Editor’s Note: This is the first in our theme for the month of May: Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean.

by Zeead Yaghi

The social, urban, and political fabric of cities across the Eastern Mediterranean have long shared material, cultural, and architectural commonalities, influenced by factors such as travel, commercial capitalism, and shared governance. Whether the longue durée role of imperial governance of the Ottoman or Hapsburg states, centuries of trade between the port cities of Italy and the Levant forming an essential cog in the network of global capitalism, or the millions of people who travelled between these cities on foot or by caravan, boat, or train, bringing with them their hopes and despair, ideals and ingenuity, politics and designs, together these forces demonstrate the existence of an Eastern Mediterranean cultural tapestry undergirded by years of capital exchange upon which convergent, yet regionally distinct, political, urban, and social transformations flourished.

These cities, from Thessaloniki to Alexandria, reached their zenith during the late nineteenth century, and since have experienced stagnation and decline. With the emergence of nation states from the lands of defeated empires, Eastern Mediterranean cities were marginalized under European imperial expansion and forced to relinquish their status as major hubs of commerce and culture and as trading posts for nearby agrarian hinterlands. By the turn of the twenty-first century, deindustrialization and neoliberalism had shifted struggling local national sectors of industry and agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean towards East Asia, such as the collapse of cotton production in Egypt or the persistent failure of agricultural production in Lebanon. The notable exception was Turkey, where state subsidies galvanized an industrial sector in the plains of Anatolia. However, Turkish economic planning did not rely on once prosperous coastal cities, like Izmir, for its industrial revolution,

This situation further maligned Eastern Mediterranean cities whose economic prosperity depended on being transport hubs for local industry. Regional leaders began relying increasingly on tourism, leaning in to the commodification of a particular Mediterranean ideal rooted in a nostalgic vision of the past. Though the current political economy has shifted to tourism and landscape preservation, living standards continue to decrease while urban decay sets in. For The Metropole’s theme month, our writers and contributors zoom in to three structural forces, and their interplay, in their investigation of urbanity and daily life in Eastern Mediterranean cities, most notably: commercial capitalism, the (imperial, colonial, or postcolonial) state, and people and the political, social, and communal logics that shape their behaviors.

The great historian Fernand Braudel, author of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, demonstrated how intimately tied both Mediterranean towns and communities were, when investigating the rhythms and transformations of the region’s natural world and material life, politics and economics, demography and culture. It was also Braudel who early on insisted on centering commercial capitalism as the most apt framework to understand and describe the nature of production and mercantile trade in the Mediterranean between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Historian Jarius Banaji expands Braudel’s focus on commercial capitalism in his groundbreaking book A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism by highlighting the role of state intervention and merchants in determining the modes of production and thus social reproduction in port cities, and the reverberations of collusion between state and commercial actors not only on the city, but also the countryside. Banaji emphasizes in particular the violence enacted by both the precolonial and colonial states in creating the conditions for commercial capitalism to penetrate the countryside. This penetration set in motion massive rural flight toward the city and major population upheaval across the Eastern Mediterranean.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed, for several decades, an increasing pace and width of urbanization in the broader Eastern Mediterranean. Scholars such as Leila Fawaz in Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut, Mark Mazower in Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950, and Philip Mansel in Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, have substantially recorded how port cities saw fast urban growth, the emergence of local industries, and the expansion of their borders as new people flocked to them, escaping poverty in the countryside or political persecution, in search of better standards of living and security.

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, author of the groundbreaking book The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, investigates the production of radical political thought emerging from the interactions between newcomers to expanding Mediterranean cities. Khuri-Makdisi delineates the emergence and flourishing of a radical trajectory across four continents, tying together the cities Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria at the turn of the twentieth century. She shows how socialists, Italian anarchists, Greek dockworkers, Syrian playwrights, and Ottoman intellectuals discussed, spread, and reproduced political ideas, concepts, and dramas in ever-expanding and vibrant Mediterranean cityscapes.

Be it the streets of Thessaloniki or Alexandria, or the alleys of Izmir, ‘Akka and Beirut, the urban landscape, economy, and political structures of these cities have evolved along similar but also divergent patterns. The Metropole’s Eastern Mediterranean theme month asks: How did a common Eastern Mediterranean urban ideal come to be? How did French and British colonial ambitions in the Mediterranean contribute to the transformation of these cityscapes? What is the longue durée role of commercial capitalism in the urban planning of urban landscape across the Eastern Mediterranean?

To answer this series of questions, The Metropole has put together a series of essays covering urban, political, and social transformation across seven cities of the region. Alex Schultz starts us off with colonial Egypt and the beaches of Alexandria, arguing that the development of beach leisure is inextricable from Alexandria’s twentieth-century urban planning initiatives, as hotels, regional and international tourism, organized sports, and women’s rights movements all played a role in the rise of beach culture.

Francesco Anselmetti investigates how different commercial policies employed by ‘Akka’s governments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the organization of the city. Anselmetti argues that such policies were not simply a means to arrange the flow of commodities in and out, but also reflected the local state’s desire to manage the mobility of people from different social classes taking part in commercial activities. Lauren Banko combines social history and microhistory frameworks to shed light on the marginal aspects of urbanization in Haifa and Jaffa in Mandate Palestine: regional immigrant wage laborers and their health. Banko explores the networks that formed around these immigrants in both places, including the ways these (mostly) men used the space of the two cities to not only work and socialize but to evade authorities that sought to remove them on account of their poverty and ill health.

Molly Oringer draws on ethnographic research she conducted in Saida, in Southern Lebanon, in order to address the everyday changes of Lebanon’s urban Jewish sites and the ways they are presently entangled with varying nationalisms, crises, dislocations, and local political contestations. Finally, Ingy Higazy takes us on a trip along the Hijaz Railway, the train line built during the last decade of the Ottoman Empire, which once linked Istanbul to Damascus, to the holy site of Mecca and Madina, passing through a myriad of Levantine cities and provinces. Higazy meditates on life on the railways and beyond it after it closed due to the erection of borders by colonial states carving up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. She uses the opposition of railways to highways as an analytical device to understand the relationship between the formation or disintegration of urban political communities and (im)mobility infrastructure in the Eastern Mediterranean.

As per usual, below is the germ of a bibliography for cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. We welcome additional suggestions in the comments.

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Bibliography

Banaji, Jairus. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. trans. Sian Reynolds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.

Carminati, Lucia. Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.

Clancy-Smith, Julia A. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Eldem, Edhem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Alan Masters. The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Goldwyn, Adam J., and Renée M. Silverman, eds. Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Kassir, Samir. Beirut. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Mansel, Philip. Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950. New York: Vintage, 2006.

Nash, Geoffrey. From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830 – 1924. London: Tauris, 2005.

Philipp, Thomas. Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730 – 1831. The History and Society of the Modern Middle East Series. New York: Columbia Universuity Press, 2002.

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Zeead Yaghi is a history PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, broadly interested in modern Middle Eastern and global histories of planning, development, and architecture. His dissertation focuses on state modernization, planning, and development in rural Lebanon during the 1960s. His PhD project received generous financial support from a number of organizations, including the Fulbright Hays Program, Chateaubriand Fellowship from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US, UCSD Department of History, UCSD Institute of Arts and Humanities, and UCSD International Institute. He is also a writer and editor, with bylines in several American and Arab magazines and journals, and can be found at zeeadyaghi.com.

Featured image (at top): Waterfront at Alexandria, Egypt, from Palace Ras el Tin (ca. 1910-1926), Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress