Onur İnal’s Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir explores how an Ottoman port city became a “gateway city.” Focusing on İzmir and its Western Anatolian hinterland as an entangled historical subject, the book examines how city and countryside constituted one another throughout the long nineteenth century. Its central argument draws on Andrew Burghardt’s concept of the gateway city, defined as a place “in command of the connections between the tributary area and the outside world” (quoted in İnal, p. 9). İnal reinterprets this concept through an environmental lens inspired by William Cronon, showing that the rise of a gateway city involved dense ecological transformation (pp. 4, 9–16). To conceptualize this process, he adopts Cronon’s distinction between first and second nature, describing the railway as a “human-made second nature” imposed upon a “pristine first nature” (pp. 15, 86). The history of the gateway, he therefore argues, must be reconstructed through the co-constitution of city and countryside, human and nonhuman, and ecological and infrastructural change (pp. 4, 13–16). He demonstrates how İzmir became a gateway city through the braided histories of humans and nonhumans, labor systems, local and foreign investment, infrastructural projects, and transformations in administration and law.
Through this framework, İnal criticizes much of the scholarship on Ottoman port cities and world-systems approaches for overemphasizing external dynamics while overlooking the internal dynamics required to transform a port into a gateway (p. 4). To reconstruct the making of İzmir as a gateway, İnal combines Ottoman archival and printed materials with consular reports, commercial statistics, newspapers, travel accounts, and other sources in several European languages.
The first chapter begins in the early seventeenth century, portraying İzmir as a transit hub connecting the Ottoman Empire to Europe. İnal presents “first nature” as both a facilitator and an obstacle to the city’s economy. Moving from earthquakes to fires and epidemics, he examines how each affected İzmir’s urban and commercial development. This investigation concludes that İzmir was “much more seismic than Salonica, much more fire-prone than Alexandria, and more contagious than Beirut” (p. 35). Although striking, this comparison might have been further developed to situate the city’s environmental characteristics and vulnerabilities, as well as its gateway formation, within a more sustained Mediterranean framework.
Chapter 2 focuses on movement and migration. Drawing on Marco Armiero and Richard Tucker, İnal treats immigrants, refugees, and seasonal workers as “nature on the move,” carrying bodies, practices, skills, and ecological knowledge that became entangled with new soils and environments. Whereas conventional accounts often treat the local as a fixed geographical category, İnal’s work shows that locality is also produced through mobile practices and embodied forms of knowledge. Within this framework, many ethnic and religious communities on the move emerge as makers of both urban and rural landscapes, building railways, draining marshes, working in cotton fields, harvesting figs and raisins, and establishing new villages. İnal also shows that mobility was frequently inseparable from coercion. Some immigrants received land, seeds, and tools, but local officials also confiscated their passports to prevent them from leaving, turning them into “quasi-indentured immigrants” (p. 54).
Chapters 3 and 4 establish the book’s core infrastructural arguments and lay the foundations for the commodity histories developed in Chapters 5–7. By examining camels and railways as complementary means of transporting grain, cotton, figs, and raisins, these chapters reconstruct the material networks on which İzmir’s gateway economy depended. Chapter 3 brings camel-based transportation into Ottoman economic and environmental history. İnal demonstrates that Anatolian pastoralists deliberately crossbred dromedary and Bactrian camels to produce stronger animals capable of carrying heavier loads over difficult terrain. He describes this practice as a “biotechnical fix” that responded to the demands of an expanding market still heavily dependent on animal energy. With a focus on the railway, Chapter 4 elaborates on the book’s first-nature/second-nature argument (pp. 85–90). İnal contends that the Western Anatolian railway network unsettled the “illusional boundary” between city and countryside by “mobilizing financial, technical, human, and nonhuman animal resources” across the region (p. 103). He also shows how Western Anatolian landscapes and ecologies shaped railway construction. His discussion follows laborers excavating cuttings and constructing embankments, as well as engineers confronting floods and unstable terrain by relying on “indigenous topographical, hydrological, and meteorological knowledge” (p. 102). Although İnal does not explicitly theorize these interactions as a process of situated knowledge production, his account suggests that imported engineering expertise had to be remade through encounters with local ecologies, labor practices, and existing forms of knowledge.
