BOOK REVIEW Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire Malte Fuhrmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 477. $103.00 hardback, $44.99 paper. ISBN: 9781108477376 Reviewed by Lucia Carminati , Department of History, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway (lucia.carminati@iakh.uio.no) Malte Fuhrmann leads his readers on a formidable tour of three “leading port-cities” of the Eastern Mediterranean, which he intentionally identifies with their old names: Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna (p. 31). With innumerable languages at his fingertips and an impressive familiarity with multiple Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts, Fuhrmann crafts an elegant, if sprawling, narrative of cultural life and Ottoman imperial dissolution in these three maritime locales from the early 19th century to the aftermath of the World War I. He seamlessly weaves together “complex, colorful, well-connected, and yet particularly local cultures” (p. 403) with wider historical processes, addressing the strong, yet tangled, connec- tions between these particular coastal spots, their hinterland, and places further afield. On its glimmering surface, Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean probes the “colorful milieus” (p. 25) of three lively urban centers and builds on the well-established notion that the Mediterranean “had been a two-way route of exchange for cultural goods and phe- nomena long before the 19th century” (p. 99). Fuhrmann, in particular, is concerned with exploring the “Levant’s infatuation with Western culture and the hybrid forms this pro- duced,” and proving that such forms offered examples of local negotiation and reinterpre- tation (p. 7). But churning deeper down and animating his whole work are anguished and far-ranging dilemmas about identity and history. What, ultimately, was these maritime cit- ies’ historical role? How did their residents shape their identities? How were dwellers’ hopes for reciprocity, cultural exchange, and mutual respect met by an increasingly aggressive European front? “Neither hell on earth nor utopias,” Fuhrmann concludes, these port cities were rather sites of contradiction and ambivalence, whose residents could avail themselves of a multitude of identities “neither clearly European nor its Other” (p. 408). The author, then, emphasizes the in-betweenness of these centers and their dwellers and claims that it could result in opportunity, burden, or transitory status, depending on the changing circumstances. The structure of Port Cities is unconventional, and it reads like multiple books nested in one. Incorporating a few of his prior publications, the author has reworked them but, most importantly, has framed them in a unifying yet multicentered analysis. The book’s six “parts” are further divided into smaller sections, with Part 1 offering a sweeping historiographical introduction. Part 2 deals with spatial relations of power and shows how the reshaping of Salonica, Constantinople, and Smyrna and especially their waterfronts impacted locals and were, in turn, shaped by them. Likewise, the author demonstrates that processes of urban remaking came to embody perceptions of a cultural bifurcation between tradition and modernity, home and abroad. Part 3 concerns the forms of entertain- ment, arts, and consumption that became available in the three port cities. Fuhrmann shows © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press International Journal of Middle East Studies (2023), 1–3 doi:10.1017/S0020743823000612 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000612 Published online by Cambridge University Press