[Bilimsel Haber] Review: Zeynep Çelik, _Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914_

[gpultar at kulturad.org]

Zeynep Çelik. Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman  
Encounters, 1830-1914. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.  
Illustrations. 337 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-98779-8.

Reviewed by Sheila Crane (Department of Architectural History,  
University of Virginia)
Published on H-Urban (August, 2009)
Commissioned by Alexander Vari


Cities at the Edges of Empire: Retracing French and Ottoman  
Infrastructure and Architectural Ambitions in the Nineteenth Century

Although Ali Riza Pasha is a relatively minor character in Zeynep  
Çelik's Empire, Architecture, and the City, his life story vividly  
demonstrates the dynamic connections between Ottoman and French  
empires that are the subject of this ambitious and fascinating book.  
Born in Algiers, Ali Riza Pasha fled with his family to Istanbul  
following the French occupation of the city in 1830. Later educated in  
France, he was twice appointed by Sultan Abdülaziz to be the governor  
of Trablusgarb (renamed Tripoli after Italy took control of the city  
in the early twentieth century), where he initiated a vast project to  
modernize the city's infrastructure with the help of French engineers  
brought in from Algeria. Whereas histories of colonial architecture  
and urbanism have long cleaved to the same nationalist divisions that  
were significant motors for imperial expansion in the nineteenth  
century, Ali Riza Pasha's story reveals the blind spots inherent in  
such an approach. By excavating previously unexamined links between  
French colonial cities in Algeria and Tunisia on the one hand and  
provincial Arab cities within the Ottoman Empire on the other, Çelik's  
book opens new ground in our understanding of architectural and urban  
transformations during what Eric Hobsbawm famously called "the age of  
Empire" (The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 [1987]).

Empire, Architecture, and the City offers a wide-ranging account of  
new infrastructural projects and monumental public spaces that were  
constructed in French colonial cities in the Maghrib and in leading  
Middle Eastern cities under Ottoman rule, from 1830, when the French  
invaded Algeria, to 1914, on the eve of World War I. The book thus  
brings this critical period of French colonial expansion in the  
mid-nineteenth century into dialogue with the results of Tanzimat  
reforms to Ottoman rule first adopted in 1839 in order to demonstrate  
the degree to which the concerted reshaping of cities were central to  
both efforts. Each chapter examines these transformations at a  
different scale, moving from transnational networks of telegraph lines  
and railroads, to large-scale interventions in existing cities, the  
design of new public squares, the architecture of major monuments, and  
the official events staged in these sites. The topography traversed is  
likewise ambitious, including substantive discussion of Algiers,  
Constantine, Bône (now Annaba), Tlemcen, Tunis, Sfax, Bizerte, Aleppo,  
Beirut, Damascus, Haifa, Jaffa, Mosul, and Baghdad. Bringing together  
existing studies of these sites with new archival documentation and  
carefully selected visual materials, Çelik traces how French and  
Ottoman authorities mobilized infrastructure, urban space, buildings,  
and public ceremony to represent and enforce imperial power.   
Considerable emphasis is placed on the impulse toward regularity,  
monumentality, and visual distinction that these urban transformations  
shared. At the same time, the author takes pains to underscore the  
divergent motivations that prompted these changes and the remarkably  
varied architectural forms that resulted.

In Çelik's hands, cities emerge as dynamic constructions,  
simultaneously experienced as important nodes within emergent global  
networks, as monumental architectural assemblages, and as performative  
stages. One of the real benefits of the book's structuring logic is  
that the reader returns at various points to the same sites, but each  
time is asked to consider them at a new scale and from a different  
perspective. In this way, the book's unfolding narrative heightens our  
appreciation of the multiple layers of meaning that were inscribed  
over time into these cities. The Hijaz Railroad, a sprawling network  
of regional lines that were to converge on Mecca, is one such  
captivating thread that weaves its way through the book. While the  
first chapter examines the process of its construction, with  
particular attention to its monumental bridges and the design of train  
stations, subsequent chapters consider memorial structures and  
inaugural celebrations that marked the completion of key segments.  
Even though it was not completed as planned, the Hijaz Railroad  
figures here as a critical motor for the expansion, modernization, and  
reconsolidation of the Ottoman Empire and a project that had palpable  
effects on transnational movements and local landscapes alike. In this  
way, Çelik thoughtfully reveals the political and cultural power of  
infrastructure, which was used to forge a new sense of imperial  
belonging and pan-Islamic identity across the Ottoman Empire.

