Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital

by Jens Hanssen

Postwar Beirut conjures up contradictory images of remarkable openness and inconceivable violence, of great antiquity and a bright future. The Lebanese capital stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and cultural effervescence but also for its tragedies of destruction. This book examines the historical formation of Beirut as a multiply contested Mediterranean city.

Fin de Siecle Beirut is a landmark contribution to the growing literature in Ottoman studies, in Arab cultural history and on Mediterranean cities. Combining urban theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's work on cities and capitalism, with postcolonial methodology, the central thesis of this book is that modern Beirut is the outcome of persistent social and intellectual struggles over the production of space. The city of Beirut was at once the product, the object, and the project of imperial and urban politics of difference: overlapping European, Ottoman, and municipal civilising missions competed in the political fields of administration, infrastructure, urban planning, public health, education, public morality, journalism, and architecture.

Jens Hanssen offers a comprehensive, original account of the emergence of modern Beirut out of an economic shift away from Acre in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. He argues that the Ottoman government's decision to heed calls for the creation of a new province around Beirut and grant it provincial capital status in 1888 paved the way for fundamental urban and regional reconfigurations long before colonial policies during the French Mandate period. This new Ottoman province came to constitute the territorial embodiment of regional self-determination for Arab nationalists in Beirut until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Drawing on published and unpublished Ottoman government documents, Arabic sources, and European archival material, Hanssen's book traces the urban experience of modernity in the Ottoman Empire. The transformation of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Beirut and the concomitant policies of urban management is vividly set against the devastating civil war in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860.

Genres: Lebanon, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 29, 2005

Reviews

[Paul]

Jens Hanssen’s primary objective in Fin de Siècle Beirut is to delineate the nature of, and interactions between, the various social forces that, at the end of the 19th century, molded Beirut into a “modern” urban environment. The author argues that Beirut’s development was driven by a combination of local, state, and foreign interests, all of which were attempting to negotiate and shape the city’s “space”. Furthermore, all of these elements were impacted by regional concerns that began to affect Beirut’s growth after it became a provincial capital in 1888; although Hanssen rarely explicates upon this factor, it is implicit throughout his narrative. While he addresses many factors and sometimes does not succeed in accomplishing all that he sets out to do, overall the author does an excellent job of navigating the complex web of interests that engaged Beirut’s development and producing clear arguments that elucidate each one’s particular role in creating a “modern” urban center.

Following an introduction that establishes his theoretical foundations and outlines his objectives, Hanssen begins by chronicling the nearly two and a half decade struggle to make Beirut a provincial capital in the Ottoman Empire. After first explaining how Beirut rose to prominence over its rival Acre, through its willingness to work with Damascus and ally with its notables’ local and regional interests, the author notes that Beirut became the provincial capital of Sidon in 1864, but lost this distinction a year later when Sidon was merged with the eyalet of Damascus. Demonstrating a local consciousness, however, merchants and notables immediately began petitioning the Porte to restore this status, presenting Beirut as a center for reform in contrast to Damascus’ reputation as a place of tradition. From a national perspective, the loss of the Balkans and Egypt led the central government to desire a tighter grip on the Arab lands by dividing them into sub-provinces, but it was international factors that, in February 1888, restored Beirut’s status as a capital, as the sultan decided that such a move would be both a buffer to Europeans and provide them with easier diplomatic and trade access.

The second chapter details the ways in which the differing ideas of individuals with local and provincial interests were negotiated to develop a “modern” Beirut that could be considered suitable for its new status as a capital. Notables and officials set about transforming physical and ideological spaces to accommodate contesting visions and interact with the needs and desires of the state-appointed governors who, at least at first, were concerned with using provincial capitals as testing grounds for the “civilizing missions” that would draw the Ottoman Empire into modernity. Chapter three, meanwhile, examines the impact that “capitalization” had on urban investment. Following the 1888 declaration, Europeans became more willing to invest in Beirut’s infrastructure (such as the expansion of its port), aided in part by the city’s already cosmopolitan nature that was welcoming to foreigners. Overcoming resistance to the effective abandonment of the old city center and the transformation of traditional economic patterns, meanwhile, required the cooperation of local notables, foreign investors, and state authority.

The second part of Hanssen’s work begins with the fourth chapter, which examines the connection between health and modernity in “capitalized” Beirut. Urbanization brought new challenges of disease to Beirut, but foreigners were willing to invest in solutions if it suited their financial interests. In this way, health and medicine became an arm of colonialism, as discourse about healing the body evolved into discourse about healing the mind and charity was overtaken by scientific curiosity. The population’s struggles with health became a window into the “ills” of “Oriental” society and hygiene and mental health initiatives became the focus of transforming behavior, although the degree to which local, state, regional, and foreign elements worked together to engage Beirut’s health initiatives is the highlight of this discussion. Chapter five engages the nature of municipal politics, which the author describes as being relatively free of foreign influence and run by councilors who identified primarily with Beirut, were wealthy, and had many family ties to other local politicians. The final chapter of this section, meanwhile, deals with education in Beirut and argues that the local and indigenous efforts were not only as important as the Western missionary ones, but often intertwined with them. Education was necessary to engage youth in modernity, and local notables went to great lengths to steer the curriculum towards their particular interests and the production of intellectuals who would contribute to the development of modernity. This notion ties to strongly to an idea from his previous chapter, which noted that a disproportionate amount of Beirut’s municipal politicians came from literary elite.

The seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters constitute the final section of Hanssen’s work. The first of these focuses on the discourses of morality and deviance that emerged from the urban centers and argues that “social activities were labelled as deviant precisely because they occurred in central places that were envisaged to represent more enlightened urban images for Beirut”. His discussion outlines the symbols and representations that were created in an effort to project new and public spaces in a positive and “modern” light as the city developed. The leads into a broader discussion in chapter eighth about the development of “Beirut-as-text” and the creation of an idealized narrative of Beirut that blamed all of the city’s problems on the “old” center and, regardless of reality, portrayed the new one as bustling with life and modernity (with, as noted in the previous chapter, safety being an important pillar of this vision of modernity). These narratives, supported by the locally-educated intellectuals and literary elites, “posited modern Beirut as the attainable utopia” and celebrated the current status and further need for “economic diversification, education, industry, and construction activity”, while denigrating the rural sector. The penultimate chapter examines Beirut’s architecture, which sought to draw a connection between the capital’s prosperity and modernity and the Empire. Imperial patronage of architecture and monuments in Beirut were “a reflection of an imperial desire to present the state as a place of order, sobriety, and rationality”. Ottoman buildings in the capital reminded citizens of the Ottoman presence, but urban planning often necessitated local, regional, and state involvement.

In a final nod to the topic of space, Hanssen notes that large public centers acted as places for displays of imperial power, but also became rallying points for anti-government activists. This highlights explicitly one of his main conclusions, which is that most, if not all, spaces in Beirut were contested by competing interests. His conclusion is relatively brief, but does a nice job of reviewing the work as a whole and attempting to draw his chapters back to the issues that he raised in the introduction, as well as making connections with contemporary Lebanon. Overall, the signposting throughout the book is somewhat uneven, but it remains an intelligible read for the most part, with rich evidence that creates an enjoyable narrative and a conclusion does an amiable job in attempting to demonstrate how his arguments tie into the story that he is attempting to tell. Although this book might be understandable by a non-specialist or a causal reader, it would probably be of limited interest to them, and the skillful way in which it negotiates the complexities of Beirut’s urban development might be lost. Fin de Siècle Beirut is an important historiographical contribution and one worthy of attention for any scholar whose research might lead them into the issues and concerns raised by its pages.

[Jonathan Jonsson]

Brilliant, lucid, extremely well researched, very well written. It highlights and corrects Orientalist tropes, avoids nostalgia, and refuses to read historical development as some teleological movement towards the modern nation state. These were Ottoman subjects constructing an Ottoman province in thought, text and city. The focus is on the historical agency of local and global actors, where local actors played a much larger role than traditional historiography would recognize. Where previous histories talk of East vs West and the clash of empires, whether colonial or Ottoman, Hanssen focuses on the way the local elite and subaltern navigated city, time and text, in order to produce their desired versions of city and society. This did not always follow sectarian lines, as we might expect by reading today's Beirut back into history - although sectarian violence was a shadow hanging over post-1860 Beirut and Mount Lebanon, which also came back sometimes, the locals (at least the elites) were far more integrated than one might think. Neither is this the history of the missionaries or the French, who gave impulses to the growing city, but were not the ones dictating it. Local merchants, literati, bureaucrats, intellectuals, educators, etc. formed the new bourgeoisie which dictated Beirut, but in constant opposition to the subaltern who navigated it in their own way. I strongly recommend this book!

[Justin Michael James Dell]

Hanssen educes how late-nineteenth-century Beirut exemplified Ottoman agency in the construction of a provincial capital. He uses a philosophical grid to elucidate how Beirutis developed their own urban identity by defining their urban 'space'. Beirut was in many ways, Hanssen suggests, the quintessential Ottoman city in that it incorporated many of the 'blueprints' Istanbul drafted as part of its ambition for the urban renewal of the Empire. The city was by no means passive in the implementation of Ottoman urban reforms, however, and in many ways Beirutis wrestled with influences and institutions from Istanbul and Europe and modulated them to fit local circumstances and purposes. In other words, it did not 'ape' foreign archetypes. Perhaps the most profound contribution Hanssen makes to the historiography is his suggestion that Beirut, far from being the terminus of an "Arab nationalism" yearning to free Bilad al-Sham from the chains of Ottoman suzerainty, was a municipality whose citizens were on the whole content to be provincial and Ottoman, provided they were 'masters in their own house'. Hanssen's love for and familiarity with the city is very palpable throughout the text.