Making a Revolution, 1908 legal reorganization, reforming and centralizing it and increasing the bu-
reaucracy’s control through newly developed technologies and specializa-
tion of office, including new provincial and urban administrations. This
led to widened public control of administration, diffusion of authority,
the bringing of new people into administration, new education and edu-
cational capital, open to all, irrespective of religion, secularization in law
and education, demilitarization of officeholding, making all citizens equal
and eligible to vote and serve in parliament, liberalizing the economy, and
protecting a right to private property.^4 The Tanzimat reforms came fully
to Salonika in 1868 , when a municipality consisting of a mayor and mu-
nicipal council (although more like an advisory body than a parliament)
was created, which introduced local governance. As in other model Tanzi-
mat cities, this coincided with the destruction of the city walls. Salonika’s
had guarded the coast; their opening was a symbolic act, representing the
city’s new openness, coming as it did at the time when the Suez Canal was
opened ( 1869 ). Extramural urban expansion followed as the “countryside
of previous centuries was connected through wide boulevards to the city
centre.”^5 This was happening throughout Europe: Amsterdam, Antwerp,
Barcelona, and Vienna all saw their walls demolished in the 1860 s and
1870 s to allow urban renewal.^6
The late nineteenth century in Salonika witnessed the emergence of
new professional activities, white-collar and liberal professionals, private
companies (banks, finance houses, insurance companies), new products,
new consumerism, a new working class, and new municipal structures
and civil administration. The city became an administrative metropole,
a garrison city, an intellectual center, and an industrial pole, as well as
continuing as an artisanal, merchant, and agricultural center as before.
Demographic growth, economic prosperity, social and political diversifi-
cation, and new contexts for social interaction such as cafés, bars, tram-
ways, and promenades contributed to the creation in a relatively short
time of a radically different place.^7
Salonika was a laboratory of Ottoman urban political reform, becoming,
a decade after Pera (Beyogˇlu) in Istanbul, the second European city in the
empire to be granted control over local governance. The new municipali-
ties were established in part to rationalize the urban order to facilitate local
and international commerce. They were charged with “urban planning,
market control, health, public morality, and public welfare.”^8 Turning
away from the ancien régime of Ottoman urban order—notables, guilds,