l' 1

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Urban Coriflagration and the Making qf the Modern World

Edited by

GREG BANKOFF

UwE LüBKEN

JoRDAN SAND

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part,

through support from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.,

and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich, Germany.

The University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 uwpress. wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street

London WC2E8LU, England

eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright © 2012

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Ali rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University

of Wisconsin Press, cxcept in the case ofbrief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flammable cities: Urban conflagration and the making of the modem world 1 edited by Greg BankofT, Uwe Lübken, andjordan Sand.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-o-299-28384-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-o-299-28383-4 (e-book) 1. Fires. 2. Fires - History.

I. BankofT, Greg. II. Lübkcn, Uwe. III. Sand,J ordan.

TH9448.F59 2012

363-37og - dc22

2011011572

CoNTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART r: CrTIEs AS FrRE REGIMES

2

3

4

5

Jan van der Heyden and the Origins of Modem Firefighting: Art and Technology in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam

SusAN DoNAHUE KuRETSKY

Governance, Arson, and Firefighting in Edo, I6oo-I868

JORDAN SAND and STEVEN WILLS

Taming Fire in Valparaiso, Chile, I84os- I87os SAMUEL j. MARTLAND

The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, J865- 187o

CORNEL ZWIERLEIN

Imperial Russia's Urban Fire Regimes, I700-I905 CATHY A. FRIERSON

6 Fighting Fires (or Not) in Porfirian Mexico AMY s. GREENBERG

PART 2: FrRE AS RrsK AND AS A CATALYST

OF CHANGE

7 The Great Fire ofLisbon, 1755

8 MARK MOLESKY

A Tale ofTwo Cities: The Pyro-Seismic Morphology ofNineteenth-Century Manila

GREG BANKOFF

v

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3

23

44

63

82

126

147

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rB

Contents

Fire and Urban Morphogenesis: Patterns of Destruction

and Reconstruction in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

jASON GILLILAND

The Great Fire ofHamburg, 1842: From Catastrophe

to Reform DIRK ScHUBERT

Did the Fire Insurance Industry Help Reduce Urban Fires

in the United States in the Nineteenth Century? SARA E. WERM!EL

Inflaming the Fears ofTheatergoers: How Fires Shaped the Public Sphere in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I88o-I9IO

KRISTEN McCLEARY

Points of Origin: The Social Impact of the 1906

San Francisco Earthquake and Fire ANDREA REES DAVIES

THE Pouncs oF FIRE

The Politics ofSingapore's Fire Narrative NANCY H . KwAK

The Beirut Central District on Fire: Firefighting in a Divided City with Shifting Front Lines, 1975-1976

SoFIA TouFIC SHWAYRI

Who Burned Cleveland, Ohio? The Forgotten Fires

ofthe 1970s DANIEL KERR

"There Is More to This Fire Than Meets the Eye": Anatomy ofFire Outbreaks in Lagos, Nigeria, I980-2008

AvoDEJI ÜLUKOJU

Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary

Jakarta jÉRÔME TADIÉ

Afterword: Fire on the Fringe STEPHEN J. PYNE

Contributors

Index

190

212

235

254

273

295

332

353

372

390

397 401

AcKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank severa! people and institutions whose help and support was crucial for this project. The German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC, sponsored and hosted the conference out ofwhich this volume ultirnately grew. ChristofMauch, director of the GHI at the time of

the conference, supported this project from the first moment he heard aboutit and encouraged us to move forward. This support was continued by the GHI's current director, Hartmut Berghoff, and its senior editor, David Lazar.

Without the help of Christa Brown and Barbe! Thomas we would not have been able to overcome the logistical challenges that the organization of such an international conference poses. To ail ofthese people we are truly grateful.

During the conference, John McNeill, Georgetown University, not only

offered valuable critical comments from which ali participants benefited but also managed to combine participation in the conference with his duties as a

basketball coach. We are indebted and grateful, of course, to ali the participants of the conference for two da ys oflively discussion in a stirnulating atmosphere.

Finally, we would like to than.k the anonymous reviewers who recommended the publication of this book, and especially to express our appreciation to Gwen Walker and ail the editorial staff at the University ofWisconsin Press who have made this collection a much better book, the publication of which has been

generously supported by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.

Vil

The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, J86s-187o

CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

In the postcolonial theoretical debate, it has beco~e comrnon t? .po~tulate the

diversity of modernity, to seek and find multiple modermt1es mstead of searching for the spread of a single European/Western modernity .1 The re is not just one way to modernity; there are many ways to and also many kinqs of modernity, even if in sorne respects it may be possible to detect an accidentai, factual precedence of Europe. On the other hand, post·postcolonial questions have meanwhile been raised as to whether it may no longer be possible to take seriously any historical perceptions of differences in "development" or "civiliza­tion."2 Are we not allowed to postulate that a city which is constandy threatened by the danger of a total conflagration is not a modern city? Lionel Frost and Eric Jones, economie historians untroubled by postcolonial reflections, suggested in 1989 such a relationship between the (Western) modernity of a city and its vulnerability to great conflagrations: modern cities in their perspective belong to the realm of the opened "fire gap," where the paradoxical discrepancy between the buge explosion of population in the nineteenth century and the decreasing risk of big conflagrations appeared.3 Lionel Frost and Eric Jones do not set out to define the term "modernity"; they just speak of the growth of "durability" of nineteenth century cities. By also including Third World cities

The Burning of a Modern City?

in their reflections, however, they clarify that by analyzing the emergence of the "fire gap" they intend to treat a very general, perhaps universal division between preindustrial and "modern" cities. Surely fire resistance will never be the only criterion ofmodernity, and there were also premodern cities that did not burn extensively, but the common experience of Western cities is that m.,Yor conflagrations do not happen anymore, if we exclude slum fires, times of war, and post-earthquake lires. So at a fust look, the occurrence or nonoccurrence of a major conflagration seems to be today an-horribile dictu-objective yardstick to "measure" the modernity of cities. This, however, does not exclu de the possibility that ifwe find in nineteenth-century sources derivations ofthat yardstick applied by Western observers and travelers in their description of non-Western and colonial cities, we are facing classical "Orientalist" modes of perceiving.

