Meltem Toksoz - Cities of the Mediterranean

Biray Kolluolu is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boazii University, Istanbul. She has published on late nineteenth-century and early twentieh-century Izmir. Her research interests include historical sociology, nationalism, sociology of space and memory.

Meltem Toksz, Associate Professor of History at Boazii University, Istanbul. She has published on the Eastern Mediterranean cotton agriculture and trade, Ottoman Mersin and the regional history of Cilicia. Her research interests include historiography, Ottoman intellectual history and the modernisation of state and society in late Ottoman history.

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First published in hardback in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

Copyright 2010, 2014 Biray Kolluolu and Meltem Toksz

The right of Biray Kolluolu and Meltem Toksz to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Copyright Editorial Selection 2010, 2014 Biray Kolluolu and Meltem Toksz

Copyright Individual Chapters 2010, 2014 Isa Blumi, Edmund Burke III, Johann Bssow, Erkan Grpnar, Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis, Constantin Iordachi, Vangelis Kechriotis, alar Keyder, Carla Keyvanian, Biray Kolluolu, Eyp zveren, Cristina Pallini, Faruk Tabak, Meltem Toksz.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

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ISBN: 978 1 78076 769 7

eISBN: 978 0 85773 745 8

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress catalog card: available

To the memory of Faruk Tabak

Contents

Biray Kolluolu and Meltem Toksz

alar Keyder

Faruk Tabak

Carla Keyvanian

Cristina Pallini

Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis

Johann Bssow

Isa Blumi

Vangelis Kechriotis

Constantin Iordachi

Eyp zveren and Erkan Grpnar

Edmund Burke III

List of Illustrations

Battista Agnese, Portolan Chart of the West Mediterranean ca. 1544, Library of Congress

Antonio Lafreri, Melita Insula (Island of Malta), 1551, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, St.Geogr.I.73.

Anonymous, Malta, 1565(?), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb.P.IX.47.

Antonio Lafreri, Giovanni Orlandi, Harbor of Malta (detail), 1565/1602, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome.

Agostino Musi, Tunisia (detail), 1535, Private Collection

Antonio Salamanca, Algeri, 1541, Private Collection

Claudio Duchetti, Giovanni Orlandi, Fortezza di Gerbi (Fortress of Jerba), early 1550s/1602, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, St.Barb.X.I.80, Pl.20.

Anonymous, Jerba, 1560(?), Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome.

Anonymous, Tripoli, 1560(?), Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome

Mapping Out the Eastern Mediterranean: Toward a Cartography of Cities of Commerce

Biray Kolluolu and Meltem Toksz

Our mental mapping of the globe through continents rests on an imagery of large bodies of water constituting limits, boundaries and obstacles to the free flow of peoples, goods, information and knowledge while land masses connote integration and belonging. Perhaps the Mediterranean stands out as the only body of water representing historical connectedness and unity. Here the sea, at least until the nineteenth century, overshadowed the lands around it, thus rendering possible the question is it the sea surrounded The Mediterranean seems to have lost this eminency in the last century. The unprecedented dynamism and dizzying speed of the modern world has so destroyed all former worlds, turning them into fading memories, that today our hegemonic geographic discourse is shaped by wests, middles, and easts of a continent. That is perhaps why the Mediterranean, after it surfaced from the whirlpool of capitalist social change, has mostly glittered on its northern and western shores. Indeed, when it is the dazzle of change that shapes our imaginary, it is not surprising that historical continuity is discarded as dreary. The centuries-old continuity of the Mediterranean, especially the role of its eastern shores, is buried under layers of rapturous social change.

This book is about the cities of commerce of the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean that have been the spaces of links, networks, and riches, also awash by conflicts, wars, and boundary contestations. These cities have occupied a central geo-political, commercial, and cultural place in the ever-expanding and ever-intensifying circuits of global exchange since the sixteenth century. We began to imagine this book in early 2004 in a city in the north, namely in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg. We were invited to this Institute of Advanced Study as part of a working group on New Approaches to the History of Merchant Cities in the Ottoman Empire and Its Successor States. Our working group was only one among many if one considers the large number of conferences and workshops, post-graduate research programs, and dissertations, articles and books on the Mediterranean cities of commerce of the nineteenth century, testifying to an explosion of interest in these spaces since the closing decade of the twentieth century.

Ottoman port-cities made their debut on the scholarly scene more than a decade ago via the world-system This group of scholars had set out with a specific agenda. They were not interested in port-cities per se but focused on the processes of peripheralization, not only of the Ottoman Empire, but also of India, and China. Eastern Mediterranean ports forced themselves onto their desks within the framework of the questions they asked as apparent nodes of commodity exchanges and other forms of capitalist encounters. In their research agenda, port-cities came to be treated as suitable means for the confirmation and further proliferation of the world-system analysis.

Today, the locales that this line of inquiry is taken up are multiple and varied. The above-mentioned conferences, workshops, post-graduate research programs, dissertations and books that are attempting to understand the dynamism of cities of commerce in history constitute a disconcerted effort. While the world-system perspective diffused an overly structured analysis, contemporary research is dispersed. The latter is being carried out not around a common perspective, but rather around a shared set of concerns meshed with those of urban history. Both the world-system perspective and the contemporary research have their pitfalls. The world-system perspective in its first attempt ended up drawing a picture in which the colors of the world-economy were exaggerated and colors of the local remained faint and shady. The shortcoming of the current research is its severely disparate character. While it is always incredibly important to gather detailed