A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul

For roughly the past two decades, increased emphasis on interconnectedness and flows on a global scale and shared histories within broader geographical and historical frameworks have shifted the attention of historians to local phenomena and places. This shift includes attention to the city scale, providing new conceptual grounds, especially for those working in premodern non-European contexts. Historians of the early modern Ottoman period have been part of this change. The substantial number of contributions made in recent decades to studies on early modern Istanbul, whose complexity continues to intrigue scholars, is therefore significant. A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul is a compilation of some of these collective scholarly efforts. Edited by Shirine Hamadeh and Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, whose seminal works are a testimony to this shift in foci and methodologies, the volume is composed of twenty-seven chapters, including an introduction, an opening essay, and five thematic rubrics, each composed of five articles by different authors.As they note in their thorough introduction, the editors take the notion of “early modernity” as a constructive frame to challenge the Eurocentric narrative of modernization and the paradigm of decline and state-centered foci long embedded in Ottoman historiography. They identify early modernity as a boundary-building process whose temporal, spatial, political, religious, and social limits were permeable, continuously negotiated, and always in the making. Thus, the volume dwells on the promise of demonstrating how Istanbul had participated and engaged in the shared historical dynamics specific to the early modern period on a global scale, such as state building, commercialization, global trade, and capital formation, while focusing on the agency of Istanbulites. These themes are further addressed and illustrated by the volume’s contributors through historical and empirical examples on varying periods between the mid-fifteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth within the context of Istanbul’s early modern urban milieu.Two topics in particular stand out in the contributions to the volume. The first of these is the location of Istanbul within discussions on early modern urbanity. Cemal Kafadar’s opening essay is therefore critical to this topic. It reflects a search for an alternative conceptualization for early modern Istanbul through a much-needed longue durée perspective, for a recognition of “the historical processes and milestones” that identify this era when Istanbul became a magnetic pull within the empire and gradually achieved a prominent place in it (p. 29). Kafadar sets forth the contextual dynamics particular to urban public life in Istanbul, the emergence of diverse public leisure rituals and its landscapes. Linking the notions of fame and the city, reputation and urbanization, he claims that urbanizing entails the desire to be known and seen. In this, he firmly illustrates the emergence of a consciousness of “urbanity,” alongside a distinct social formation in a stratified and fragmented urban society, characterized by communal tensions and conflicting interests oscillating within dynamics of inclusion and exclusion for Istanbulites and newcomers from elsewhere.On the other hand, the essays of Gülrü Necipoğlu, Nükhet Varlık, and Gülay Yılmaz draw particular attention to globally shared early modern experiences. The authors, who adopt a global urban history approach, neatly focus on a local phenomenon in the context of Istanbul. They convincingly demonstrate the contextual responses to this phenomenon, both in terms of collective responses and imaginaries of Istanbulites and on an institutional level. They engage in global dynamics and locate Istanbul among the other early modern cities in a wider geography, especially in Mediterranean and European contexts. One would have liked more such essays that move between the global and local scales, in which the city appears as a melting pot where global and local dynamics blend, more than a scene where social relations occur.The volume’s second central issue is the attentiveness of contributors to the agency of Istanbulites. The plurality of the voices of inhabitants of various backgrounds, the complexity of the socioreligious and political networks they took part in, and the places they occupy in the city are illustrated. The contributors demonstrate how the contours of gender, social class, rank, and community belonging were fluctuating, fluid, and permeable, also sometimes tenacious and contested. In particular, the court–city binary in historiography has been problematized. The elite formation process, the regulation of commercial life, and the artisans, janissaries, immigrants, and dervishes are addressed throughout the volume. The changing themes and styles of artistic and intellectual production in the city, music, poetry, and visual and textual artifacts, are also explored to examine the fading lines of separation between the court and the city.Some authors focus on the city or urban spaces as the object of scrutiny. For instance, Emine Fetvacı’s focus on miniatures demonstrates the increasing occupation with the cityscapes and daily life over time, while Aslı Niyazioğlu’s inquiry on poems shows the plurality of the ways the city was experienced and conceived by different authors. Moreover, other authors focus on urban space as a sociospatial process through which the inhabitants’ transformative agency in (re)shaping and (re)configuring the city becomes evident. Indeed, urban space matters. As Alexander Shapov, Deniz Karakuş, Karen Leal, and Zeynep Yürekli demonstrate, the urban space(s) mattered for the inhabitants of early modern Istanbul, too. These authors offer a magnifying glass into the stratification, fragmentation, and contestations between urban and rural spaces, city dwellers and villagers, apprentices and masters, Muslims and non-Muslims, central authority and urban society. Their essays greatly contribute to our understanding of the intrinsic relationship between early modern Istanbul’s social landscapes and its spatial landscapes.Overall, the volume fills a critical gap as the first compilation of works on early modern Istanbul. Attentive to refreshing methodological debates, it is analytically helpful for researchers of Ottoman history as well as a wider, nonspecialist audience. More critically, the success of the volume lies in its capacity to propose new conceptualizations for further research, one that encourages us to view early modern Istanbul and Ottoman history itself in their relationship to global historical and geographical contexts.