By taking up the issue of the relationship between "modernity" and the fire

history of cities with regard to Istanbul in the years 1864-70,1 will show how we cannot escape this double problem ofjudging the modern character of cities by their exposure or nonexposure to conflagration risk either toda y, ex post, and in the nineteenth century, ex ante. I use for this purpose archivai material from the Sun Fire Office, the biggest British fire insurance company at that tirne. Ulrich Beek employs the question ofinsurability by private insurance companies as a litmus test to differentiate between the epochs of fust and second modernity.4 Historically, the first decisive issue is how the agents of an insurance company specifically inscribed this border between insurability and uninsurability into the city space as a border between areas, between cultures, and between pre­modernity and modernity.

The fire his tory of Middle Eastern cities is seldom treated explicitly as a distinct research topic. Besicles the still-irnportant study of Zeynep Çelik on the planning and building history of modern Istanbul, which gives the role of conflagrations substantial treatment, recent publications treat only the earl y modern fire history of Istanbul and Damascus.5 Until now, fire insurance archivai material has not been used in this field of research. Those sources will reveal also a possible double significance: on the one hand, it is mate rial to be used for the reconstruction of-in our case- lstanbul's lire history itself: as the insurance agents provided themselves with local information, their records sometirnes allow an even denser description of "what really happened" than the material Çelik had at hand. On the other hand, a good part of the material to be presented here is deeply saturated with a British Orientalist perspective on the Near East in the nineteenth century, and we can detect in it the early application of the "fire-safety yardstick"-and its failure because of certain

CoRNEL ZwrERLEIN

autosuggestive overestimations of the achieved modernity of the so-called

European part oflstanbul.

Urban Reform in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul

Istanbul-or Constantinople, as it was always called in English sources­underwent rapid population growth in the nineteenth century: in 1840 it had about 40o,ooo inhabitants; in 1886 in the official census 873,000 inhabitants were counted, 44 percent Muslims, 17-5 percent Greeks, 17.1 percent Annenians, 5.1 percentJews, and 15.3 percent foreigners. So the balance between Muslim and non-Muslim population was equal.6 While the population of the Stamboul quarter was mainly Muslirn, non-Muslims lived mostly in the quarters of Galata and Pera on the other side of the Golden Horn. The Ottoman Empire opened up to Western influence on an economie and a general cultural leve! at the end of the 183os: An Ottoman-British commercial treaty was established in 1838 and followed by treaties with other nations.7 On November 3, 1839, Sultan Abdül Mecit (r. 1839-61), with the assistance of the European ambassadors, proclaimed a decree (Hatti ~erif) making the politics of opening to Western influences official and declared himself as an enlightened emperor: the so-called Tanzimatperiod ofreforms and approximation to the West had started. One of the first acts by the grand vezir Mustafa Rqit Pa§a was to charge the German Helmut von Moltke with outlining a renovation scheme for the whole city. Moltke started by drafting a plan of the city at the standards ofhighly developed contemporary German cartography, which, even though his project to irnprove the street network was ultimately not implemented, remained the central starting

point for further projects. Throughout the r84os and r85os, the aims and the general direction of urban reform in a Western direction were somewhat unclear, as Christoph Neumann has pointed out: "ln the r8sos the radical restructuring of European metropoles had only begun. ln 1853 Georg Eugène Haussmann had been appointed prefect of Paris. The demolition of the Vienna city walls and the construction of the RingstraBe, which usually are taken to signifY the starting point of the reshaping of modern Vienna, happened only in 1858. So Istanbul invented its own modernity at the same time as the other European capitals. The provisory intizam-1 ~ehir Komisyonu (Commission for Urban Order) had no money, no executive powers, and no mode! to imitate."8 Thus, at first glanee, Istanbul seems to have stood on equal terms with northern

European cities.

The Burning of a Modern City?

The pilot quarter oflstanbul urban reform was the Sixth Municipal District (Altmc1 Daire-1 Belediye) created by statute on December 28, 1857. lt was to be one offourteen new districts oflstanbul yet to be founded, but the number six was also assigned to it with allusion to the famous Parisian quartier sixième, which figured also as a pilot district in Paris. The Sixth Municipal District was formed by the quarters of Galata and Pera/Beyoglu, it was a structure of self­government with its own right to determine budget and taxation and two official languages, French and Turkish-and in practice, French dominated. Galata and Pera were the old Genoese quarters oflstanbul where rich European merchants and bankers lived. The administration of the district was composed of a director and eight regular and four consultant members. They belonged mostly to the thin non-Muslim upper class of the trade and finance sector of Galata and Pera, including such men as Antoine Alléon, Avram Camondo, Cermanos Hawa, and the English banker Charles S. Hanson, the last of whom played an important role in the foundation of the Ottoman State Bank.9 In

186o the self-government institution of the Sixth District had seventy-seven employees under contract. Its task was foremost the reordering of the city­scape: the council planned and enlarged what was known as the "Grand rue," built a plaza in Karakdy, widened the streets between that plaza and the Tophane and between the old Unkapam and the new Galata bridge, adapted the canal system, and introduced street lighting. Under the rule of the future mayor of all oflstanbul, Server Efendi, it decided to demolish the Galata city walls in r863-65 and started a cadastral survey. The city experienced "from r865 to r86g ... the most active phase of urban planning" in the nineteenth century.1o Many foreign architects collaborated in the reshaping oflstanbul-and especially of Galata and Pera-in diverse European styles mixed with a new Orientalist style. 11 As the records of the Sun Fire Office show, the progressive administra­tion of the Sixth District also introduced the maintenance of certain statistics, indu ding statistics on fires and buildings damaged by fire. In 1868 the successful administration scheme of the Six th District was to be transferred to the city as a whole, but this attempt failed. ln 1870 the districts were reorganized under the more direct rule of the Istanbul mayoralty known as the §ehremaneti.

