Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840–1880

Izmir is a somewhat privileged case, among the “cosmopolitan” port cities of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, in terms of the number of studies devoted to it. However, although scholars dealing with Izmir’s history almost unanimously cite its cosmopolitan character, most of them examine the city from the perspective of individual ethnic and religious minorities. An obvious disadvantage of such an approach is that it ignores the relational dimension of group formation: minority communities c..