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Using a method of feminist historical ethnography, this article offers a microanalysis of US Sixth Fleet port calls, Rest and Recreation, and naval diplomacy in Haifa port over the period 1979–2001. The documentation of everyday civil–military encounters in the city supports the claim that in the Mediterranean context, American military expansion was welcomed both by political elites and by the general public. In this process, a politics of consensus was built through repeated activities, ceremonies and cultural frames, which stressed the shared values and importance of US–Israel relations. Although the negative effects of routine visits (vandalism, crime, prostitution and rape) were never publicly acknowledged on the national level, two mechanisms for containing and minimizing urban conflict were developed over time by local officials and entrepreneurs. First, a discursive framing of port calls as a form of militarized tourism enabled municipal authorities to carefully plan and control the daily routine of foreign servicemen, including their exchanges with local residents. Second, the urban decay of the Haifa port district enabled the creation of intimate and confined bars that catered for American soldiers far from residential areas. Narratives of and about women who were involved as agents in the daily maintenance of these spaces reveal that intimacy, sexuality and even motherly love were significant for the development of both mechanisms. Furthermore, local forms of militarized femininity, namely the care for male soldiers as a motherly duty and the trivialization of sexual violence, were expanded to include US servicemen, contributing to the normalization of foreign military presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from 1840s, the Ottoman State underwent a series of institutional changes which was reflected in the transformation of major cities like Smyrna and Salonica, two prominent ports of the Mediterranean. This paper aims to present a critical and comparative evaluation of the urban transformation in Smyrna and Salonica between 1840 and 1900. Through case studies, such as the regulation of roads and the re-organization of burnt-out neighbourhoods according to the new building codes, and the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects – railroads and quays – the dichotomous nature of urban transformation is revealed. Despite all the zealous efforts of local authorities and implementation of urban regulations, only certain sections in both cities were actually modernized, these being the new investment areas and the burnt-out zones. The Ottoman State and the European investors worked together for creating profitable investment zones, which dramatically changed the appearance of these cities in a short period of time. Except for these areas, the traditional urban fabric still prevailed in Smyrna and Salonica at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the factors that contributed to the late nineteenth-century Europeanization of Ottoman urban society was the entertainment sector, in particular bars, music halls and brothels. In the big cities of Rumelia and western Anatolia, a relevant number of the workforce in this sector originated from countries such as Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy or France; they exposed local society to new forms of sociability. This article is intended as an initial step in assessing the impact of coastal popular culture in shaping Hamidian port-city society. It tackles the question of whether it is possible to write such a history with a perspective of agency, by focusing on the people on stage or behind the bar, their migratory background, life-stories, and worldviews. It distinguishes between three milieus: musicians organized in orchestras; individual singers, dancers, bar or pension owners; and prostitutes and pimps or traffickers. All three seem to have retained a liminal lifestyle, with one foot in their place of origin and the other in the region they operated in. Despite their constant interaction with customers or audiences, integration into local society was not the rule, but an exception. The respective milieu of persons engaged in similar semi-itinerant entertainment work was the predominant group of social organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of the emergence and development of the modern banking sector in the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and of the role of multinational European financial capital therein. The study focuses on the port-city of Izmir which is seen as a prime example of inter-imperialist rivalry. As the premier export market and urban centre in the Empire, the city also came to dominate commercial banking operations in the Ottoman Middle East in the period under study. As a result Izmir saw the development of a vibrant and competitive banking sector, second in importance only to that of Istanbul. The appearance of a well-capitalized banking sector, closely connected to Western credit markets, and where Western banks were dominant, was the last stone in the edifice of economic growth of Ottoman port-cities, along with Izmir, and the single key element still needed to propel them forward. For it was the estimation of Western financiers that Izmir and other regional maritime and urban markets in the Empire were at a level of economic development where a banking sector could function profitably, which led banks to establish branches of European overseas banks here in the early twentieth century. Banks were thus able both to profit from the rapid economic growth of the region and to stimulate it further. Although they impacted banking in fundamental ways, changing it forever, local bankers and their practices did in part survive; local entrepreneurs were not passive recipients of Western investment, but sought to learn from and compete with it, influencing it accordingly. Overall, the growth of the banking sector in Izmir can be assessed as mixed: though beneficial for the economy and society as a whole, the lower ranks of the banking profession did not fare too well from the competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a description of the "undesirables" list maintained for the city of Smyrna by the Egyptian government in 1926. Details are given describing the contents and scope of the list, highlighting entries consisting of unemployed persons, vagrants and criminals. Further notes are given pointing out the individuals who were on the list due to political concerns, such as Bolshevik communists. Conclusions are drawn from an examination of the list regarding the entire issue's discussion of the port-city and it's social dynamics during the late Ottoman Empire.

This article examines the historiographical trajectory of merchants in Eastern Mediterranean ports, from a commercial bourgeoisie to cosmopolitan citizens. The paper argues that despite recent historiographical trends, class is still a valuable analytical tool, and is compatible with the notion of cosmopolitanism. A class dimension when approaching the history of Mediterranean ports is important because it emphasizes the urban inequalities and intra-communal hierarchies and can explain the inter-communal conflicts that characterized most of these ports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reasons for the passing of the cosmopolitan order in the Ottoman port cities of the belle epoque were neither cultural nor societal, but world-systemic. To a great extent, the lives and times of these dynamic port-cities can be accounted for by reference to an opportune conjuncture that marked the world-system from the 1870s to the 1920s, rather than to the internal properties or constitution of the maritime cities along the Ottoman shoreline. This serendipitous conjuncture came about during the era of intense hegemonic rivalry starting in 1878. Its end, too, had more to do with the temporary resolution of great-power bickering than with the social or economic properties of the port-cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the many locations that the late Ottoman Mediterranean offers for consideration to historians of port-cities, the Cypriot city of Larnaca/Tuzla, with its trade station of Scala/Iskele, is a perplexing case-study. Barely larger than a borough in size, it seems it was absorbed in its countryside confines - not only economically speaking (as was the case with many other hinterlands), but also with regard to the use of cross-border legal notions and the establishment of complex social solidarities. Ottoman and consular archives shed light on the range of these landholding, money-lending and networking operations, while allowing us to analyse their wording and phrasing. As a result, one gains insight into the multilayered semantics and pragmatics of an unsettling urbanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]