As Çelik has shown, fires and conflagrations played a crucial role in the process of urban reform: they provided the modernizers accidentally but efficiently with tabula rasa zones on which to work. Between 1633 and 1839 109 large fires were recorded, and 229 between 1853 and 1906: "Major fire therefore played the greatest rote in the transformation of the urban fabric." 12

86 CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

But despite ail the elements of urban reform, in the outside perception, the

horror of these frequent conflagrations prevailed; they were interpreted as de ar signs of the backwardness of the city. Among world metropolises, Istanbul

seemed to be one of the most vulnerable to fires. The British au thor Edward Lear gives a good example ofthat perception. ln 1848 he wrote to his sister Ann describing a fire that destroyed three hundred bouses in Pera prior to its election as a part of the Sixth District: "The bouses feil crash, crash, crash, as the fire

swept on nearer & nearer." He introduced this personal impression with a general remark on the conflagrations in Istanbul: "1 must now devote a word to conflagra­tion general & especial. Y ou know that nearly ail the bouses in Constantinople are of wood-and you may have heard of the frequency offires, & their extent, but you will not be surprised to hear that since I came-(Aug 1st) there have been 8 dreadful burnings-the !east of which destroyed 6o, & the largest 5,000 bouses-and reduced hundreds and thousands to wretchedness." 13 The high frequency and the scale of fires in Istanbul made a strong, nearly shocking impression on the Englishrnan. In this city, opening up to Western, "moder~" influences but still burning frequently, the British fire insurance compames

tried to establish business.

The Sources of the Sun Fire Office

Un til the nineteenth century, the British fire insurance companies had conducted their business almost exclusively in the British Isles. The Phoenix Assurance Company had been the first to draw up policies outside Europe, beginning in

the United States between 1782 and 1785, and it soon built a network of agents predominantly within the British Empire. Other British fire insurance c~mpanies emulated the Phoenix. The oldest still in operation and the largest fire msurance

company, the Sun Fire Office, was relative! y late to follow this exa":ple." Its first decision to expand was taken in 1836, but the drive toward globahzauon only made a lasting impact from about 1850, at the same time as the rest of the

insurance market. 14

Besicles business balances, management minutes, and sorne correspondence,

a very precious genre of sources for observing the globalization of this business can be found in the archives of the Sun Fire Office: the so-cailed memorandum books. Running to roughly three hundred volumes, each with sorne two hundred to four hundred pages consisting of detailed reports on foreign agencies, these describe, inter alia, the extent oflocal fire insurance, fire brigade provision, and

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The Burning of a Modern City?

recent notable fires. Usuaily the volumes were compiled following the inspection

of an agency by visiting members of the Foreign Departrnent (often by Francis Boyer Relton, foreign clerk since 1837 and foreign superintendent from r868 to 1873, and George Sa ward Man vell, foreign clerk since r864 and foreign super­in tendent from 1873 to the r88os). Along with handwritten analyses by the men at the place and by the members of the Foreign Department in London, the volumes often con tain sketch plans, photographs, newspaper clippings, printed circulars, and statistics. Those volumes functioned as a sort of steadily growing

special encyclopedia and in-house knowledge resource for the London head­quarters of the company. It was strategie knowledge about the hundreds of places on the globe where the insurance company was active, a form of global economie memory. They were used by P. G. M. Dickson in his monograph on

the Sun lnsurance Office, but they still contain a huge bulk of unused material.IS The age ney made them accessible to the public in 1994 when they were handed over to the Guildhall Library in London. The ten volumes on Constantinople form the core of sources on which this essay draws.lG

The Installation of the Sun Insurance Company in Constantinople

Istanbul was not one of the first cities in which the Sun was active outside Europe.17 The previously mentioned Ottoman-British commercial treaty of

1838 and the political reformist tendency of the Tanzimat after 1839, however, as weil as the construction of the first railway line in the Ottoman Empire, the

British-built izmir-Aydm tine begun in 1856, created new interest in the Ottoman Empire among London business circles. The Sun acquired an agent in the

economie center of izmir/Smyrna in r863, three years before the opening of the railway line; from there the most important cities of the Middle East were

opened up for European commerce, with Istanbul/Constantinople leading the way from r864 onward.

Injune r864, the company sent an employee named Woods to Constan­tinople to draw up an analysis of where and how it could install itself in the city. lB Other insurance companies were also considering starting business in Constantinople (the Imperial, the North British and Mercantile, and the Royal). The introduction ofthese insurance companies at this time shows that enterprises in London hoped to participate profitably in the general process of economie and cultural development. Woods was able to acquire sorne lùstorical and current

88 CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

statistical material concerning the frequency offires. For example, he found a list, of unknown origin, oflarge fires in the eighteenth century, which should

really have made a fire insurer queasy right from the start: 19

1729

1745 1749-50

1750 1751

1756 1756july

1761

1765 1767 1769 1771

!778 1782 Feb

June August

1784 1791 March &July

1792

1795 1799 Pera

12,000 Houses

Fire 5 days 12,000 Houses 10,000 [Houses]

4,ooo [Houses] 500 [Houses)

15,ooo [Houses] large Fire [large Fire] [large Fire]

[large Fire] [large Fire] 2,ooo Houses 6oo Houses

7,ooo [Houses] 10,000 [Houses]

50 Masques 100 Corn mills

w,ooo Houses 32,000 [Houses)

7,000 [Houses] 7,ooo [Houses] 1,8oo Houses & other Buildings

Second, with regard to recent years, he found a record of 13,750 ho uses burned

clown in the district ofPera from 1841 to 1848.2° For the last four years, 1859 to

1862, Woods managed to find an exact statistic recorded by the reformed city

administration of the Sixth District (Galata and Pera), in which "only" 337 houses were listed as having been destroyed by fire. This induded a detailed description of their construction and of the destroyed and rebuilt areas, with the conclusion that this district had ultimately grown as a result ofthese fires .21

Thus it is clear that contemporary observers themselves recognized the produc­

tive effect of the fires. At the same time, however, the uncontrollable character of the fires made

observers insecure about the city. Woods himself, in the short time he spent in

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The Burning of a Modern City? 89

Figure 4·'- "Typical Wooden houses in the Stamboul district of Istanbul." (LMA CLC/BIIg2/o rg/3I522/259, p. 121. Reproduced by permission of RSA Insurance Group PLC and London Metropolitan Archives, City of London Corporation.)

