirut in the last days of 2004, at a time when the city was still blissfully unaware of the awaiting catastrophe. As we are writing these words, the city once again has become the stage of a violent confrontation that makes us reconsider the historical possibility of the Mediterranean. We believe that this collection is timely and necessary, precisely because world societies and polities at the beginning of the twenty-first century are over-ridden with the opportunities and risks that come with increasing global interdependencies and connectedness.
In the following, we will elaborate on the processes that have triggered a new wave of interest in the Mediterranean cities of commerce, precisely because these, we argue, frame recent scholarship in specific ways. Today, social science discourses are marked by a fascination with the so-called unprecedented intensification and extension of networks of flows of capital, commodities, peoples, information and knowledge in contemporary capitalism, so much so that both academic and non-academic circles insist that this contemporary capitalism is qualitatively different from earlier versions and requires a new name that is, globalization. Cities have taken center stage in this literature, not only as focal points in these networks, but also as sites of valorization of global capitalism.’ London, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul and Bombay are all characterized by very heterogeneous populations and a relatively high autonomy from national structures. There are provocative, but little explored parallels between global cities of the contemporary world and port and merchant cities of the nineteenth century and earlier. Nineteenth-century cities of commerce can be seen in a similar light, in that they were sites where trade networks were concentrated, sites which enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy from the empires in their hinterlands, and which housed heterogeneous populations. If capitalism has always been a global enterprise indeed, the current fascination with its globalization and global cities seems naive in the face of historical patterns.
Today, coming to terms with the so-called globalized condition appears more urgent than ever in the light not only of ever increasing flows, but also of the human costs as social and ecological danger, and violence escalate. Caglar Keyder, who was among the pioneering group of researchers of the world-system analysis, re-visits the theme of the ‘port-city’ and opens this collection of articles, in the hope that this reevaluation of the historical port-city can serve the relativization and bracketing of the nationalist experience. For him, politics always accompany the making of port-cities, facilitating their transformation as nineteenth-century global economy dictated restructuring in the Eastern Mediterranean. Easterm Mediterranean port-cities then became sites of all kinds of political projects, ranging from cosmopolitanism to nationalism. The twentieth century saw the dominance of nationalism, rendering cosmopolitanism a foolish chimera. That is why, for Keyder, the current wave of globalization is another chance to examine and theorize the history of port-cities anew. This pressing need to theorize globalization implicitly forced many scholars to look at nineteenth-century urban change, not least because the ports acted as gateways and nodes of the workings of nineteenth-century globalization under British hegemony.
Furthermore, these cities of commerce presented themselves as terrains of multiplicity, both in terms of space and population. They attracted social scientists with their potential to mirror contemporary urban formations with increasingly heterogeneous and, in most cases, segregated populations. Put differently, with the rise of discussions on globalization of capitalism and culture in the last decade of the twentieth century, the cosmopolitanisms of these cities of commerce became a model that could both articulate and perhaps even present remedies to the new global condition. Yet, the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism is very much engrossed in the discourse of the nation-state. Contemporary cosmopolitanism is articulated as ‘an orientation and a willingness to engage with divergent cultural experiences’, rooted in ‘a detachment from the local’.” Since such cultural, social, political, or economic engagement rests on unequal power relations, contemporary cosmopolitanism is very much tied to a ‘vision of “one world” which itself is a euphemism for “First World”’.'° The problems embedded in the concept of cosmopolitanism can be seen in a different light if we sketch its geography and think through its history cartographically, as we hope to accomplish in this book. We are decolonizing the concept from the imaginary of the nation-state and European hegemony.
The collection opens with an essay tracking large-scale shifts in the economic structure and landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean in the longue durée, from the 1350s to the 1850s; this exactly provides such a conceptual decolonization. Faruk Tabak offers us an analysis that contextualizes nineteenth-century globalization, hence rendering it much less majestic and abrupt. He delineates two sets of longue durée transformation, economic and ecological, which spanned the centuries between the Pax Neerlandica and the Pax Britannica and gave the Eastern Mediterranean space constancy. Tabak first shows the resurgence of the Levantine trade in the 1350s to be part of the restoration of the trade circuit between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, a trade circuit that made the southeastern part of the Eastern Mediterranean a viable unit in world trade networks.
