The port-city of Izmir (old Smyrna) plays a crucial role in modern world history. From the 1570s, that city became subjected to European mercantile interests and quickly developed into the main... Show moreThe port-city of Izmir (old Smyrna) plays a crucial role in modern world history. From the 1570s, that city became subjected to European mercantile interests and quickly developed into the main conductor of an irreversible European takeover of the Ottoman economy – the structural basis of a centuries-long decline of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire. Or, so the historical consensus dictates. The problem is that this consensus has been constructed over a conspicuous shortage of sources by an overreliance on grand theories paired with a fundamental misunderstanding of the Ottoman (political, legal, economic and social) system and its solutions to the challenges of the times. This study wants to uncover and question the teleological (mostly Eurocentric, oftentimes triumphalist) historiography of city, empire and world systems that have resulted. In its stead, it lays the foundations of a historiography that restores 17th-century Izmir (and perhaps early-modern Ottoman civilization) to the role of an active and autonomous participant-alternative to Europe’s expanding world system. Show less
Our primary hypothesis will be that Izmir’s culture and political economy were purposefully manipulated by the Ottoman and European centers and their various representatives in their quest for... Show moreOur primary hypothesis will be that Izmir’s culture and political economy were purposefully manipulated by the Ottoman and European centers and their various representatives in their quest for dominance, but that these found themselves consistently resisted and thwarted by Izmir’s cultural and institutional dynamic. We will posit that this distinctly crosscultural urban culture had its own political economy, with its own logic and trajectory. From this primary hypothesis immediately follows another – which holds that the image of Izmir as a segregated and administratively neglected ‘city’ was a façade. Willfully constructed by the Ottoman and European centers and their local representatives, it was maintained to hide from view a world of crosscultural compromise and mutual dependencies. This hidden ‘middle ground’ and the urban culture it fostered, differed significantly enough from that in other Ottoman places of crosscultural trade to effectively constitute a distinct urban culture Show less