Constantinople, witnessed a fire irr the old town that "within 3 hours burnt out 500 families, about 300 houses, 8o of these families were Greeks."22 Woods makes observations about the firefighting techniques of the Ottomans: the dry or demolition extinguishing technique of the Turks, which chiefly emailed pulling clown houses and only to a secondary extent the use of relative! y ineffective small portable water syrirrges, seemed to hirn backward and inefficient, and he

urged the managers to establish a company tire brigade thar relied more on water hoses. 23 We find also photographs of typical wooden houses in the Stamboul district oflstanbul that showed the London managers how vulnerable th ose streets must have be en to fires (fig. 4.1 ). 24

Only the Sixth District, the area of the city elected for modernization, seemed to be a secure starting point for insurance business. Woods provided himselfwith a German map of the Sixth District drafted in r861 by C. Stolpe (with German and French inscriptions). Already irr the original print, "Muslim"

go CoRNEL ZwrERLEIN

Figure 4.2. Map used by Woods to separate insurable (clark areas) from uninsu_r~ble blocks of bouses; the mar king of Christian quarters and Muslim ones appear m the ong~nal print. (LMA CLC/B!Ig2/0igl3152'21257, Appendix. Reproduced by permission of~SA Insurance Group PLC and London Metropolitan Archives, City of London CorporatiOn.)

and "Christian" blocks of streets were divided visu ally by color according to the habituai division that reigned in the city.25 Woods now walked through the

whole district, analyzed ali the streets, and marked in the blocks where the building stock was in his opinion good enough to be insurable; in any case this

only applied to Christian blocks accordingto Woods.26 In Pera and in Galata ­in the latter quarter, nearly ali ho uses were built of stone-he applied yet another

criterion of discrimination: "1 have rejected these portions of Galata & Pera where there is either a great mass of very inferior wooden buildings or where the Houses, stone or wooden, are devoted to drunkeness [sic] or debauchery­for the former reason 1 have omitted to color nearly the whole of the district which lies on the north si de of the Grande Rue de Pera for the latter reason, 1 have

omitted several blocks which are en tire! y given up to people of bad character."27

The heuristics of insurability th us spatially extract the supposedly secure

Christian-European, stone-built, and morally civilized "modernity" from the closely contiguous plurality of"nationalities," cultures, and in sorne respects even "epochs." In an anonymous newspaper clipping glued into the memorandum books, "street scenes in Constantinople" are narrated by describing "Turks with turbans and modern Turks with no trace of garb to distinguish them from the Giaour save the scarlet fez" together with Albanians,Jews, Maltese, Frankish

The Burning of a Modern City? gr

merchants, English sailors, and German clerks.28 Another clipping states that

there "must be deeper changes going on below the surface of Turkish social !ife" and describes "modern Turkish merchant[s]" as looking like Parisians, not like an "Oriental elder."29 Such was the European press's perception of the Tanzimat reforms, but in the end, after Woods's report, the London headquarters reached the following judgment: "ln Stamboul, the old regime intractable Turks are ruling- Kismet renders them indifferent to ali things."30 The decision about whether houses were "insurable or not" (fig. 4.2) th us reflects the insurance agents' views ofwhat Edhem Eldem has calied "the cultural and mental divide of tradition/ modernity" in the character of the "physical topography of the

city." As Eldem has shown, the city seemed to be divided into "modem" districts and "islands of tradition" or of "exoticism. "31

The Hokapa~a Fire of1865 and the Pera Fire of187o

The size of the eighteenth-century tires listed in the table above showed how cautiously one had to proceed in Istanbul: that century saw the equivalent of ten tires the size of the famous Great Fire of London of r666 (in which ca. twelve thousand bouses were destroyed)-fires that are almost unknown in European historical memory.32 Only a year after Woods's report, in r865, severa! severe tires were observed, including a fire on August ro during which the old Seraglio Palace was largely destroyed. Thenon September s-6 came the largest

frre in Istanbul's old town. Early, high estimations cite 8,ooo destroyed buildings; later estimations indicate 2,744, including r,879 residential buildings and 751 shops.33 On the occurrence of this fire, the English newspapers gleefully made comparisons with the double catastrophe in London of r66s/ r666: just as then, in early September, the Great Fire had followed the terrible plague epidemie, in Constantinople a large cholera epidemie had preceded the present fire. The comparisons unambiguously suggested that the condition of Constantinople in matters of firefighting and administration was likewise "two hundred years

behind";jokes were made about the small handheld water syringes carried by running soldiers, which were described as more appropria te to Oriental folklore and compared with the English fire-extinguishing techniques of the seventeenth century.34

In the British newspapers, which the Sun employees searched for clippings to be glued into the memorandum books, grand urban planning visions à la Haussmann were immediately kindled, which could now be implemented in the burned-down areas oflstanbul; sorne observers even expressed regret that

CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

more of the city had not fallen victim to the ftames. Other voices in turn morally reprimanded the cynicism of th ose who looked over the heads of the ruined population "to fondle future landscapes from imaginary minarets."35 In fact, the rebuilding commission worked relatively successfully W1til186g. The Western attitude of disdain toward the situation of the Muslim and Armenian parts of town was an easy one to adopt because the fire had broken out in "one of the most crowded and dirty districts of the old city" in which a majority of buildings were still made of wood. 36 By the same token, it was imagined that the "pro­fessedly better-off quarter of Pera" was far superior in comparison: while three large insurance companies (Royal, Imperial, Sun) had been operating in Pera and Galata for two years, they would "naturally shrink from having anything to do with wooden-built StambouJ."37

Almost five years later, however, observers were disabused of this notion by a conflagration in Pera itself, when on June 5, 1870, around eight thousand houses burned clown and sorne 1,300 people died-in those areas in which stone housing was already dominant and which Woods had counted among the "insurable."38 In the live years since establishment of the insurance offices in Istanbul, however, only a few houses had yet been insured, so that the first estimations of the amou nt of loss to the insurers (;(go,ooo Royal, [25,000

