The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (review)

The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. By Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 244 pp. $59.95

This book is a tale of three cities. Why Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul? Masters and Goffman have already published books on Aleppo and Izmir; each city has rich historical sources; and each occupied a middle ground between language groups and between East and West. This medial position is especially important since the authors' aim is to construct pictures of diversity and uniqueness, the better to reject normative types.

The authors reject Weber's definition of cities, based on his limited view of civic culture that excluded the Middle East and lumped cities there together in one undifferentiated category--Islamic.¹ They criticize their intellectual forbears for not confronting Weber's typology directly, and for focusing "on particular cities rather than the idea of whether an Islamic type of city might exist or what its characteristics might be" (3). Yet, this is exactly the method adopted in this book, in its three separate essays on three separate cities with little reference to one another.

Trade is at the center of each essay; trade creates diversity and the meeting ground of East and West. Each author situates the commercial life of his city within the changing reach and expression of Ottoman power and the structure of the world economy. Masters tells the well-known story of Aleppo in an efficient and workmanlike narrative. There the silk trade maintained Aleppo's multilingual and multireligious community until the end of the eighteenth century when sea routes displaced caravan routes in international trade. It remained an important regional entrepôt until the erection of national frontiers in the early twentieth century.

Goffman's essay on Izmir is fresher, perhaps because Izmir has been less studied than Aleppo, and because Goffman includes documented vignettes of everyday life and commercial practice. Those who know Izmir only as the Smyrna of the Greek exodus in 1922 will learn that, from its beginnings as a commercial center in the seventeenth century, it was a multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multireligious city in which Greek-speaking Christians were only one, and not the most numerous, of many communities. Unlike Aleppo, the commercial importance of which preceded the Ottoman conquest in 1516 and was enhanced by the pax Ottomana, Izmir rose to prominence in a moment of Ottoman weakness as a place to trade outside restrictive Ottoman taxes. Once the Ottomans were able to reassert their control over the city's growing trade in the second half of the seventeenth century, they taxed it to their own advantage but without destroying it. This strategy was a departure from the usual Ottoman practice of provisionism that privileged the feeding of Istanbul. As European political and economic power grew, the balance of communal power in Izmir shifted, and Christian Greeks came to prominence as Europe's preferred middlemen at the expense of Izmir's Jewish, Muslim, and Armenian Christian communities.

Eldem's treatment of Istanbul is markedly different from the other two essays. His essay is more about the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the nineteenth-century world economy than about the city itself. He makes the point that incorporation occurred via trade through, and policies emanating from, Istanbul, but does not make a strong connection between macro-economic change and life in Istanbul. He tries to do so by presenting fictional depictions of two documented events, one in the life of a dragoman at the end of the seventeenth century and one in the life of a sarraf in the mid-eighteenth. Daring as this approach may be, in this case, it does not work well. Overall, the essay presents a static view of Istanbul in the eighteenth century and an abstract view of economic change in the nineteenth.

The introduction...