The introduction sets out the framework of the book by situating Hong Kong as a site of Britishness. It introduces the major aim of the book: to challenge widely made assumptions about the primacy of ‘race’ in determining the entitlements and benefits of being ‘British’, and to call for a full consideration of how racial and cultural diversity shaped Britishness. It explains how Hong Kong, a nexus of mobilities within and across the British Empire, Chinese treaty port world, and the Asia-Pacific, offers us a uniquely important site to understand identities and belonging in the British Empire. The case of Hong Kong, this book argues, illuminates the blurred distinctions between Britons and other Europeans in colonial Asia, and the possibility for colonial subjects to claim a British subjectivity. Building on recent literature on modern Asia and global history, this book will also challenge common assumptions about race and identities in colonial Hong Kong. It will also trace how rising nationalism and the global dispersal of cosmopolitan sensibilities created tensions in the colony, offering a global history of exclusivity and cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century.

The Introduction describes Veracruz as a central node in trade and migration networks that spanned the early modern globe, but also as a city that nonetheless is not typically afforded a status alongside other colonial American ports, like Havana, Philadelphia, or Cap-Français. In examining Veracruz’s social history more closely, the Introduction argues we can illuminate not only the distinctive social and cultural world of its inhabitants, but through the city’s relationship to ports in the Caribbean, an entire regional system that mediated the definition of colonial categories like race, caste, ethnicity, religion, and status in the seventeenth century, especially for Africans and their descendants. It then situates the book’s contributions at the intersection of three fields of historical scholarship--Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic--and offers a detailed outline of the book’s chapters.

Chapter 4 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the discussion of the role of cities in enabling small elite groups to amass large pools of wealth while guaranteeing poverty for the large majority of people whose labor made that wealth possible. The focus here is on long-distance merchants, who relied on cities and city-based states for the ability to finance, acquire, and transport goods otherwise unavailable in a city’s hinterland to elite and artisanal customers on a regular basis by building the infrastructure needed for long-standing circuits of point-to-point commerce. The chapter illustrates these points by reference to merchants’ complex relationship to state elites in governing palace districts, the invention of currency, merchants’ own houses, the separate districts for foreign merchants that became ubiquitous in cities, and such infrastructure as warehouses, commercial courts, customs houses, caravanserais, roadside waypoints, stables and signage, ports, docks, shipyards, breakwaters, and lighthouses.

East Asian religions are marked by diffuse spirituality and close ties to the state (e.g. Confucianism). When the state was weak, however, independent sects gained an appeal, which created a niche for Christianity. On the other hand, a resurgent state brought repression of these groups. Early modern Japan is the most vivid example, but also in China at the same time in milder form. The Taiping rebellion is a nineteenth-century example. Missionary incursion sparked resistance (the Boxer rebellion) but also acculturation (Western education). Japanese nationalism coopted Christianity through WW II, but its appeal has been limited since. Korea exemplifies how persecution of Christianity, first by its Confucian monarchs, then by the Japanese and then the communists, only strengthened its appeal.

While cultural practice in the Ottoman port cities showed a rather liberal blending of various shades of modernity, discourse produced by the middle classes intended to rein in the freedom identity development. In chastising mimicry of the West as well as insufficient mastery of modern etiquette, Turkish and Greek bourgeois picked up uponcriticism of port city society by foreign observers. The attribution of class characteristics to nations is also characteristic both of the foreign observers and the local middle class. Attempts to conform to international middle class standards is combined with the need for national distinguishability. Only in rare cases did individuals who did not comply with the conformity the middle class attempt to impose and out themselves as "super-Westernized."

While port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were for a long time vilified, recent local and international interest has rehabilitated them, turning them into a projection site for nostalgia for the pre-nation state multicultural order. While simplifications and especially characterizations of the nineteenth-century port cities as a social utopia must be revoked by critical historians, the highly ambivalent and mixed Eastern Mediterranean societies nonetheless need to receive proper attention in order to counter oversimplified visions of cultural identities and intercultural clash. A complex reading of nineteenth-century port city society thus serves as a counter discourse against a Weberian sense of the Asian City or its contemporary vulgarizations, such as the worldviews propagated by S. P. Huntington or R. T. Erdogan.

