Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires

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

3. The Imperial Palaces in Comparative Perspective: Topkapı, Kremlin, and Hofburg

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

6. Bound by Difference: The Merger of Rostov and Nakhichevan-on-Don into an Imperial Metropolis during the Nineteenth Century

7. Guarding the Imperial Border: The Fortress City of Niš between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, 1690–1740

8. Empire after Empire: Austro-Hungarian Recalibration of the Ottoman Čaršija of Sarajevo

9. Lemberg or L’vov: The Symbolic Significance of a City at the Crossroads of the Austrian and the Russian Empires

10. Kars: Bridgehead of Empires

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.

"Overall, the knowledgeable contributions discuss the question of manifestations of imperial rule at the local level in an exemplary manner, whereby this question draws on existing approaches – for example by Markian Prokopovych. They show how fruitful this comparative perspective can be for the continental empires of Europe and their colonization policies. "Imperial cities" thus proves to be a connecting attribution and characterization, whereby a national, regional and local level can be connected and important empirical insights can be gained... the decolonizing perspective of the volume can contribute to further research into the role of the "imperial cities" in the peripheries."

Heidi Hein-Kircher, Martin Opitz Library Herne / Ruhr University Bochum