Imperial, [26,ooo Sun) came to only a minimal value in comparison with the

estimated total damage of ;[6 to 7 million. In fact, only twenty of the ho uses insured by the Sun were affected, with a damage amount of [17,174 (fig. 4-3).39 Again, the British commentators lamented the deficient fire brigades; an en­graving in a British newspaper at the time of the Pera fire of187o, which is to be found in the Sun memorandum books (fig. 4·4), looks like the exact visualization of a similarly Orientalist description of the Galata fire brigade by Edmondo de Amicis in his Constantinople(1878):

Tulumbadgi! Firemen-cried one of the watchmen on the bridge. We drew on

one side. A horde of half-naked savages, with bare heads, and hairy breasts,

reeking with sweat, old and young, blacks, dwarfs, and hirsute giants, with such

faces as we are wont to assign to assassins and thieves, four ofwhom bore upon

the ir shoulders a small engine or pump, that looked like a child's bier; armed

with long hooked poles, coils of rope, axes, and picks, they passed before us,

shrieking and yelling, with dilated eyes, flying hair, and trailing rags.40

After the Pera fire again, urban planning visions were kindled on this scorched tabula rasa; most of these, however, were never carried out, and the special administration of the Sixth District was disbanded again in the same year as

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Figure 4·3· Fire damage area in Pera 1870, contemporary map. (LMA CLC/Birg2/oig/31522126o, p. '49· Reproduced by permission of RSA Insurance Group PLC and London Metropolitan Archives City of London Corporation.) '

Figure 4:4· Turkish fire runners with hand.held water syringes. (Engraving from Bnllsh newspaper, 1870, in LMA CLC/Bhg2/0ig/3I522h6I, p. II.

Reproduced by permission of RSA Insurance Group PLC and London Metropolitan Archives, City of London Corporation.)

94 CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

the fire.41 The rebuilding of Pera proceeded haltingly. Comparisons were made with Chicago, which also bumed dawn in 1870: thirty months after that fire eighteen thousand houses had been rebuilt there ("1 house rebuilt eve?' hour, exclusive ofSundays"), while in Pera, after forty-seven months, only SIX

hundred had been rebuilt ("1 house rebuilt every 56 Y, hours").42 While the Westernjournalists presented a view ofChicago's fire as a massive side effect of the equally massive growth of a previously unknown type of modern city, Pera's fire became for them a clear indicator of the limited modernization

capacity ofits city.43 •

The sober figures of the insurance company reveal that the Pera busmess was un profitable in the end. But at first, right after the fire, the agents in Smyrna, Henry & Rose, had still judged conflagrations to be "quite an exceptional occurrence" and "the field of insurance in Constantinople" as now "favorable for operations," since, in the insurers' experience, there was always a rush to acquire insurance policies immediately after a conflagration, while the popul~­tion still felt terror in their bones.44 And indeed, the insurance company d1d

seem to profit at first: the su~ insured soared from [146,176 in 1869 to more than ten times that sum (,{;1,554,247) within four years after the Pera fire. Mter a further year of extensive damage (1874), however, it decreased to half this maximum rate by 1879. Mter fifteen years of activity in Constantinople, the

total premium revenue of 1865-79 was only minimally higher than the sum of damages paid out (approx. [76,750 to [74,434).45 The high fire risk of ~he city was therefore reflected in what was, after initial attempts, a defensive underwriting strategy. Policies were signed for only a few "European" "good risks," and the business was oflow profitability. Also there was no expansively growing market as in North American cities; even after the revolution of 1908,

a further conflagration occurred in rg18, burning dawn over seven thousand

houses.

Fires and Orientalist Perceptions

Fires seem to have be en an endemie, progress-inhibiting problem of the city, rather than an opportunity-or if the latter, then only in the rnicro-arena of a collective form of action taken by ethnie groups and religious communities, who had made the endemie aspect of this situation a fairly constant factor in the calculations of their mode of building and living. Marc David Baer has shown how, in the case ofConstantinople's largest fire in 166o (28o,ooo houses destroyed, 4o,ooo deaths), previously Christian andjewish properties were

The Burning of a Modern City? 95

Islamicized by the Ottoman Porte in the rebuilding process.46 Similarly, the

great fire of june 4, 1696, at Galata was perceived as a punishment from God for the "blasphemy, impiety, superstition, idolatry, and adultery" of the Jews and Christians who had taken possession of many houses in the quarter. The sultan ordered the confiscation of ail burned Christian andJewish houses to Islamicize the area.H But about two hundred years later, Woods perceived an opposite tendency after the many "small" fires affecting sorne hundreds of houses in Istanbul, in a similarly plural ethnie and religious situation -the active protagonist here was not, however, the state, whose Western-oriented urban concepts did not have a real! y comprehensive effect, but rather the collectives of "nations" or "millets": "The Fires appear to act as the Pioneers of other Nationalities & amongst the Turks. The Turks allow theJews to settle amongst them, & theJews do not abject to Greeks amongst themselves, so by degrees the Quarter becomes a mixedjewish & Greek quarter & these two nations side by side help one another to shoulder out the Turk. Other nations eventually inhabit the ceded Quarter, & so the whole ofStamboul seems likely to undergo intime a total change."48 If even at a time of catastrophe the differences between the "nationalities" did not disappear, for the insurance agents the knowledge of these local differences, customs, and also the variousjurisdictions within this barely comprehensible city were important. Accordingly, they sent to their headquarters, as weil as purely statistical material and information about building stock, cultural information about the ethnie, religious, and national plurality in Constantinople.49 However, this information was on a rudimentary leve! that did little to alter the strongly Western, Orientalist point of view.

