Compte-rendu: "Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840-1880, Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014"

compte-renduInternational audienceIzmir 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 coalesced in relation and opposition to one another. Another disadvantage is that it downgrades the multicultural character of the city’s diverse population—an aspect historians of such cities are careful to point out—and its interactions with the Ottoman administration. Usually, approaches tending to encompass all minorities focus on the end of the Ottoman era, namely the first two decades of the twentieth century and especially 1922, when the city was burned. In most Turkish, Greek, Armenian, or other national historiographies, the image of Izmir in flames has become a symbolic signpost, announcing the end of the city’s cosmopolitanis