Imagining mid-nineteenth-century Beirut as a ‘City of the World’: Public intellectuals, photography, cartography and historical literature

Abstract

This study explores the process of constructing mid-nineteenth-century (1858–76) Beirut as a city of the world not merely through its gradual material instantiation in mechanisms of technological modernization and in the built environment but also, more emphatically and enduringly, as a product of the cultural imagination. The article engages the ethico-political parameters of a ‘crisis of representation’ in the context of both the selected historical period that is one of geopolitical crisis, specifically the 1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus that brought refugees, military and diplomatic intervention into Beirut, and our ongoing era of intensive contestation and critical attention to Beirut’s urban heritage. This contrapuntal framework of geocreativity invites an examination of the output of mid-nineteenth-century Beiruti intellectuals and missionaries (including newspapers, public lectures, the encyclopaedia and the memoir), alongside mid-nineteenth-century photography and cartography by military and civilian visitors to Beirut, and twenty-first-century Lebanese historical literature, particularly Rabī‘ Jabir’s Bayrūt trilogy (2003–07), that recreates mid-nineteenth-century Beirut as a city of the world from the perspectives of the archive and the consciousness of the city’s post-war transformations.