Malte Fuhrmann’s monograph juxtaposes the trajectories of the three most important cities in the Aegean Sea – Istanbul, Salonika and Izmir – in the decades before World War I. It focuses on their role as port-city nodes in the expanding world-economy. Against this background, European schools, newspapers, cafés and bars, cinemas and operas, shaped – each in their own aleatoric ways – the lives of residents and visitors, from parental agency and pupils’ positive experiences even at the most missionary schools, to the quotidian practices of brewing and drinking beer. The book is full of fascinating vignettes about annual sporting competitions, theatre seasons and great performances by ‘Bohemian Orchestras’ (p. 260). Fictional characters, like the ‘Man without Qualities on the Bosphorus’ Bihruz Bey, expanded the reading public’s imaginary of vice, virtue and prospect, civility and civilization (pp. 214–17). Adele Feuer, a real-life female café-owner in Salonika, has a cameo appearance in Fuhrmann’s book; as do French and Armenian actresses. And they disappear as quickly as the paper trail in the police or consular records ends (pp. 259–62). Elite women who leave their own historical records, like the Phanariot Grande Dame Demetra Vaka, brandish evidence of local bourgeois class consciousness-qua-civilizing mission (pp. 266–87).
For all the fascinating European life stories sketched here, the framing of Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean is off, both in terms of location and historiographical engagement. For one, Ottomans appear accidental to the cities they organized and inhabited. The book shows us the dorée sides of the Ottoman fin de siècle, not the class war undergirding the elite culture in this Aegean triangle of port-cities. Moreover, any reader with a familiarity of Eastern Mediterranean historical geography will be puzzled by the total elision of port-cities to the east of Izmir as well as the sizable recent scholarly literature on them. Fuhrmann’s central tenet is that European places of learning or leisure – indeed, the wider pursuit of the ‘European Dream’ – were the sole game-changers in town. This is a face-value reflection of the largely European sources the book presents.
Fuhrmann displays an initially plausible scepsis towards the explanatory powers of colonial discourse analysis. He provides documentary evidence that reducing late Ottoman maritime cities to their ‘semi-colonial aspects’ fails to capture the complex human and social interactions at play in fast-changing urban settings. This makes sense from the Palazzo Experimental at Venice where I started to write this review. But it appears less plausible, indeed polemical if not dogmatic, from the vantage point of the German Orient Institute in Beirut where I am now finishing it. Fuhrmann seems to treat critical scholarship in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism as an epistemic threat to the noble goal of reconstructing what was really going on in the notoriously unruly modern world. Phrases like the ‘nineteenth-century mind frame’ (e.g. pp. 268, 270), elicit little confidence in the book’s epistemic alternative.
Fuhrmann understands the three cities in terms of the all too human processes of ‘soul-searching, identity-building, curiosity, experiment, despair and line-drawing’ (p. 217). Izmir had an early cultural lift-off, while Salonika was a thespian late-comer and Istanbul’s theatre scene bossed only from the 1870s. But east of Izmir lies the Oriental abyss, the great analytical void of this book. For example, Aleppo – the eastern Mediterranean capital hub since Shakespeare’s Othello invoked its Venetian ties while he ‘smote’ himself to death – pops up out of nowhere as a ‘fairly exotic location’ (p. 292) whence an influential Italian–Levantine family hailed. Elsewhere, Fuhrmann uses the memoires of a scion of the great Istanbul theatre dynasty, the Naum-Duhanis, but skips over the analytical value of this and other families’ Arabic roots east of Izmir. In fact, career bureaucrats from Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut, who became ministers and confidants of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), were attractive marriage prospects for European families not least because they could open political doors in Istanbul. Unfortunately, the many ties between Aegean port-cities and Arab provincial capitals of the late Ottoman empire remain unexplored in this monograph.
What remains of lasting value in Fuhrmann’s monograph is the plethora of vignettes that it provides to researchers of fin-de-siècle history and late Ottoman cities.
