Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914 * By ZEYNEP CELIK

Abstract

Zeynep Çelik’s Empire, Architecture, and the City is both a study of modern imperial building projects and a call to re-think many of the assumptions that underlie current scholarship on nineteenth-century empire. By comparing Ottoman and French policy, Çelik demonstrates that older, territorial empires rested as much on the political mobilization of architectural forms as newer, colonial empires did. Her focus on provinces rather than on imperial centres suggests that studies of peripheries remain key to understanding empire, and that ‘urban’ need not be synonymous with ‘central’. Finally, her investigation into local as well as international ‘circulation[s] of influences’ (p. 5) questions the linear models of cause and effect on which many discussions of global city planning continue to be based. Although the book is therefore a useful addition to the growing literature challenging ‘conventional bilateral axes of east-west and north-south’ (p. 5), it is also more than that. Çelik is engaged in a subtle reconfiguration of some of the more complicated questions that dominate studies of urban architecture and imperial power.