mediterranean modernity? 115
Cosmopolitanism and modernityOne of the modern circum-Mediterranean phenomena most representative of this
non-Modern modernity is the question of cosmopolitanism. The main urban cosmo-
politan protagonists include Izmir/Smyrna, Trieste, Istanbul, Thessaloniki/Salonica,
Alexandria, Beirut, and Jaffa. They have featured in monographs that combine a
celebration of a cosmopolitan past with a condemnation of its abrupt, violent end
(Mazower, 2004) and in the renowned works of writers like Constantine Cavafy,
Lawrence Durrell, Italo Svevo, and Ivo Andríc, as well as in comparative and critical
accounts (Driessen, 2005; Ballinger, 2003).
In its narrowest definition, cosmopolitanism refers to the situation created in
Ottoman port cities in the period 1870–1920, where British and French colonial
expansion found the Ottoman littoral less accessible for direct political-economic
extraction. Whereas southern Europe was already completing its second wave of
national independence movements, and African societies suffered the harshest “scram-
ble,” these cities enjoyed a privileged relative autonomy. The imperial rivalry between
European powers facilitated the emergence of an institutional setting conducive to
cross-marine ties and ethnically-designated merchant élites with their extraterritorial
rights and consular courts (Tabak, 2009: 87). The cross-marine conditions of this
urban conviviality become clear when port cities are examined together with their
respective interior urban counter-poles. The modern histories of these pairs reveal the
competition between the inland center and the port city over regional hegemony:
Beirut and Damascus, Alexandria and Cairo, or Jaffa and Jerusalem. The only non-
Ottoman port city in the annals of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism that presents a
similar dynamics is Trieste, which from its days of maritime centrality in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire was reduced to a sub-regional port upon the dissolution of the
“Austrian Littoral” and the city’s annexation to Italy (Abulafia, 2011: 557–590).
As for the Mediterranean itself, however, the boundaries of this category are fluid.
Should Sarajevo, Aleppo, or Jerusalem, with their interethnic texture, count among
these cities, though they did not serve as depots for maritime commerce (Bromberger,
2006)? Should the list be limited to the port cities of the Ottoman Empire in the
height of imperial rivalry (1870–1920) in the eastern Mediterranean (Tabak, 2009),
or should the category include pre-independence colonial Tunis (Clancy-Smith,
2011), early-modern Venice, Alexandria, and Izmir (Rothman, 2012), or even
medieval Andalus and Sicily?
These problems of definition diminish neither these cities’ role in nostalgia for a
Mediterranean pre-national order nor the important historical and anthropological
implications of this nostalgia’s recent spread. As with the discourses on honor and
shame and on patronage, cosmopolitanism has served as an emblem for the wider
Mediterranean through its contrast with a dimension of modernity. Like the two
other oppositions in the discourse of modernity and the Mediterranean, what make
the Mediterranean case stand out are the impediments it is said to have set to the
universalizing or leveling effect prescribed by the ideology of modernity. Images of
inter-ethnic and inter-religious cohabitation in port cities like Alexandria and Izmir
countered nationalism, “a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic
boundaries should not cut across political ones” (Gellner, 1983: 1). Yet, unlike
modern political order (“offended” by patronage) and modern cultural order of