When the center of the worldeconomy shifted in the sixteenth century from the larger Mediterranean to Antwerp and Amsterdam, this resulted in the decline of the rich trades of the former; yet it ‘did not simply undo the trading world of the Mediterranean but reshaped it’. Admittedly, the return of the Little Ice Age in the 1550s, which caused frequent flooding in the maritime and inland plains, prevented regular tilling, and resulted in a population decrease and the decline of Levantine trade and population decrease. These processes brought about a spatial shift in the center of gravity within the Eastern Mediterranean, from the southeastern Levant to the northern Aegean, with Izmir (Smyrna), Salonica (Thessaloniki) and Istanbul as its centers. Tabak also implies that this spatial shift from Aleppo and Cairo to the north, triggered by the rise of overland trade in the Anatolian and Balkan peninsulas, constituted a structural transformation that was to cause in the resurgence of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean. The end of the Little Ice Age in the 1870s sped up the process already underway and ‘altered the region’s landscape beyond recognition’. These radical changes were only an end point to the long-term processes of shifting interactions between the cities of commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean basin before the onset of nineteenth-century globalization.
The continuities and shared patterns in the historical trajectory of the making and unmaking of the Mediterranean in its entirety are taken up again by Edmund Burke III, in his epilogue to the volume. Despite the contemporary fractures that seemingly separate the northern/southern, and eastern/western shores of the Sea along religious and cultural differences, levels of economic development and state formation, Burke points towards a ‘deep structural historical unity of the Mediterranean’ at the political and cultural levels, by tracing the development of the modern state throughout the region and the patterns of incorporation of the Mediterranean in the world economy. Burke’s structural reading of the Mediterranean as a unit offers a complementary analysis to the emphasis in this volume on mapping out the integrated nature and unity of the Sea through the prism of cities of commerce. His essay offers yet another framework rendering the constancy of space in the Mediterranean visible.
The strength and durability of the Mediterranean networks that remained viable despite major political upheavals and transformations including the devastation of the Great War can clearly be seen in Izmir’s history. Ozveren and Giirpinar argue that it was only the Great Depression that finally rung the death bell of world capitalism and intense competition, bringing an end to the way in which the Mediterranean networks had formed a particular historical unity by the nineteenth century. Put differently, not national economy, but rather its crisis ended the history of global port-cities, such as Izmir. Before the 1930s, no other crisis had been able to force the national government to steer the economy, and, hence the city, away from the Mediterranean and toward a new path of development. This argument emphasizes the particular Mediterranean continuum despite the interruption of political processes and invites us to think of Izmir as a site that experienced the transition from the imperial to the national, and of the Sea in a large array of possibilities.
Cities of Commerce ‘Cities with ports differ from city-ports, the former building their piers out of necessity, the latter growing up around them by the nature of things. In the former they are a means and afterthought; in the latter, starting point and goal,’ writes Matveyevic.'' It is this feature that underlies our analysis of what we call cities of commerce. These terrains include particular spaces, groups, and socio-economic and political relations, with or without literal piers. But let us first explain our choice of the term ‘city of commerce,’ rather than ‘port-city’ or ‘merchant city’. We believe that the term ‘city of commerce’ encompasses its fundamental activity and social relations that make and remake the city. The term ‘port-city’, while capturing the role of these terrains as gateways that connect different worlds, is imprisoned in the discourse of nineteenthcentury British hegemony and the liberal world order that it maintained. On the other hand, the term ‘merchant city’, while making visible the group that lies at the heart of the social and economic life of these cities, tends to exclude all other relations and groups from workers at the piers to shipyard staffs, customs officers, storage and transportation workers, communication officers, to consulate personnel. We argue that the concept of the ‘city of commerce’ embraces the existence of different types of trade on a large scale and over an extensive area, as well as the multiplicity of relations and groups within the city or linked to it.
Cities of commerce of the nineteenth century are distinguished by certain spatial characteristics that produce and reproduce the specific social relations on these terrains. Spaces of commerce dominated the urban landscape. Entrep6t and storages safeguarded and ensured all commercial activities. Custom-houses regulated and taxed trade for both local and central treasuries. While shipping agencies, commercial houses and agencies regulated the flow of merchandise, insurance companies provided the security that this increased volume of trade called for. Inns (in the Ottoman context, hans) and hotels served as temporary lodging for traders and travelers.'? Banks further commercialized the spaces of these cities, together with markets and, later on, department stores. The origin of the goods offered for sale provides a ready map of these cities’ far-flung connections. In social clubs, which later turned into chambers of commerce, merchants played cards, read newspapers and periodicals from all over the Mediterranean, while conversing about politics, haggling over prices, finalizing transactions, and striking deals. All these activities called for spaces of connections: Railroads and tramlines carried people and goods inexpensively and speedily. Piers, and later on, ports accommodated the high volume of trade with steamships, also allowing entry and exit to ‘illegal’ goods. Telegram and, later on, post offices dispatched news and orders.