Thus, in Woods's report, "nationality" refers, on the one hand, to the "millets," the officially recognized, corporately composed groups of non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and, on the other hand, to citizens of European countries. There is an explicit reference, for example, to a consequence of the Greek national struggle for freedom of 1821: the houses, shops, and goods belonging to Greeks- who had settled there largely under Selim III (1762-1808, governed 1789- 1807)-had been beset in a pogrom-like manner during the Greek uprisings in Constantinople. ln reaction to this, a large nu rn ber of the rich Greek traders had adopted a new nationality (French, Austrian, English, or Russian) in arder to enjoy the corresponding legal protection. Here, therefore, there was a leap- from one street to the next-from the old confessional "millet" corporation/nationality to a nationality in the state system of the modern era. ln the mid- to late nineteenth century, then, in spite of simultaneously occurring processes of nationalization, the premodern concept of natio was here still inter­woven with the modern concept of nation. 50

g6 CoRNEL ZwrERLEIN

When considering the facts and these British perceptions of lstanbul's fire history, one might at first conclude-unless one dismisses everything observed, including the fire data and the photographs of the fire scenes of r86s-r87o, as distorted-that Istanbul was not yet a "modern" city, ifwe apply the yardstick of the absence oflarge fires. "Safety" and "modernity" had not yet come into equilibrium in Constantinople: the existent forms of modern planning, modern self-refiection, and a modern beliefin progress, which were inherent in the process of urban reform, did not result in durable fire safety. Elements of"premodernity" and "modernity" were interwoven here on the materiallevel ofbuilding stock just as they were on the confessional, ethnie, and nationallevel. Const~ntinople did not yet pass the li tm us test of fire safety; it still stood on the wrong s1de of the "fire gap."51 And that yardstick was applied already by the insurance agents of Sun, who divided the city into spaces of insurability and of noninsurability, dividing as such also between Western modernity and non-Western-Muslim,

Greek, Armenian, andjewish-backwardness. On another leve!, however, it is necessary to question the perceptions of the

Sun agents and their London headquarters and of British journalists. Clearly, the images of Ottoman firefighters running barefoot formed part of the pictur­esque image of the Orient from the colonial perspective, real! y a classical Orientalist perception in the sense of Edward Said.52 But the analytic categories of the Sun agents were themselves remarkably simply constructed. Woods's

conviction that it would be possible to carry out a profitable insurance trade in the Sixth District if only the spatial demarcation made was sufficiently accurate because that district was the newly elected "modern," "European" part of the

town, proved in the space of six years to be completely untrue. The map ~awn up by Woods functioned as an instrument of orientation in tracing, to the mch, the spatial separation between "premodernity" and "modernity." But this attempt was a failure; it was an unfounded suggestion of planning security

fostered by the self-proclaimed modernity of Galata and Pera. The pointis therefore not only that the Christian part of town was wrongly

categorized here as "modern," while, from the British perspective, this part of town too should have been categorized as "premodern." The pointis rather to analyze the British perceptual models in a far more general way. lndeed, with hindsight it is astonishing how little the globalization of a company such as Sun in the second half of the nineteentl1 century was carried out on the basis of what can be deemed "scientific rationality," for example, by means of reliable fire­statistical advance calculations, which one would imagine to be among the elements of a Weberian "rational modernity." Instead, this globalization took place in the form of a massive trial-and-error process. It was not un til twenty

The Burning of a Modern City? 97

years after their installation in numerous cities of the colonial world that the insurance companies had gathered enough data to enable them even to compare global differences in fi.re risk. This was possible by means of the so-called loss ratio, the relationship between premium revenues and damages paid out in any given city. 53 This revealed that the most profitable cities did have a very high loss ratio of about 6o percent, forexample, New York and also Hamburg. Here, there were frequent fires, but- with the exception of the Ham burg fire of 1842-these fires could usually be localized, so that although the damage amounts paid were considerable, the business remained profitable because the constanùy high fire risk also compelled city dwellers to take out fire insurance policies. But Istanbul was marked by a loss ratio of 97 percent; that is, the insurance company there was taking a Joss, taking into account the agency's business expenses. This was the case although, as wc have seen, insurance trade was carricd out only in the "Christian" parts of town. The Indian colonial cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, on the other hand, prescnted minimalloss ratios of an incredible o to ro percent; these cities, with their damp monsoon months and houses built of nonflammable teak and chunam mortar, simply did not burn, and this was true of black as weil as white towns, at !east outside the slums.54 Here, the fire insurance business quickly reached a leve! and then stagnated. This is a further argument aga.inst crea ting a simple category of "Asiatic cities" from Istanbul to Tokyo, as Lionel Frost has done .55 Indian cities must be categorized, in fire history terms, quite differendy from cities such as Istanbul. This knowledge, which was not available to the Sun Fire Office until twenty years later at the end of the nineteenth century, also shows, however, that the Western actors of globalization themselves were, with regard to orientation, protagonists of a rather unreflexive cowboy-style "modernity" th at was not so impressively superior at ail. In di an home owners knew well enough, and better, why they didn't need any fire insurance. In Istanbul, the insurance firms thought that through expansion the market could become profitable. Th us they argued after the two big fires of 1865 and 1870 that now, finally, the householders should insure their property; even the loss oflives could be reduced by insuring because the insured house owner could concentrate completely on saving of lives in the case offire. But they lamented the small number of clients:

This backwardness of local householders to insure might be intelligible if it

were necessary for them to form, as we in England had to do, the Company or

association with which to elfect the insurance. But such is not the case. English

Companies of the highest standing and of unquestionable solvency, have

established agencies here, and insure every description of property at reasonable

gB CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

rates ofpremium; safety is brought ta the very doors of the citizens of Constan­

tinople, who notwithstanding, take as much wooing and appear ta be as coy as

maidens with their first love. 56

In the aftermath of the two great fires, the insured total sum of the Sun agency

increased nearly tenfold between 186g and 1874 but decreased with nearly. ~e same speed back to half in r87gY Still more fires showed the Sun tha: a ~oh~cs of expansion was not advisable. In r8g2 the first national insurance mstttut.lon was founded, the Société Générale d'Assurances Ottomane, which quickly became the biggest insurer on the market. 58 But weil after the end of the Ottoman

Empire Istanbul was affiicted again and again by hu ge fires. In c~nclusion, we may say that, on the one hand, from a statistical point of

view and in the long run, we may still use, as Frost and jones, the absence of extensive fire risk as a yardstick for the "modernity" of a city. On the other, however, we must complexify that vision. The heuristics of insurability a~~lied by the Sun agents were more autosuggestive and normative t~an empmcal.

