Malte Fuhrmann leads his readers on a formidable tour of three “leading port-cities” of the Eastern Mediterranean, which he intentionally identifies with their old names: Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna (p. 31). With innumerable languages at his fingertips and an impressive familiarity with multiple Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts, Fuhrmann crafts an elegant, if sprawling, narrative of cultural life and Ottoman imperial dissolution in these three maritime locales from the early 19th century to the aftermath of the World War I. He seamlessly weaves together “complex, colorful, well-connected, and yet particularly local cultures” (p. 403) with wider historical processes, addressing the strong, yet tangled, connections between these particular coastal spots, their hinterland, and places further afield.
On its glimmering surface, Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean probes the “colorful milieus” (p. 25) of three lively urban centers and builds on the well-established notion that the Mediterranean “had been a two-way route of exchange for cultural goods and phenomena long before the 19th century” (p. 99). Fuhrmann, in particular, is concerned with exploring the “Levant's infatuation with Western culture and the hybrid forms this produced,” and proving that such forms offered examples of local negotiation and reinterpretation (p. 7). But churning deeper down and animating his whole work are anguished and far-ranging dilemmas about identity and history. What, ultimately, was these maritime cities’ historical role? How did their residents shape their identities? How were dwellers’ hopes for reciprocity, cultural exchange, and mutual respect met by an increasingly aggressive European front? “Neither hell on earth nor utopias,” Fuhrmann concludes, these port cities were rather sites of contradiction and ambivalence, whose residents could avail themselves of a multitude of identities “neither clearly European nor its Other” (p. 408). The author, then, emphasizes the in-betweenness of these centers and their dwellers and claims that it could result in opportunity, burden, or transitory status, depending on the changing circumstances.
The structure of Port Cities is unconventional, and it reads like multiple books nested in one. Incorporating a few of his prior publications, the author has reworked them but, most importantly, has framed them in a unifying yet multicentered analysis. The book's six “parts” are further divided into smaller sections, with Part 1 offering a sweeping historiographical introduction. Part 2 deals with spatial relations of power and shows how the reshaping of Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna and especially their waterfronts impacted locals and were, in turn, shaped by them. Likewise, the author demonstrates that processes of urban remaking came to embody perceptions of a cultural bifurcation between tradition and modernity, home and abroad. Part 3 concerns the forms of entertainment, arts, and consumption that became available in the three port cities. Fuhrmann shows that new pastimes coexisted with old ones and that the available entertainment options did not simply mimic European practices, but rather stemmed from local desires and innovations. Part 4 pulls the reader in several different directions, but overall chips away at teleological readings of the formation of national loyalties in the pre–World War I period. It shows that European models mattered when it came to shaping identities on the Eastern Mediterranean shores, but that they were sheer ingredients in a mix that tasted of both confusion and opportunity. This part of the study examines foreign schools, the French-language press, changing gender and class roles, Levantine communities, and working-class migration. It champions the idea that identity in the late Ottoman sphere was in flux, but also puts such discussions in perspective by claiming that split identities affected urbanites across Europe. In Part 5, Fuhrmann argues that local claims and adaptations of Europeanness prevented the formation of large and stable anti-European alliances. He also lingers over the identities and loyalties of marginalized migrant women who had arranged for themselves a life astride the European and Ottoman worlds. Part 6 brings the book to a close with a reflection on the consequences of the unraveling of port city society and the implications of the 19th century on the 20th. Overall, Port Cities points in many different directions. Although ambitious in scope, its relatively loose structure can be disorienting.
As one dives further into the book, it becomes clear that Fuhrmann's higher pursuit is going beyond in-depth case studies to write the history of port cities as elements of a common space. He tries to build such a space by indefatigably sustaining comparisons among the three port cities of Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna, chosen because of their shared “Greco-Turkish cultural imprint” and previous “highly mixed status” (pp. 31, 33). This task, however, is constantly challenged by the “specific meanings local residents projected on forms of European culture” (p. 9). Against this comparative background, Fuhrmann admits that, for example, Smyrna generally spearheaded developments in leisure practices, or Constantinople remained the outlier when it came to reconstructing its quays, partaking in evening strolls, and even facing contemporary urban planning. Comparative forays into Egypt's history, meanwhile, strike an uneven effect. Some references, like the ones to Khedive Ismail's 1871 statement that Egypt no longer lay in Africa but in Europe, Alexandria's Place des Consuls, the 1882 “anti-Western riots” in that port city, and prominent Alexandrine characters, may distract from his vision about shores further north. The bridges built by the author appear more solid when comparisons turn into connections, as with the traveling theatrical troupes passing by Egypt, or the couple moving from Smyrna to Salonica and possibly spurring the development of opera in their new home.
Fuhrmann also enriches our knowledge of Eastern Mediterranean urban culture by embracing an eclectic multitude of voices and perspectives, including the literati, administrative, social elites, and the nonelite residents. His sources range from Ottoman state documents, consular records, and ecclesiastical papers to visuals like postcards and photographs, as well as printed sources, such as memoirs, travelogues, and pamphlets, but also novels, writings by Westerners on the East, and advice literature. Even when entering institutional archives in Berlin and Vienna, he pays attention to petitions, letters, court interrogations, probate records, and testimonies. Thanks to a striking literary sensitivity and keen eye for details, Fuhrmann handles sources critically and often juxtaposes them effectively. At the same time, he concedes that they are sometimes uneven in quality and focus, as when he clarifies that women's migratory paths were not nearly as well documented as those of men. Overall, Fuhrmann pays systematic attention to historical actors’ own views. Moreover, he broadens the horizons of readers within the confines of US academia by relying on an expansive body of scholarship that includes relatively less-known works, such as Mafalda Ade's research in German, or his own 2006 book Der Traum vom deutschen Orient: Zwei deutsche Kolonien im Osmanischen Reich 1851–1918.
To conclude, Fuhrmann successfully moves away from top-down, center-periphery approaches to Mediterranean and Ottoman history; overcomes the sterile debate about whether the driving forces behind change in the late Ottoman empire were domestic or imposed from abroad; and captures port city residents’ creativity in designing their own identity, lifestyle, and social practices. Although he steers clear of conceiving Europe as an amorphous, hostile, or static entity, approaching it instead as a “locus for local attributions of meaning” (p. 14, pp. 29–30), he does sometimes equate “Europeanization” and “modernity,” using the latter, nonchalantly, to describe items as different as picnics, quay promenades, the interconnected world, watches, leisure sites, and institutions. Yet historical actors themselves may have conflated all these things. Accounting for the characteristics of what he terms the “modern, quickly evolving world” of Eastern Mediterranean port cities is no easy feat (p. 8). Fuhrmann elegantly bears the challenge and forces us to reappraise the history of Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna and beyond. His analysis of urban reform in maritime centers, entertainment as a “world where the rules of exclusion were less severe or overcome” (p. 95), the complexity of migration and migrant identities, and the purging and violence that came with homogenizing societies bear on the study of all the other port cities in the Eastern Mediterranean. At once, Port Cities offers rich local studies, an overarching Mediterranean narrative, and insights on the import of cultural history. As such, it resists categorizations and will appeal broadly to students and scholars of Ottoman, Mediterranean, and European history, as well as urban and cultural history at large.