The construction of rail and telecommunication lines as well as luxury residences created new commercial agenda including the need for timber, which then became a trade branch of its own. Printing houses produced reading material for the ever-increasing leisure and business needs of the inhabitants. These cities of commerce were also distinguished by spaces of leisure and public social relations: Theaters, beer gardens, dance halls, coffee houses and promenades reflected multiple levels of belonging.'? Clock towers ornamented the cities and regulated a new life-style.'* Sanitation facilities and hospitals dispensed health. Schools of different communities testified to the mixed populations.’° French, British, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and American consuls and their families lived in the most luxurious quarters of these cities.'° Unlike in other cities, monumental religious buildings did not dominate the cityscape; neither did the architectural signature of one particular confession prevail.
The spatial matrices of these architectural structures and infrastructures can be understood through the concept of cosmopolitanism. For cosmopolitanism is an intriguing concept that insinuates opposing spatial matrices, two opposite ends of a spectrum, with claims to universality on one, and parochialism on the other.'? The immanent contradiction is unsolvable because the concept is bounded by and embedded in one locale.'® Contrary to the common understanding of the term, a cosmopolitan is not a ‘citizen of the world’ or ‘belonging to all parts of the world; not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants’, but a ‘citizen of a city’, a city that embodies the former. This observation brings back the relation between autonomy and interdependence in cosmopolitan spaces. To put it differently, cosmopolitanism should not be conceptualized merely as an intellectual, aesthetic, or cultural stance but as a spatial phenomenon that mediates between the local and the global. Cosmopolitanism should be employed in this placebound understanding, with cosmopolitan sites seen as sites that tie together flows of people, goods, and capital within the larger world in which they are embedded. Eastern Mediterranean cities of commerce are rendered cosmopolitan by their placement in the world economy and nexus of flows of peoples and goods. It is the different lingual, confessional, and ethnic communities’ attachment and belonging to these cities which contribute to their connectedness. These terrains are conceptualized as cosmopolitan not simply because of their multiconfessional, multi-ethnic, and multilingual populations and dense and variegated cityscapes, but also because they occupied relatively autonomous spaces that mediated between different worlds.
This volume offers three articles that deal with representations of the Mediterranean as a spatial category and constructed spaces, by Carla Keyvanian, Christina Pallini, and Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis. Keyvanian uses sixteenth-century maps disseminated after the emergence of the printing press. Looking at the European reception of Italian and Dutch maps depicting Islamic cities, the author conceptualizes the Mediterranean as the unified locale of a particular intellectual visualization of the city. These widely circulated visions of the cultural, social, and economic characteristics of the city in the Islamic world reproduced the European worldview of the Eastern Mediterranean city as an intellectual construct much more nuanced than conventional east/west relations. This intellectual charting of the Mediterranean even surpassed the one following the discovery of the Atlantic, with three times as many maps of the Mediterranean as those of the New World produced in the sixteenth century. These maps turn modern perceptions of the New World, upside down, demonstrating the primacy of the Mediterranean in the early modern era.
The architectural layout of cities of commerce further emphasizes the solidity of the Eastern Mediterranean cartography. Christina Pallini uses architectural characteristics to read the Mediterranean cities through the location of their ports, tracing the structure of the port’s hinterlands in relation to the city’s residential layout. She focuses on the parallel histories of Alexandria, izmir, and Salonica in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her essay invalidates the conventional representation of the Mediterranean as a great lake dotted with cities along its shores and represents it as scene encompassing vast, diverse, and interconnected lands. The architecture of these cities reveals the constant making of communities as institutionalized bodies separate from other bodies politic.
Some of these cities came to be institutionalized through yet another set of architectural and infrastructural projections and projects that prove more Mediterranean than European or national. Vilma HastaoglouMartinidis explores such nineteenth-century Mediterranean linkages through the activity of harbor-building. She takes issue with existing studies that explore the making of cities of commerce in the realm of Ottoman state modernization only and argues for a larger realm of port construction in which the Eastern Mediterranean became the site of a shared enterprise between 1860 and 1910. This was the common project of a network of international navigation companies, contractor firms, local municipal and port authorities as well as chambers and committees.'? Hastaoglou-Martinidis argues that the technical aspects of the enterprise, the construction networks of harbor-building, entailed far-reaching architectural and urban innovations transforming the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean within a few decades from mere ports into a single modern entity.