The visual materials reproduced in the book alone make it an  
invaluable resource. Çelik's book adopts an approach common to several  
recent studies that consider the built environment in tandem with the  
visual culture of empire.[1] Given the book's stated interest in  
tracing how imperial power was consolidated and represented through  
emergent communication technologies, it was surprising to find  
relatively little attention given to the compositional strategies and  
circuits of distribution of the postcards and photographs included as  
illustrations. The production and circulation of these images, which  
serve as crucial source material throughout the book, would seem to  
merit more sustained analysis than the relatively brief treatment of  
these concerns in the introduction and epilogue. Nevertheless, the  
book makes thoughtful and creative use of its remarkable visual  
apparatus, particularly in the layered annotations given to the  
numerous full-color maps and plans (although, as with most books of  
its kind, the reader does have to repeatedly refer back to the color  
plates).

Empire, Architecture, and the City takes its place within a  
flourishing field of urban and architectural studies that has examined  
how built landscapes have been shaped by colonization. In turn,  
Çelik's study is founded on the broadly shared understanding that the  
histories of modernity and of imperialism are intimately interwoven.  
The book's most innovative methodological contribution is the  
comparative, cross-cultural perspective it adopts, a choice that marks  
a welcome and significant departure from existing studies of  
architecture and empire. In this regard, Çelik builds on a  
surprisingly limited number of studies that have challenged the  
conventional national or regional topographies through which histories  
of imperialism have long been traced. The majority of these are  
anthologies of investigations by various scholars largely focused on  
singular imperial traditions or relatively bounded localities.[2] By  
contrast, Çelik's comparative approach allows her to reveal the close  
intellectual affinities between French and Ottoman authorities. In  
this sense, her project tests recent work by Ottoman historians who  
have described the Tanzimat reforms as "borrowed colonialism," in  
order to consider how such dynamics operated in the urban realm.[3] At  
the same time, however, Çelik takes care to underscore the differences  
that separated French and Ottoman strategies, from the organization of  
their colonial or provincial administrations, to the status and  
treatment of women, and the influence of religious belief on imperial  
ideology.

Çelik's cross-cultural perspective is grounded in her own previous  
research across the Mediterranean region examining the cities of  
Algiers and Istanbul as well as Islamic architectural structures  
featured in nineteenth-century world's fairs.[4] While building on  
these influential studies, Empire, Architecture, and the City stakes  
out significantly expanded terrain, not only in its geographic breadth  
but also in the projects it investigates. For example, new  
documentation drawn from the archives of the French army (Service  
Historique de la Défense) lends fresh texture to Çelik's account of  
urban transformations in Algiers under Napoleon III, a moment that  
received less detailed examination in her earlier work on the city. An  
impressive model of comparative research, Çelik's study avidly mines  
primary sources in French and Turkish, mainly drawn from collections  
in Istanbul and various archives in France. Significant differences in  
available documentation of French and Ottoman imperial projects posed  
a considerable challenge, but one that is discussed in the  
introduction and creatively responded to in the chapters that follow,  
particularly by drawing on information from the Ottoman salnames, or  
almanacs for the provinces.

In addition to its comparative approach, Empire, Architecture, and the  
City offers a second and equally important challenge to existing urban  
histories of colonialism. By shifting the focus from the metropolitan  
center to the periphery, Çelik takes on board the lessons of  
postcolonial theory contesting the absolute oppositions embedded in  
the foundational mappings center and periphery, East and West. As a  
result, the book effectively decenters our understanding of empire,  
even as it provides vivid accounts of cities whose histories are  
largely unknown outside the audience of specialists in those areas.  
Here, Çelik takes her cue from the work of Jens Hanssen (The Empire in  
the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire [2002])  
and others who have trained their attention on the history of  
provincial Arab cities within the Ottoman Empire. By pairing this  
investigation with that of French colonial cities in the Maghrib,  
Çelik's study aims to "reconsider the bilateral axis of east-west and  
north-south" in favor of a multidimensional communication pattern (p.  
5). Certainly, the process of translating planning schemes and  
architectural ideas from metropolitan capital to the peripheries is  
shown here to have produced considerable variations. Nevertheless,  
even as the book argues against a familiar story of one-way European  
influence, Paris retains its position as the authoritative capital of  
the nineteenth century. Even urban interventions in Algiers that  
predated those famously undertaken in Paris under Napoleon III are  
referred to as "a Haussmannian operation before Haussmann" (p. 73). If  
we take chronology seriously here, might these urban experiments in  
Algiers offer productive fodder for further rethinking circuits of  
influence and origin? Rather than positing Paris as ultimate source,  
Çelik's account might have more directly engaged recent critiques of  
the familiar notion that modernity first originated in Europe and was  
subsequently disseminated around the world.[5]

