The Making of an Ottoman Port

Abstract

The quay of Izmir (Smyrna) remains one of the most important engineering feats of the nineteenth century in the Middle East and was the first of its kind in the Ottoman Empire. Its scale and modernity placed Izmir, already one of the great ports of the Near East, in the front rank of Mediterranean ports and changed its urban landscape for ever. The vicissitudes of the construction of the quay and harbour complex strikingly illustrate the dilemmas and problems as much of ottoman urban policy as of modern urbanization. As a struggle between the British and the French to dominate the local infrastructure, the harbour of Izmir is also one of the earliest examples of imperialist rivalry in the Ottoman Empire, of the role of European Diplomacy in finance and of European investment in the region