Chapters 5 to 7 trace successive but overlapping processes through which crops became commodities. Grain cultivation first expanded into newly reclaimed lands; the American Civil War temporarily revived cotton as an export crop; and the subsequent decline in grain and cotton prices created the context in which figs and grapes gained prominence. Chapter 5 argues that the retreat of the Little Ice Age – together with population growth, legal reforms regarding property rights, and new agricultural technologies – enabled grain cultivation to spread into previously unused lands. He demonstrates how this process reassembled social relations. Pastoralists lost access to grazing lands; some Tahtacıs entered wage labor; land-poor cultivators became tenants or sharecroppers. Chapter 6 presents the cotton boom generated by the American Civil War as a contingent conjuncture. It argues that Western Anatolia’s advantage over Cilicia rested on its greater supply of labor, processing capacity, transportation network, and port-based merchant connections. The boom therefore depended also on immigrant smallholders, seed programs, local entrepreneurs, ginning technology, and railways (pp. 135–149). Yet state and merchant attempts to extend the cotton frontier remained constrained by rainfall, frost, soil moisture, varietal differences, pests, and seed-pod behavior. As İnal writes, “the boundaries of cotton were later determined by humans as much as by the nature of the plant itself” (pp. 140–144).
Chapter 7 illustrates the reciprocity of the gateway model. İnal shows how the clearing of hillside forests and scrub, along with the extension of the railroad network, made room for expanding vineyards and fig orchards. The chapter also demonstrates that European demand for seedless raisins shaped the grape varieties cultivated, while sorting, grading, and destination-specific packing labor undertaken mainly by women and children standardized the fruit and made it a marketable commodity. İnal here strikingly highlights how the initial failure to cultivate the Smyrna fig successfully in California until its pollinating wasp was imported reveals the limits that ecological specificity imposed on the abstractions of commodity exchange.
Chapter 8 shifts the focus back to İzmir, showing how the relationship between the agricultural hinterland and global markets materialized in urban space. Agricultural expansion reshaped warehouses, financial institutions, manufacturing districts, and the city’s social geography, culminating in the construction of the modern quay and the diversion of the Gediz River. Because sediment carried by the Gediz threatened to silt up the gulf and isolate İzmir from the sea, the river was diverted to preserve access to the port (pp. 187–190). Also, the waterfront development created new commercial areas that supported the movement, storage, and export of commodities (pp. 181–187). Within this framework, the chapter demonstrates that gateway formation depended on the engineering of urban space and the remaking of ecologies.
Taken as a whole, the book’s breadth is one of its most impressive features. It provides valuable insights across fields such as political economy, labor history, mobility and migration studies, environmental history, animal history, and the history of science and technology. İnal meticulously navigates among crops, animals, migrants, workers, infrastructure, legal systems, ecological processes, and investment networks, preventing the book from devolving into isolated case studies. The result is a detailed and ambitious narrative of how a gateway city was formed. Because the book succeeds on multiple levels, it naturally raises questions that highlight the project’s scope and ambition as productive limits. The first concerns mobility. Although the book repeatedly notices blocked or coerced movement, such as impassable roads, confiscated passports, environmental constraints, and urban bottlenecks, these episodes remain analytically dispersed. A more sustained account of uneven mobility and immobility could have questioned whose movement the gateway accelerated, who or what it detained, and how these experiences were connected. The gateway would then appear not only as a channel of circulation but as an apparatus that distributed speed, delay, access, and immobility unevenly.
The second reservation concerns environmental ontology. The distinction between first and second nature helps İnal illustrate transformations associated with railways and capitalist markets. Yet İnal’s claim that first and second nature become blended does not resolve the problem, because blending still presupposes two distinguishable orders (p. 86). The distinction, therefore, locates human histories within “second nature” and the multiplicity of more-than-human causalities, agencies, and actions within “first nature.” Describing the two as blended may acknowledge their historical entanglement, but it still risks reproducing the nature–culture divide by treating them as separate domains that enter into relation only afterward. By the nineteenth century, Western Anatolia was already a historical socio-ecology shaped by cultivation, grazing, mobility, animal labor, and the state. The book’s own evidence, I would argue, points toward a more fully relational ontology.
The final reservation concerns a causal asymmetry in the book’s political economy. İnal reconstructs internal dynamics with considerable empirical precision. Yet when the narrative explains why particular transformations occurred when they did and acquired the scale they did, causal weight repeatedly shifts toward external forces. Internal dynamics, consequently, sometimes appear as the mechanisms through which external factors operate. This is not just a limitation of İnal’s study. As empirically grounded scholarship on Ottoman political economy expands, it may become possible to write Ottoman capitalism more fully on its own terms. These reservations do not diminish the book’s accomplishment. İnal offers a compelling history of gateway formation and a framework for reconsidering other Ottoman port cities.