One of the book's greatest insights is to recognize that new public  
spaces in the French colonies and the Ottoman provinces consolidated  
new representations of empire while nevertheless allowing for local  
variation. In both French and Ottoman contexts, stylistic differences  
in architecture were encouraged as a means of accommodating and even  
overtly emphasizing regional and ethnic differences. Here, Çelik draws  
on an established body of scholarship, including her own, that has  
emphasized the important shift in colonial policy under Napoleon III  
from assimilation to association as an explanation for a shift in  
architecture from "the style of the conqueror" to the neo-Moorish  
buildings first analyzed by François Béguin.[6] During this same  
period, the Ottoman Empire embraced a vision of modernity marked by an  
even greater stylistic multiplicity. In the book's epilogue, Çelik  
describes Ottoman imperial ideology as "a position reflecting the  
cosmopolitan culture of the empire" and one that encouraged  
"integrated heterogeneity" (p. 272). The epilogue raises critical  
questions about how racial ideology and cultural difference were  
formulated in French and Ottoman contexts, particularly as these ideas  
helped to shape educational policy. While this history is a  
fascinating one, the observations offered in this final section of the  
book move almost entirely away from direct consideration of the built  
environment, a choice that leaves the reader wondering precisely how  
Çelik understands the relationship between architecture and racial  
ideology.

Occasionally, Çelik seems to overstate her case about the enlightened  
attitudes of Ottoman authorities and their magnanimous motivations.  
Near the end of the first chapter, for example, she asserts that  
whereas new railroads and communications networks established by the  
French in North Africa aimed to facilitate colonial expansion and more  
efficient extraction of natural resources, similar projects under the  
Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century were  
created for the benefit of their provincial subjects. This conclusion,  
however, fails to acknowledge the occasionally violent opposition to  
the Hijaz Railroad by Bedouins, whose livelihood was largely dependent  
on serving the needs of pilgrims making their way to Mecca by other  
means, discussed earlier in the chapter. In fact, this episode offered  
a rare glimpse of active resistance to such grandiose imperial  
schemes, since Çelik's study of empire building from above focuses  
explicitly on the official perspectives of state authorities and elite  
officials, a choice acknowledged from the very outset. These brief  
traces of how modernization efforts were received by local residents,  
however, open up productive terrain for further exploration. Future  
studies might also expand on the foundation Çelik provides to compare  
urban transformations in the French colonies and in Ottoman provinces  
with those undertaken during this same period in provincial cities  
within France and Anatolia.

A timely study that provides significant insights into pressing  
debates about modernity and imperialism, Empire, Architecture, and the  
City should enjoy a broad audience within and well beyond the fields  
of urban and architectural history. Çelik's book offers a refreshing  
counterpoint to the prevailing monographic focus on individual cities  
of much recent urban history, particularly studies focused on imperial  
and colonial situations. While this book is certainly essential  
reading for scholars of the French and Ottoman empires, it has much to  
teach all historians of the modern period interested in better  
understanding the far-reaching and still on-going consequences of  
nineteenth-century imperialism.

Notes

[1]. Recent examples of this tendency include William J. Glover,  
Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City  
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Steven Nelson,  
 From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa  
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Brian L. McLaren,  
Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent  
Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); and Swati  
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the  
Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005).

[2]. See Marc Pabois and Bernard Toulier, eds., Architecture coloniale  
et patrimoine: Expériences européennes (Paris: Somogy-Institut  
National du Patrimoine, 2006); Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly,  
eds., Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian  
Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Julia  
Clancy-Smith, ed., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family  
Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of  
Virginia Press, 1998).

[3]. Selim Deringil, "'They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery':  
The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate," Comparative  
Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 312.

[4]. Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers  
under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);  
Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at the Nineteenth-Century  
World's Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and  
The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the  
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

[5]. See Ikem Okoye, "Unmapped Trajectories: Early Sculpture and  
Architecture of a 'Nigerian' Modernity," in Exiles, Diasporas, and  
Strangers, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 28-44;  
Anthony King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism,  
Identity (London: Routledge, 2004); and Vikramaditya Prakash,  
Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial  
India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).

[6]. François Béguin, Arabisances, décor architectural et trace urbain  
en Afrique du Nord, 1830-1950 (Paris: Dunod, 1983), 11. Çelik also  
draws on more recent work, especially Nabila Ouselebir, Les usages du  
patrimoine: Monuments, musées et politique coloniale en Algérie  
(1830-1930) (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme,  
2004).



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Citation: Sheila Crane. Review of Çelik, Zeynep, Empire, Architecture,  
and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914. H-Urban, H-Net  
Reviews. August, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23699





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