The existence of multilingual and multiconfessional communities as well as the emergence of distinct class structures in cities of commerce accentuated the variety and levels of belonging in the particular spaces mentioned above. Population movements matted communities; migration rescaled the exchanges between the city and the hinterland and created two main groups, merchants and landholders who mediated between consumers and producers. This confrontation allowed for the creation of new kinds of terrains where multiple communities established conditions for their material relations, and attached themselves not only to communal, economic and political bodies, but also to the city itself.
On a range of scales, cosmopolitan groups remade the space of the city of commerce by enlarging it through the relations they established between the coasts and interiors while creating new practices of property.”° From the beginning, urban and rural groups penetrated into one another thanks to this network, carrying new relations and practices with them and, hence remolding each other. Through this interaction, each group actually moved into each other’s spaces and life while at the same time mobilizing and extending their own community. The motion involved two layers: One literally expanded the urban community through language, religion, ethnicity and family ties; the other created and preserved a new landholding class for whom communal and commercial ties with the urban community meant protection against risks and fluctuations.
The city of commerce thus rendered the connections between urban and rural social relations much more visible, as its making enables us to view the groups involved as real people, communities and families. Members of closely-knit communities moved between rural and urban worlds, and marriages created new family branches beyond the city of commerce and its hinterland. Put differently, the migration, settlement and networking of individual families between the hinterland and the city of commerce reveal ties beyond those of cosmopolitanism. Communities extended beyond cosmopolitan sites through families, the group most mobile and best-equipped for establishing ties that gave stability to the networks between the worlds of the city, its hinterland, and the Mediterranean.”’ Either in the city, its hinterland or in an altogether different city of commerce, a family of a particular language and confessional community could marry into another community of a different language but maybe of the same faith, thereby extending community relations from those of religious to lingual.
Children of such marriages continued to expand both levels and scales of relations. For instance, sons formed commercial and political ties by marrying into larger mercantile communities of another city of commerce more often than not, into Istanbul’s communities who were already engaged in a variety of connections with trading houses, naval agencies, and consulates of countries across the Mediterranean. Sons could also become vice-consuls in their own city, working for various countries from Spain to the USA at different times. Daughters established further bridges with other families of the same community within the city or married into foreign families of investors, bankers, and merchants that settled and invested in the city and around. Some of the grandchildren married into the same confessional community in yet another city of commerce, while others married citizens of various northern countries of the Mediterranean. These familial networks between cities of commerce newly mapped the circuitry of production and exchange, which helped carve relatively autonomous niches with strong positions in the larger economic and spatial order of the Eastern Mediterranean.”
Through these niches, various communities established their own material conditions simultaneously, even if not always in an equally smooth fashion. In doing so, they favored their attachments to the city more than to any other entity, thus successfully avoiding social conflict, at least before the emergence of the nation-state.*? Where did political authority materialize itself in the city of commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly in the Ottoman Empire before the era of nation-states? The connections to political authority from municipal and provincial administration to central authority and rivaling foreign powers form yet another level of relations encapsulated in the cities of commerce.
Attachment to the city did not outweigh political roles in its administration, which was for the most part in the hands of the cosmopolitan groups congregating in the spaces described above. To the contrary, political administration was in the hands of an aggregate of all groups, as it was most visible at the municipal level, and in the representative and advisory councils of provinces. They managed the city of commerce relatively autonomously from imperial politics, and they did not hesitate to interfere in these imperial politics when the need arose.” Situating the city in such relative autonomy enables us to see cosmopolitan attachment as including the state as part of social-material relations and not in opposition to the rule of the state.
Nineteenth-century modernity introduced its own peculiar set of experiences. One such experience had to do with educational migration which facilitated the formation of yet another kind of network in the Eastern Mediterranean: that of multiple belonging to cities of commerce across the two shores of the Aegean. Migration and access to information within the Eastern Mediterranean turned Athens and Izmir into exemplary sites of contestation for community members, spanning the very space of the Eastern Mediterranean itself. In his essay, Vangelis Kechriotis illustrates the contribution of migration to cosmopolitanism as we have outlined the term, for in his article the community fluctuations between Athens and Izmir made the respective communities more Mediterranean, rather than distancing them from each other.
Commercial activities of migrant and mobile communities in nineteenth-century port-cities are still one of the most obvious subjects of study for both the world-system approach and the disparate trajectories of case studies on single cities. In both, comprador relations played crucial roles in linking the cities to the worlds beyond. Many of these have been explored as part of communitarian networks, such as those of nonMuslim merchants. Yet, the involvement of people who speak the same tongue has not been used as point of departure. Isa Blumi studies the role of Albanian-speaking actors in ‘illegal’ trade and provides another web of relations beyond British, Italian and Ottoman trade regulations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Circumventing the political and economic spaces of the imperial custom regimes, these ‘criminals’ linked the Adriatic and Balkan hinterland to various parts of the Eastern Mediterranean.
