Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires
This book explores the various ways imperial rule constituted and shaped the cities of Eastern Europe until World War I in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires.
In these three empires, the cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served as the stages where the empire was displayed in monumental architecture and public rituals. To this day, many cities possess a distinctively imperial legacy in the form of material remnants, groups of inhabitants, or memories that shape the perceptions of in- and outsiders. The contributions to this volume address in detail the imperial entanglements of a dozen cities from a long-term perspective reaching back to the eighteenth century. They analyze the imperial capitals as well as smaller cities in the periphery. All of them are "imperial cities" in the sense that they possess traces of imperial rule. By comparing the three empires of Eastern Europe this volume seeks to establish commonalities in this particular geography and highlight trans-imperial exchanges and entanglements.
This volume is essential reading to students and scholars alike interested in imperial and colonial history, urban history, and European history.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Ulrich Hofmeister is a historian at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he leads a research project on Russian city planning during the eighteenth century. His research interests include the imperial history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as well as Russian urban history. He has published a monograph on Russian notions of an imperial civilizing mission in Central Asia (Die Bürde des Weißen Zaren, 2019).
Florian Riedler is the scientific coordinator of the research network Transottomanica at the University of Leipzig, Germany. His research interests include Ottoman urban history, migration and mobility studies, and the history of infrastructure in the Ottoman Balkans. Among his latest publications is the co-edited volume The Balkan Route: Historical Transformations from Via Militaris to Autoput, 2021.