1st Edition
Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires
This book explores the various ways imperial rule constituted and shaped the cities of Eastern Europe until World War I in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires.
In these three empires, the cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served as the stages where the empire was displayed in monumental architecture and public rituals. To this day, many cities possess a distinctively imperial legacy in the form of material remnants, groups of inhabitants, or memories that shape the perceptions of in- and outsiders. The contributions to this volume address in detail the imperial entanglements of a dozen cities from a long-term perspective reaching back to the eighteenth century. They analyze the imperial capitals as well as smaller cities in the periphery. All of them are "imperial cities" in the sense that they possess traces of imperial rule. By comparing the three empires of Eastern Europe this volume seeks to establish commonalities in this particular geography and highlight trans-imperial exchanges and entanglements.
This volume is essential reading to students and scholars alike interested in imperial and colonial history, urban history, and European history.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
1. Introduction
Ulrich Hofmeister and Florian Riedler
Part I: Conceptual Opening
2. Cities, Empires, and Eastern Europe: Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires
Ulrich Hofmeister
Part II: Manifestations of the Imperial in Urban Space
3. The Imperial Palaces in Comparative Perspective: Topkapı, Kremlin, and Hofburg
Nilay Özlü
4. Temeswar as an Imperial City in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Robert Born
5. Imperial Power, Imperial Identity, and Kazan Architecture: Visualizing the Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Russian Province
Gulchachak Nugmanova
6. Bound by Difference: The Merger of Rostov and Nakhichevan-on-Don into an Imperial Metropolis during the Nineteenth Century
Michel Abesser
Part II: The City as a Palimpsest of Empires
7. Guarding the Imperial Border: The Fortress City of Niš between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, 1690–1740
Florian Riedler
8. Empire after Empire: Austro-Hungarian Recalibration of the Ottoman Čaršija of Sarajevo
Aida Murtić
9. Lemberg or L’vov: The Symbolic Significance of a City at the Crossroads of the Austrian and the Russian Empires
Elisabeth Haid-Lener
10. Kars: Bridgehead of Empires
Elke Hartmann
11. (De)constructing Imperial Heritage: Moscow Zaryadye in Times of TransitionOlga Zabalueva
Part IV: Conclusion
12. Imperial Cities and Recent Research Trends: Nostalgia, Water Infrastructure, and Segregation
Julia Obertreis
Biography
Ulrich Hofmeister is a historian at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he leads a research project on Russian city planning during the eighteenth century. His research interests include the imperial history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as well as Russian urban history. He has published a monograph on Russian notions of an imperial civilizing mission in Central Asia (Die Bürde des Weißen Zaren, 2019).
Florian Riedler is the scientific coordinator of the research network Transottomanica at the University of Leipzig, Germany. His research interests include Ottoman urban history, migration and mobility studies, and the history of infrastructure in the Ottoman Balkans. Among his latest publications is the co-edited volume The Balkan Route: Historical Transformations from Via Militaris to Autoput, 2021.
