Capitalistic Urbanization in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Armenian Agencies

Year 2023, Volume: 5, 9 - 21, 31.12.2023

Ümit Fırat Açıkgöz

https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2023.2

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract:

Few periods in the imperial history of Istanbul saw as spectacular a building boom as the
long nineteenth century. A host of building typologies, some totally new others age-old,
dotted Istanbul’s urban landscape at a pace and an intensity rarely, if ever, seen in the city’s
Ottoman and Byzantine history. Their scales transgressed the classical restrictions and
codes of decorum formulated in the sixteenth century. Their styles expressed diverse and
conflicting identities and political aspirations. Palatial complexes and mosques; embassies,
banks, and department stores; railway stations, high schools, and churches; apartment
buildings and ferry stations; and various infrastructural projects marked the advent of the
modern era in Istanbul with vibrancy, dynamism, and hope as well as crises, contradictions,
and inequalities.

Studies on the late Ottoman urban history of Istanbul have burgeoned in the past three
decades. These studies have significantly expanded our knowledge on the dynamics of
Istanbul’s urban modernization, demonstrating the ways in which the buildings and
infrastructures crisscrossing the Ottoman capital embodied larger imperial and global
transformations of the nineteenth century. We have learnt a lot about the municipal
institutions, legal regulations, European inspirations and local domestications, grand plans,
post-fire regulations, monumental buildings, stylistic issues, and communal and imperial
agendas.1 The more we learn about late Ottoman Istanbul, however, the more pressing
becomes the need to address some fundamental methodological issues and to explore some
crucial but still largely uncharted territories....

Keywords

capitalism, urban history, Ottoman Armenians, modernization, urbanization

Thanks

As the co-editors of this special dossier, Yaşar Tolga Cora and I would like to express our gratitude to a number of individuals and institutions. We had the opportunity to discuss the first drafts of the dossier’s articles in a workshop participated by several scholars from different backgrounds. We thank the workshop participants for their comments and criticisms; Debjani Bhattacharya for giving a keynote speech; and ANAMED and Istanbul Research Institute for co-hosting this workshop in July 2022. We also thank Emily C. Arauz for her meticulous copy editing. Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to K. Mehmet Kentel, who supported this project in various ways since we approached him in 2021 with the proposal to publish a special dossier in YILLIK.

References

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• Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna. “Of Dark Pasts and Pipe Dreams: The Turkish University.” YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 3 (2021): 185–193.
• Erkal, Namık Günay, and Sümertaş, Firuzan Melike. “ ‘Of a Piece with Their Habitations’: Phanariots and Their Houses on the Phanar Waterfront.” YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 4 (2022): 7–44.
• Ersoy, Ahmet. Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.
• Findley, Carter V. Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789–1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.