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The Exalted Column, the Hejaz Railway and imperial legitimation in late Ottoman Haifa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2014

MICHAEL TALBOT
MICHAEL TALBOT*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, Paris, 75005, France
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Abstract:

This article examines the political and social tensions of late Ottoman Haifa through the history of the Hejaz Railway and a particular monument, the ‘Exalted Column’ (Sütūn-u ʿĀlī), a monument erected in 1903 to commemorate the beginning of Ottoman construction on the Haifa railway branch. By first establishing the use of railways and railway architecture as a means of exerting state power in a comparative and local perspective, the railway structures in Haifa are analysed in the context of that city's other monumental buildings. This then leads to a discussion of the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī as a celebration of Ottoman authority and modernity, and of the developing Ottoman–German alliance. The symbolism of the column's iconography is shown to reflect a variety of problems that the Ottoman state faced in Haifa at the turn of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 246 - 272
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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51 Translated by the author from the Arabic inscription on the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī.

52 Translated by the author from the Ottoman Turkish inscription on the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī.

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70 Ibid., 488–90. The provincial average is taken from the male and non-military rüşdiye schools in the districts of Saida, Sour, Haifa, Nazareth, Safed, Tiberias, Jenin, Jableh, Marqab and Sahyoun.

71 Ibid., 487.

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