The knowledge machine of the insurance enterprise was less m1ghty ~an .the convictions expressed by its actors would lead one to expect. So the h1stoncal self-consciousness of "modernity" does not translate weil into a categorical division between "modemity" and "premodemity" that we may use as analytical

categories.lfwe look beyond the suggestive graphs of the tire gap .ofFr~st and Jones, the cultures of building, living, preventing fires, and copm~ Wlth fire damage could be so different and so closely interwoven in the same oty that the perceptual split between modern and premodern reveals part of the story

rather than a tool with which to analyze it.

NoTES

1. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, "Multiple Modernities," Daedalus: Journal of the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences 129, no. 1 (2ooo): 1- 2g; Shmuel N. Eisen~tadt, Multiple Modernities: A Paradigrn of Cultural and Social Evolution (Frankfurt: M. ProtoSoClology, 2007). Cf. Corne!

Zwierlein, Der gez:.ii.hmte Prometheus: Feuer und Sicherheit z:.wischen Früher Neuz:.e1t und Moderne

(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 7-15, 315-sB. . . .

2. Barbara Weinstein, "Developing Inequality," Ammcan Hutoncal RtllleW 113, no. t

(2008): 1-18. . . .

3. L. E. Frost andE. L.Jones, "The Fire Gap and the Greater Durabihty ofNme-

teenth Century Cities," Planning Perspectives 4 (1989): 333-47. . .

4. Ulrich Beek, Weltrisikogesellschajl: Arif der Suche nach der verlorenen Szcherhezt (Frankfurt:

M. Suhrkamp, 2007), 239·

The Burning of a Modern City? 99

5· Marc David Baer, "The Great Fire of 166o and the lslamization of Christian

andjewish Space in Istanbul," International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004): 159-81; Doris Behrens-Abouseif, "The Fire of884h479 at the Umayyad Masque in Damascus

and an Account oflts Restoration," Mamlûk Studies Review 8 (2004): 279-97; Anna Akasoy, "The Man-Made Disaster: Fire in Cities in the Medieval Middle East," Historical Social

Research 32 (2007): 75- 87. 6. Robert Mantran, Histoire d'Istanbul (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 299.

7· Mübahat Kütükoglu, "The Ottoman-British Commercial Treaty of 1838," in

Four Centuries of Turco-British Relations: Studies in Diplomatie, Economie and Cultural A.ffairs, ed.

William Hale and Ali ihsan Bagi§ (North Humberside, UK: Eothan Press, 1984), 53-61.

8. Christoph K. Neumann, "Modernitaten im Konflikt: Der sechste Munizipal­Bezirk von Istanbul, 1857- 1912," in Istanbul: Vom imperia/en Herrschersitz:. zur Megapolis;

histon.ographische Betrachtungen zu Gesellschaft, Institutionen und Riiumen (Munich: Meidenbauer,

2006), 351 - 75, here 355 (my translation). 9· In February 1863 the negotiations ta found that state bank reached a successful

conclusion. See Christopher Clay, Goldfor the Sultan: IM1stern Bankers and Ottoman Finance I8s6-I88I; A Cont1ibution to Ottoman and to International Fmancial History (London: 1. B. Tauris,

2000), 87. 10. Zeynep Çelik: The Remaking qf Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman Ciry in the Nineteenth

Century (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993), 6g.

11. See Diana Barillari and Ezio Godoli, Istanbul 1900: Art-Nouveau Architecture and

Interiors (New York: Rizzoli, 1996). For an in1pression of the Pera district, see Akylas

Mellas, ed., Pera: The Crossroads qf Constantinople ([Athens, Greece]: Militas Editions, [2001]).

12. Çelik, Remaking of Istanbul, 53; Erne! Ardaman, "Perspective and Istanbul, the Capital of the Ottoman Empire," ]oumal qf Design History 20 (2007): 109-30, 118-20, and

table on 124. 13. Cited in John Freely, Istanbul, the Imperial Ciry (London: Penguin 1996), 274.

14. Clive Trebilcock, The Phoenix Assurance and the Development of B1itish Insurance, vol.

1, I782- 187o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 162-331; P. G. M. Dickson, The Sun Insurance Office, qw-Ig6o: The History of Two and a Ha!f Centuries qf British Insurance

(London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 162-233; Peter Borscheid and Kai Umbach, "Zwischen Globalisierung und Protektionismus: Die internationale Versicherungswirt­

schaft vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg," Jahrbuchfor Wirtschiftsgeschichte (2oo8): 207- 26; Robin

Pearson and Mikael Lônnborg, "Regulatory Regimes and Multinational lnsurers before

1914,'' Business History Reuiew 82 (2008): 59-86. 15. Dickson, Sun Insurance Office, 162-233. 16. London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter citcd as LMA) CLC/B/ 192/019/

31522/257 to 266. 17. Dickson, Sun Insurance Office, 188-89, begins the chapter on the involvemcnt of

Sun outside Europe with Smyrna. Earlier, however, Indian and West lndian outposts,

CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN 100

Valparaiso, Singapore, Batavia, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Cape Town appear in the

records; LMA CLC/BII92/0I9/388521I and 2.

18. Unfortunately there is no background information about Woods, except that

he shipped in at Smyrna on 25june 1864 (LMA CLC/BII92i019131522i258, P· 3)·

19. LMA CLC/B/192/0I9/31522i257, p. 8gs [copy from Woods's report]­

although on p. 32 it says, "No records ofnumber ofFires have been kept for any length of time." The list does not concur with the fires cited in Alfons Maria Schneider,

"Brande in Konstantinopel," By;:antinische Zeitschri}i41 (1941): 382-403, and is not reliable; in terms of dimensions, however, it must have provided the in surance company with a

basically correct pic ture of the high risk of conflagration.

20. LMA CLC/BIIg2/0I9131522i257, P· 36s.

21. LMA CLC/BII91!/019/315221257, p. 34- A similar statistic for the years 1859-

64 enabled a 7îmes journalist to calculate that, with 4,113 buildings in Constantinople destroyed in 16o fires during these six years, the average number of houses per fire would be a very high 26: 7îmes (London), September 8, 1865, in LMA CLC/BII92/

019/3I522/26o,p.38. 22. LMA CLC/BII92/0I9I31522I258, unpaginated [p. 42].