Changes in Great Power politics, technical developments, and flows of trade all together transformed Eastern Mediterranean perceptions and usages of space. From their image of Europe and the opportunities it offered to modes of travel, to visions of and policies of urban renewal and its acceptance, many aspects of life in Levantine cities were transformed by the heightened interaction with Europe. Nonetheless, the new Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica were not carbon copies of the towns on the far side of the sea, but very much also the product of local desires and attitudes.

The chapter traces the transformation of Western travel narratives reporting about journeys to Eastern Mediterranean port cities from the beginning to the middle of the nineteenth century. It claims that the transformation from romantic immersing in the foreign landscape to supremacism was influenced by the technological and sensory revolution of the steamship.

The introduction formulates a critique of the predominant reading of modern Ottoman historiography for its focus on nationalities, nationalism, and the state. It traces the reason for this neglect from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.It argues that the Europeanized and heterogeneous culture of the large cities needs more attention in studies of the modernization of the region and operationalizes notions of urban, global, and cultural history for this purpose.

Quay development had a fundamental impact on late nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean urban space. Large-scale development of the waterfront created not only a new facade for Izmir and Thessaloniki, but also precipitated new usages of urban space and modes of transport, labor, and leisure. They also led to a perceived bifurcation of the urban space into modernized and non-modernized quarters.

The polyvalence of late Ottoman port city society, with its many different ethnic and religious communities, overseas and local cultural influences, and the failure of the Ottoman state to provide a convincing common identity for its heterogeneous population combined to make identity building a highly complicated process. Depending on individual stance, locals could find this predicament a possibility to carve out an identity that transgressed against more narrow, community-determined norms. Others however, felt the challenge to develop a personality that met the standards of the coming twentieth century a burden they could not creatively master within the commercial surroundings of the port city. Especially the bourgeois and the ecclesiastical elites of the respective communities, aimed not to negate the possibilities of the age as a whole, but to restrain most forms of individualist and in their eyes morally precarious pursuits, thus restricting the manifold possibilities contemporaries actually had to develop their personality.

This chapter traces the role of Eastern Mediterranean cities and urban society in historiography since the nineteenth century. As Max Weber considered their urban characteristics underdeveloped, many subsequent historians, including those critical of Westernization, concentrated on the state and agrarian society instead. The trend toward a focus on Ottoman urban history since the late 1990s has by contrast focused almost exclusively on microstudies. Therefore the field's overall rich findings have not managed to make an impact upon"big" history of the Middle East, the Ottomans, or nineteenth century in general.

The Ottoman port cities cannot be conceived of as an Other of their hinterland. They were tied to them economically, infrastructurally, and socially. However, outside of the well-policed cities, the danger of non-state sanctioned violence, especially banditry focusing on abduction and ransoming wealthy residents and foreigners, posed a threat to the socioeconomic order of the port cities and their respective ties to theoverseas powers. However, ultimately they must be seen as attempts to opt in on the profits from the Thalassocentric order, rather than an attempt to replace it.

Contextualizing the “unraveling” of the Thalassocentric order in the “Age of Anger” (Pankaj Mishra), I examine the Ottoman elites’ “reverse Orientalism” (Erdal Kaynar), the endemic “economies of violence” (Tolga Esmer), and most especially the process of marginalization of some groups of Europeans that paved the way to deconstructing the Europeanization paradigm all together. I claim that unlike some other world regions, Eastern Mediterranean urban society did not bring forth an outright autochthonous intellectual rejection of the West, as it was too closely intertwined with it. There were other forms of rejections though. This was on the one hand the endemic violence in the countryside that threatened material possessions and the well-being of foreigners. Moreover, intercommunal violence could target foreigners and especially consuls, as became evident in the St. George’s Day riots of 1876. Whereas the success of such violence was limited, European dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean was not so much challenged but deconstructed. My example of such a process is the Ottoman campaign targeting the reputation of European women on moral grounds, which provokes the European-led campaigns against the “white slave trade.” Finally, following the moral erosion of the dream of the port cities pertaining to Europe, I trace the steps of their violent disassociation from the Thalassocentric order and the subsequent steps of bringing them into a nation-state order.

This chapter narrates the downfall and eventual replacement of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean port city order. While the Italo-Turkish War foreshadowed the events to come, the following war years predominantly devasted the hinterland. Port city society found its penultimate blow in the Smyrna Catastrophe and the Holocaust in Salonica. In all port cities, however, the introduction of a nation-state order was initially declared but far from reality. Only decades of urban socioengineering and education of subsequent generations managed to install the change.