Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman History ed. by Nazan Maksudyan (review)

of irregular warfare. During the reign of Abdülhamid II, Ottoman counterinsurgency operations gradually intensified against militia forces (komitadjis) in Macedonia and rebel forces in Yemen. One also needs to consider the Hamidiye Cavalry corps, which was established in 1891 in Eastern Anatolia as an irregular military agent of the center, as another factor that fueled the Ottoman military procurement. As its main objective, Arming the Sultan demonstrates that the arms trade between Germany and the Ottoman Empire functioned as a politicaleconomic determinant that shaped the process of a diplomatic rapprochement, culminating in an alliance between the two powers on the eve of World War I. At the same time, this original research also yields an indirect conclusion that contributes to the ongoing debate in Ottoman military history regarding explanations for the almost perpetual defeats in late Ottoman wars. Apparently, in terms of availability of modern weapons, the Ottoman army’s performance was comparable to its rivals. The decisive factor in Ottoman defeats had less to do with military technology than it did with military organization, command capacity, and mobilization. Mehmet Beşikçi Yıldız Technical University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.3.1.15 Nazan Maksudyan, ed. Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman History. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014. 210 pp. Cloth, $85/£53. ISBN: 978-1782384113. Women and the City, Women in the City applies a combination of urban and gender studies to late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican history. Seven chapters divided into three thematic sections grapple with different manifestations of women in urban space. The volume is an attempt to fill a gap in the scholarship by focusing on women as actors in making and negotiating urban spaces. The editor’s statement that the book questions gender roles in public and domestic spheres and established views of gender and space is borne out by the authors’ contributions. In the first section of the volume, “Women and Reorganization of Urban Life,” both chapters focus on women and their spatial and temporal claims in transitional periods. The first contribution, by On Barak, “Times of Book Reviews 203 Tamaddun: Gender, Urbanity, and Temporality in Colonial Egypt” (pp. 15–35), is an intriguing study of how time was regulated and perceived in a period of drastic change at the turn of the century in colonial Egypt, and the extent of women’s role in time-keeping in households. The fact that the author focuses not only on middle-class men and women but also on servants adds class and power hierarchies to his analysis. Barak’s chapter successfully demonstrates the porousness and temporal connectedness of the domestic and public spaces by tracing the role of women in the household, their relationships with their husbands, and their children’s education. The second chapter, “Women in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere: Anti-Veiling Campaigns and the Gendered Reshaping of Urban Space in Early Republican Turkey” (pp. 36–67), by Sevgi Adak, discusses Kemalist policies on female dress through the lens of the anti-veiling campaigns in Turkey in the mid-1930s. Adak’s detailed study shows women actors as both supporters and opponents of these campaigns and scrutinizes the veiled and unveiled female presence in urban space. The author uses the terminology of unveiling carefully, for example distinguishing between peçe (face-veil) and head cover. Most importantly, the chapter underlines the coexistence of different voices by showing the complexities of the anti-veiling campaigns, such as the lack of a universal law on female dress, various procedures undertaken in local administrative units, and the patriarchal concerns of the state. The second section of the volume, “Male Spaces, Female Spaces? Limits of and Breaches in the Gendered Order of the City,” looks at women’s activities and their consequences in urban spaces. “Playing with Gender: The Carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah” (pp. 71–85), by Ulrike Freitag, describes a traditional celebration during which women cross-dress and take over the streets of Jeddah for four days. Based on interviews with people from Jeddah, the author traces the legacy of the festival, the changes it underwent in time, and its contents...