This kind of analysis of state—society relations in the cities of commerce of the Ottoman Mediterranean is of historiographical significance as well.
Ottoman historiography is still determined by the centrality of the state, even if this state-centered approach has recently attempted to do away with explicit demarcations between society and state. In an effort to critically reevaluate the world-system approach, urban historians —especially the ones studying the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire— have brought the ‘state back in’ and thus continued the historical tradition of placing the state’s action at the heart of the vocabulary of nineteenth-century reform. It comes as no surprise that recent scholarship’s attempt to avoid Orientalist and essentialist views by pointing to the weakness of the Ottoman Empire has inevitably and forcefully confirmed the central role of the state.’? However, even the fact that urban administration is refashioned as a product of nineteenth-century central reform (Tanzimat) in the Ottoman Empire, does not automatically locate the city of commerce in the realm of imperial modernization, but rather proves that imperial orders do not readily delimit state and society.
A cartographic analysis of cities of commerce with an eye to the permanence of the Eastern Mediterranean redefines all boundaries, including those of the state, in an aggregate and thus allows us to escape measuring the extent of state power. Constantin Iordachi’s contribution to this volume points towards the larger boundaries of the Mediterranean, by establishing the Mediterranean’s organic links with the Black Sea via the Danube. He concentrates on Sulina, Tulcea, and Constanta in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Iordachi argues that, while Tulcea (the administrative center of Dobrudja under Ottoman rule) was connected to the larger Mediterranean world via Istanbul, Constanta became the political center under Romanian rule after 1878. In the same period, Sulina was connected directly to Central European cities, serving as the main commercial gate between Central Europe and Anatolia. This essay illustrates our larger argument that the connections within the Mediterranean world are mediated through multiple scales of relations between political centers as well as economic and commercial networks.
The cartography of the Eastern Mediterranean permits us to re-imagine state and society in the same space without fixed boundaries. Cities of commerce do not surface as the locus of the power of an imposing state only, nor do they emerge only as entities able to reform. Instead, the city of commerce itself can be imagined as a cartographic entity. The spatial matrix of the city of commerce is not only an analytical tool: The city of commerce is defined not through, but with, its spatial matrix, thus rendering the cartography of the city a maze of multiple political happenings as they form variously scaled entities through rural/urban dynamics in provincial administration that simultaneously contact and contract with the dynamics of the imperial and global centers.
However, such contraction among the Eastern Mediterranean cities of commerce can even be delineated within an approach that includes the state. Johann Biissow draws our attention to the sharing of information and argues that in the early twentieth century knowledge traveled between the Mediterranean shores by steamboat, telegraph, and railways knowledge also traveled, and at a hitherto unknown speed. In his essay, Biissow takes the press as a case to evaluate the extent of the development of intellectual and cultural networks. His is a mental mapping out of the Mediterranean where the ‘local’ press connected Palestinian cities of commerce not only to their vicinity, but also to other Mediterranean centers.
‘You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.’”°
The city of commerce can serve as a juncture of space, class, community and political authority. The city of commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean also provides many junctures in terms of methodology, between grand theory and micro history, in terms of the empirical between the sui generis and the all encompassing; in terms of discourse between the national and the global. The city forces us to find a new metaphor to address the many scopes and scales it constantly embodies: constancy of space. That is why this book insists on a cartography that looks at the terrains themselves, rather than at the forces contained in these terrains. The Eastern Mediterranean cities of commerce are stages, or rather sites, of the composition of happenings —mixture of events, actions and geography. The main medium was neither the early modern or modern state, nor the market, nor tradition.
The Eastern Mediterranean composition has shown itself to be a maze of all these forces, with shifting positions in a hierarchy of influences; yet is not determined by any one of them even when historical change is analytically frozen. The composition of happenings that is the Eastern Mediterranean is larger, more tangible, durable, and visible than the matrix of sites on one level and the forces that shape them on another. This does not mean that the composition itself is immune to change. What reveals the durability of the unity of the Eastern Mediterranean despite changes is the space: The constancy is in the space, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. The city of commerce valorizes this space, cosmopolitanism generates the city, and the extended community is the city’s fabric. Each written from a different vantage point the following articles deal with this process of valorization, making the Mediterranean visible through a cartographic analysis.
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