Europeanised city quarters were built as didactic political models for empires

Evidence

The similarity between the world exhibition and the new cities of the Middle East and North Africa was nothing accidental, nor did it go unnoticed by local writers. Both the exhibition and the city were built as political expressions, didactic in style, and both demanded the individual to be an awed and curious spectator, a tourist in need of a political guide and a map. There were many particular similarities. In the case of Istanbul, the first Middle Eastern capital to construct a large Europeanised quarter, the new city was expressly intended to be a ‘model’ for the rest of the Ottoman world – and its construction was supervised by Sadatlu Kamil Bey, who had acquired his experience by supervising the construction of the Ottoman exhibit at the Paris World Exhibition. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 503

Categorization

• SHARE: Sadatlu Kamil Bey’s career — building the Ottoman exhibit at the Paris World Exhibition and then supervising Istanbul’s European quarter — is a perfect nerd-sniper for anyone interested in exhibition history or Ottoman modernism.