The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity

ULRIKE FREITAG, MALTE FUHRMANN, NORA LAFI and FLORIAN RIEDLER, eds., The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011). Pp. 288. $ 155.00 cloth. $ 48.95 paper.People are mobile. They move in pursuit of work, pleasure, community, or salvation; they move of their own volition, or when forced by the government or by hostile forces. They come to cities, for a season, for a couple of years, or to stay indefinitely. This volume studies many different migrations in the late Ottoman period, and partly beyond its political boundaries but within its sphere of influence, and examines state reactions to migration, and the impact of the resulting dialectic on the cities of the region. It is the outcome of a research project conducted at Zentrum Moderner Orient at Freie Universitat Berlin, leading up to a conference in 2007. Urban history, modernity, mobility, and migration being among the foremost interests of this unique institution, this volume may be best seen in the context of a series of publications, followed more recently by volumes on translocality, urban governance, and urban violence.1The book covers a broad geography, from the western Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The individual chapters also differ significantly in how they articulate the particular theme of city and migration. Malte Fuhrmann interrogates the ways in which European non-elite migrants to the Ottoman Empire identify with the Empire and their respective countries of origin, finding that these attitudes are much more dependent on the necessities and communicative situation of the moment than determined by class and culture. Christoph Herzog discusses a specific tool of the state in its persistent attempt to control migration, that is, the internal passport, a document the Ottoman state used much longer than European countries. Population mobility has always been a thorn in the side of the state, and especially the modern state with its higher claims to control. At the same time, here and in Fuhrmann's chapter, the city is mostly absent.Herzog shows that the legislation about passports targets certain ethnicities, like Kurds and Albanians, in ways suffused with civilizationist attitudes aboutsedentary life and regular work. Florian Riedler's chapter on Armenian migrants in istanbul and the massacres of 1895/6 sheds light on how this state policy against migration affected Armenians, who were victimized, fled, and sought to return, or not; thus the laws contributed to the ripple effects of the massacres across the territory of the Empire. The state is also the main agent in Dilek Akyalcin-Kaya's study of immigration to Ottoman Salonica: she shows a mostly hapless central administration that mandates the establishment of local administrative structures to deal with migrants, primarily from the Balkans, but fails to allocate any funds. The confusion is partly carried over into the study, in which it is not always clear if the arriving persons are former Ottoman citizens, which way they are coming, if Salonica is just a stop or the final destination, if the destination is the city or the province. In investigating the stunning population increase in Moldavia in the first half of the nineteenth century, Florea Ioncioaia finds attitudes towards migration that strongly mirror that of the Ottoman state in differentiating desirable arrivals of merchants and artisans and protecting the status of "sudits," while the state took pains to deter and deport whom it viewed as vagrant. The author criticizes national narratives but adopts a similar point of view that sees all migration as inherently problematic, and even goes as far as stating: "immigration produces xenophobia, intolerance, segregation, and unrest." Administrative concerns are central to Tetsuya Sahara's chapter on the functioning of city councils in the Balkans. While attributing the remarkable population increase to migration, the chapter is mainly concerned with modern infrastructure and services provided by the city. …