Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914 (review)

Zeynep Çelik correctly points out in the Introduction to this impressive book that comparative studies of modern empires have usually focused on Western European empires, most notably the French and British. She also notes that at the same time scholars have overwhelmingly ignored the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire, which they have considered to be less developed. What Çelik leaves unsaid is that few scholars have the linguistic ability, training, and sheer energy needed to undertake the daunting task of comparing the creation of public space in the French and Ottoman empires as she does in this work. The list of archives at which Çelik conducted her research is notable. Ambitious in scope, marvelously conceived, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this book is an important contribution to studies of architecture, urbanism, imperialism, colonialism, and visual culture.

One of the central concepts underpinning this project is (borrowing the phrase coined by historians C. A. Bayly and Leila Tarazi Fawaz) the historical existence of a "connected world of empires." In this framework, empires follow and learn from the concepts, plans, policies, programs, technologies, and schemes of other empires. Rather than the usually perceived one-way traffic of ideas from west to east (in this case from Europe to a modernizing Ottoman empire), Çelik is careful to point out that ideas moved in both directions, although not at the same rate and magnitude, between the French and Ottoman Empires.

Another organizing principle of this work is the decision to focus on the peripheries rather than the capital cities of Paris and Istanbul. In other words, the case studies are drawn from the Maghrib (Algeria and Tunisia) in the French case and the Ottoman Arab provinces (Syria, Beirut, Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Hijaz, Yemen, and Tripoli, the latter formerly referred to as Trablusgarb). By investigating the peripheries, Çelik is able to show how the imperial stamp was shaped and reconfigured by regional social, spatial, artistic, and cultural characteristics.

The peripheral areas examined in this book had great cultural affinities with one another. For example, Arabic was the dominant language and Islam the religion of the vast majority in the French colonies of North Africa and the Ottoman Arab provinces. In addition, from the sixteenth century until before the nineteenth century, the entire region had been under Ottoman rule. French colonial interventions in North Africa were thus superimposed on a landscape previously shaped under Ottoman rule. To reveal the complexities of these interactions, Çelik examines these territories from 1830 and in doing so contrasts the modernization projects of a new, energetic, and expanding French empire to those of an old and venerable Ottoman imperial regime whose domain was shrinking. For example, in 1830, France occupied Algeria and began transforming its landscape, and in 1839, Sultan Abdülmecid, the head of the Ottoman Empire, issued the Tanzimat Edict, which ushered in a series of plans of modernization in the empire. The closing date of the book in 1914 is similarly important for both empires. It marks the beginning of World War Iand the end of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, by this date the entire Maghrib (including Morocco) was under French rule.

In terms of its design and major themes, the book consists of an Introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Both empires are discussed in each of the chapters. However, since the author drew on French and Ottoman archives with very different recording practices, she had to choose distinct strategies for presenting the materials, sometimes discussing developments in the French and Ottoman empires together, at other times treating the related category of projects in each regime discretely. Although a number of themes undergird this project, Çelik underscores two. First, "Ordering, documentation, classification, and filing of information" became central to the functioning of the modern state. Çelik argues that these orientations "made their lasting mark on imperial space from the macro-to microscale" (7). Tracing...