The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul
By Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters
Reviewed by Amanda Prechel, Biola University, La Mirada, CA; Email: amanda.m.prechel@biola.edu
In The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul, the three cities mentioned in the title are analyzed through comparison and contrast. Also, each city is considered individually, as each city has a different culture and history from the next. The focus of the work is on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they “feature a [time of] mature stability” for the Ottoman Empire.[1]
All three of the authors are professors of history; Edhem Eldem is at Bogazisi University in Istanbul, Daniel Goffman is at Ball State University in Indiana, and Bruce Masters is at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. They have written to
question the idea, developed in response to the Weberian notion of a European-based city typology, of a normative Islamic type of city as well as its corollary the Ottoman city. Finally, the inclusion of Aleppo suggests that the category of an Arab Ottoman city is equally problematic.[2]
Max Weber has created a typology for cities in his book entitled The City, but does so only with European cities, excluding Islamic cities on the premise that all Islamic cities “share certain fundamental characteristics...in short, Weber’s Islamic cities are monolithic and undifferentiated.”[3] These three chapters are something of a response to Weber’s ideas; they attempt to show the unique character of each of these cities under the Ottoman Empire.
Aleppo was an Arab Ottoman city, Izmir was an Anatolian (what is now Turkey) Ottoman city, and Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) was a Byzantine Ottoman city. These three cities are described by their economic activity in trade with the Western world. Flourishing trade brought several non-Muslim people groups to these mostly Muslim cities creating an interesting dynamic.
Aleppo thrived in the international silk trade during these seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bruce Masters “paints a colorful portrait of resident merchant communities that included Europeans, Indians, and Iranian Armenians.”[4] These groups were also subdivided into several religious groups, including various sects of Christians and Jews. Goffman also zones in on the groups of non-Muslims in his discussion of Izmir. A big difference between Izmir and Aleppo is where these non-Muslims lived within the cities, which showed how they interacted with the city. In Aleppo, these foreign populations lived in caravans in the center of the city right where the trade took place while in Izmir there were segregated living quarters for the foreigners. Eldem discusses Istanbul
around the theme of social transformation and economic power shifts...[and] traces Istanbul from its role as an imperial capital of consumption that fed on the Ottoman production and commerce of the sixteenth century to its later position as a link in the global system in the nineteenth century.[5]
The various groups—both religious and ethnic—involved in trade in Istanbul were living in a segregated manner as they were in Izmir. Eldem points to the fact that there is a notion today of a greater sense of “pluralism and cosmopolitanism” among the various people groups in this city than there was in actuality. “During the nineteenth century, [Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul] felt the devastating impact of capitalist Europe on the economies and societies of the Ottoman Empire.”[6] After these Ottoman cities experienced a decline in trade, they no longer flourished in the same way as they once did, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This book’s attempts at giving the reader insight into seventeenth and eighteenth (as well as nineteenth in the case of Istanbul) century Ottoman cities are successful. The one thing that I wished it did more of was give more details as to the Muslim population involved in trade in addition to the plentiful information given on the foreign groups. The book is useful for studying the history of Ottoman cities, but also for the study of cities in general.
[1] Eldem, Edhem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15.
[2] Ibid., 207.
[3] Ibid., 1-2.
[4] Zeynep, Celik. “Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul,” The American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 613-14.
[5] Ibid., 613.
[6] Abdul-Karim, Rafeq. “Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, the Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 63, no. 1 (January 2004): 71-72.
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