Sibel Zandi-Sayek's book takes us into what she sees as the formative period of the busiest port city in the Ottoman Empire, which roughly coincides with the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839–76). It focuses on the change of urban space. Space is to be understood here both in a very literal and a more abstract sense. The introduction takes us on a tour of the most important changes to the built-up space of Izmir during the period: the new infrastructural links running through and from the city that allow people to communicate and move in novel ways; the new sites of pleasure; but also the new places of state power.

The following chapters imbibe these new spaces with meaning. In chapter 1, the author tackles issues of property, taxation, and sovereignty, which in her opinion combined to define a form of citizenship. She concludes that the different ways citizenship was defined and how local residents changed their self-identification indicate “an identity selectively derived from established forms of belonging based on residency and participation in the economic spheres of urban life and from emerging state-sanctioned forms of identity, premised on the equation of citizenship with nationality” (p. 74). In the complex legal context of late imperial Izmir, residents sometimes tended towards the former and sometimes towards the latter.

Chapter 2 addresses the question of order in the streets. A citizenry which in part possessed notable private riches demanded the creation of a public space that reflected this status. This public space should no longer be shaped by the classic urban institutions, such as the cemaat, esnaf, vakif or mahalle, but by a new institution banding together the residents as equal and responsible citizens, and which conceived of the urban space as a totality in need of shaping. Sandi-Zayek conceptualizes conflicts between private and public usage not as a conflict between modern and pre-modern, but as “tensions inherent to modern public space” (p. 111). Efforts to shape the public space culminated in the introduction of an elected belediye (town council) in 1867.

The heated debates focused on the reordering of the waterfront (chapter 3). While driven by private interests, they were framed as a discussion about the public good. Sandi-Zayek sees here a manifestation of what others have called conscience citadine (p. 148).

The final chapter addresses public festivities, beginning with a detailed description of the 1842 Catholic Corpus Christi procession. Religious organizations, expatriate communities, and above all the Ottoman state, achieved through religious holidays, protocol affairs, and national events a temporarily heightened rule over the normally highly diverse public space, co-incidentally producing an impression of unity to others. The number of extravagant festivities demonstrates, according to the author, that allegiances were not stable, but had to be constantly enacted (p. 186).

Sandi-Zayek concludes that “Izmir's dynamic public sphere … emerged at the intersection of the modernizing Ottoman state and the fashioning of new urban identities” (p. 191).

There are two ways of reading this book: one which leads me to laud it without reservation, and another which brings forth a certain uneasiness. I will first explain the latter, then continue with the former. The author styles her book as avant-garde, with statements such as, “this book provides an important corrective to studies of Ottoman cities, which have too often been conditioned by assumptions of clear-cut ethnoreligious boundaries and national divides. … In particular, I show how people negotiated and maneuvered between institutional boundaries …” (p. 7). Such promotional language is best reserved for funding applications rather than manuscripts. However, in the case of nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean urban history and that of Izmir in particular, it is simply wrong to say nobody has accomplished a differentiated analysis before. Although less inspired works continue to appear, since 2005 when we have seen the publication of at least three monographs, some edited volumes, and even more articles, we can definitely speak of a turn in “Smyrnology” towards a complex reading of this highly diverse society. In the light of these publications, many of Zandi-Sayek's theses do not sound as unique. Her statement in chapter 1 that identities were created through a process of negotiation comes close to Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis's well-known “jeux d'identités”, where Smyrnelis illustrated how the Smyrniots skilfully manoeuvred between different nationalities and allegiances (Une société hors de soi: identités et relations sociales à Smyrne aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Paris, 2005). The ability and limits of citizens claiming to strive for the public good within and without formalized institutions has been a constant theme in numerous articles by Vangelis Kechriotis (e.g. “Protecting the city's interest: the Greek Orthodox and the conflict between municipal and Vilayet authorities in İzmir (Smyrna) in the second constitutional period”, Mediterranean Historical Review 24/2, 2009, 207–21). Likewise, Oliver Schmitt has described the 1842 Corpus Christi celebration (Levantiner – Lebenswelten und Identitäten einer ethnokonfessionellen Gruppe im osmanischen Reich im “langen 19. Jahrhundert”, Munich, 2005, 328–37) and Hervé Georgelin has commented on groups carrying their identity into the public space (La fin de Smyrne. Du cosmopolitisme aux nationalismes, Paris, 2005, 101–48). It is hard to understand why these authors are not mentioned in the main body of the book. It is possible to conclude that Sandi-Zayek intends to dominate the field of modern Smyrnology, assuming that English-language readers will not know the ample historiography on the subject as it is mostly in French. But let me hope that such a harsh view of the book is unfounded. Smyrnelis is after all mentioned in the acknowledgements and some other authors in the bibliography.

Moreover, that is not to say that this book has nothing new to offer. It follows already published arguments to a point, but either develops them in new directions or charts them on little-known terrain. It focuses on the Tanzimat, while most studies have concentrated on earlier or later periods. It takes urban space and the visual dimension seriously, not only in its analysis but also in its evidence, including, in the 200 pages of the main body, 61 photographs and drawings that are not merely illustrations, but tightly intertwined with the text, and 24 maps processed for the purpose of the book. Most importantly, Sandi-Zayek is besides Kechriotis the only researcher who takes the Ottoman state as a major actor in urban politics. Many others tend to see Izmir as a strictly self-made society, whereas she stresses the dialogical nature of identity creation, influenced by local society and the state. It is unfortunate that the book does not bring across the dialogical nature of research into late Ottoman Smyrniot society as well.