The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (original) (raw)
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History of Istanbul / VOLUME 1 /Istanbul’s Long Century: On a Global And National Scale
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Ottoman Istanbul on a World Scale
History of Istanbul, 2020
When writing a history of Istanbul, particularly in the Ottoman era, the historical context of the city must not be ignored. To understand the historical context, both the general political and socio-economic conditions of the empire should be taken into account, and cities that are similar on a regional and global scale should be examined from a comparative perspective. Even though existing studies about Ottoman Istanbul take such historical contexts into consideration, they neglect to do so from a broader perspective. The aim of this article is not to narrate the history of Istanbul. Rather, I will address the city’s place on the world scale from a comparative perspective, taking the history of other cities into account. I will first establish the central position Istanbul holds within the historical process itself and then will attempt to exhibit the city’s position in comparison to other world cities by making comparisons between Ottoman Istanbul and major cities both within and outside the Ottoman Empire. The period I am examining - from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries - is quite long; however, this was an era in which many important transformations took place in urban areas throughout the world, and as a result, it seems appropriate to make a dual periodization. The first period falls between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a time in which Istanbul was the world’s most populous city and enjoyed profound global influence. The second period encompasses the years following the nineteenth century when the Atlantic trade and the Industrial Revolution began to have a great impact on the world.
This article explores the social history of İstanbul’s extra-mural urbanization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the Beyoğlu district, where the modernizing city emerged as a dense urban sprawl on what had been an area with rural characteristics well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The examination traces the main axis of development from the northern shores of the Golden Horn to the Taksim area, concentrating on the people who created and inhabited this nascent space. It delves into the formation of modern class structures and identifies migratory patterns in the variegated spaces of the area, including Kasımpaşa, Tarlabaşı and Galatasaray. Utilizing Ottoman state documentation, local school reports and contemporary descriptions and memoirs produced by the inhabitants of the city, this study contributes to the existing scholarship by incorporating the human element and a social perspective into examinations of the urban development of modern Istanbul. On a broader level, the article suggests that in the context of the rapid and drastic transformation which Istanbul is experiencing in its cityscape today, we need to look more closely at the origins of this phenomenon, particularly with an eye to the social stratification that came into being in the late Ottoman period.
2021
Cosimo Comidas De Carbognano, was born in Istanbul from an Armenian family converted to Catholicism.He was a dragoman for the Bourbon governments of the Two Sicilies and Spain in the Ottoman Empire. His curiosity about the history of Istanbul and his conviction that the various descriptions of the city, provided by foreign travellers, were incompleteasthey lacked ofʻsomeparticularitiesʼled him to write the DescrizioneTopograficadellostatopresente di Costantinopoli (Topographic Description of the Present State of Costantinopole). The book, published in 1794, is dedicated to Ferdinand IV of The Two Sicilies and it has the merit of exposinga description of the various classical monuments, both Christian and Islamic, in the city and in its surroundings in a highly contextualized manner and enriched by twenty-one illustrations. In this paper we propose some reflections on the image of Istanbul at the end of the 18th century, based on the information provided by De Carbognano.