23. LMA CLC/B!Ig2/0I9I31522i258, unpaginated [p. 43].

24. LMA CLC/BII92IOI9/31522i259· p. 121.

25. "The colors Brown & Pink characterize respectively the Turkish & Chris~ian

quarters as nearly as possible, but as the map was made severa! years ago, sorne portions

of the brown might now be colored pink" (LMA CLC/BII92/019/3I522/258, P· 72).

26. The map in LMA CLC/BII92/019I31521!1257, Appendix: "Plan der zum 6.ten Communalbezirk vereinigten Vorstadte Galata, Pera und Pancaldi von Constan­

tinopel . .. erganzt ... bis insjahr 1861 durch C. Stolpe ... 1 Plan des Faubourgs de

Constantinople Galata, Pera et Pancaldi." 27. LMA CLC/BII92/o19/3I5221258, p. 72. 28. LMA CLC/BII92/0I9I31522i259• p. 126.

29. LMA CLC/B/ 19~2/ or9/ 31522/259, p. 188. 30. LMACLC/BII92/0I9i3I522I259, p. 117. 31. Edhem Eldem, "Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital," in ~he

Ottoman Ciry between East and West: Aleppo, /zmù; and Istanbul, by Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 135-214,

here 204. 32. On the Fire of London, see Stephen Porter, The Great Fire rf London (Th~up~,

UK: Sutton, 1996), and-for a wider public, but reliably researched-Adnan Tmms­

wood, By Permission rf Heaven: The Story rf tlze Great Fire rf London (London: Jonathan Cape, 2oog). Eighteenth-century Istanbul was much larger than European cities bef ore indus­trialization, so the numbers ofhouses destroyed have to be read in proportion to that

factor. 33· LMA CLC/B/192/019131522/1!6o, p. 44s. On the rebuilding after the

"Hocapa~a" fire, see Çelik, Remaking rf Istanbul, 55- 59; a more precise map of the fire

The Burning of a Modern City? lOI

damage region than in Çelik can be found in LMA CLC/BII92/019i31522126o, p. 33· Cf. Ardaman, "Perspective and Istanbul," 115.

34· 7îmes (London), September 8, r865, in LMA CLC/B/r92/0J9i3151!1!/1!6o, 35; Dai/y Telegraph, n.d., ibid., 39·

35· The Standard, n.d., ibid., 41.

36. Dai/y Telegraph, n.d., ibid., 39·

37· Times (London), September 8, 1865, ibid., 35· 38. Çelik, Remaking rf Istanbul, 64, cites three thousand houses.

39· Levant 7îmes, June 13, 1870, p. 661, in LMA CLC/BII92I019131521!/1!6o, p. 113; for the actually affected risks, see LMA CLC/B!Ig2/019/31522/26o, p. 160. In

1869 the total sum insured in Constantinople was [146,176, and the premium revenues were [905 (cf. total balance of the Foreign Department in 1869-70 and "Paid !osses" in 187o in LMA CLC/BII92/0I9/38852i2).

40. Edmondo de Amicis, Constantinople, trans. Caroline Tilton (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1878), 240.

41. Çelik, Remaking rf Istanbul, 64-65, 73 (with an inaccurate map of the fire area and a much too small damage zone. This can also be seen on photographs in LMA

CLC/B1Igz/o19131522/26o, p. 171-91; cf. Ardaman, "Perspective and Istanbul," u4, for a retrospective map of 1917.

42. Comparison made in a newspaper (LMA CLC/BII92/0Jg/31522i262, p. 81). 43· "The city of Chicago-in the United States-which in 1838 consisted of 12

shanties and IOO inhabitants, but now numbers a population of 420,000 souls" (LMA CLC/BIIgz/OJg/31522/261, p. 81); c[ William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the

Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), g; Karen Sawislak, Smoldering Ciry: Chicagoans

and the Great Fire, I87I-I874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 283n21. 44· LMA CLC/BII92IOI9i31522/z6o, p. 205. 45· Figures according to the balances and damage sums in LMA CLC/BIIgz/

OI9/38852/z. 46. Baer, "GreatFire of166o."

47· Eldem, "Istanbul," 155. 48. LMA CLC/BII92/o19/31522/zs8, unpaginated [pp. 43, 45).

49· E.g. LMA CLC/Bhgz/OI9i31522i259, pp. 89-108. 50. LMA CLC/BII92I019i31522i259, p. 945· For the "millet" system-the partial

privileges granted to corporations of confessions/religions or "nationalities"-see Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and]ews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning rf a Plural Socie!J, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982); and Michael Ursinus, "Zur Diskussion um 'Millet' im Osmanischen Reich," Südost-Forschungen 48

(1989): 195-207. 51. Frost and jones, "Fire Gap." 52. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); André Raymond, "Islamic

City, Arab City: Orientalist Myth and Recent Views," British Journal rf Middle Eastern

Studies 21 (1 994): 3- 18. In a way, the concept of the "Asian City," which is equated with

102 CoRNEL ZwiERLEIN

the premodern/preindustrial city in Lionel Frost's "Coping in Their Own Way: Asi~ Cities and the Problem of Fires," Urban History 24, no. I (1997): s - 16, IS also still

thoroughly indebted to this Orientalist view. . . S3· For the yardstick of the Joss ratio, see Robin Pearson, lnsunng tk lndustnal Reuolu­

tion: Fire /nsurance in Great Britain, I700-I85o (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 36n37·

54. See Corne! Zwierlein, "lnsurances as Part of Human Securi!J, their Tirnesca~es,

and Spatiality," Historical Social Research 35, no. 4 (2010): 253-74, here 264-68; data giVen here according to the corresponding Sun memorandum books for Germany, t~e United States, and India and to the annual general balance sheets of the company m LMA CLC/B!I92/o19l31522ii53, pp. 66, 81; vol. 156, p. 63ss.; vol. 164, p. 4o; LMA

CLC/B/1g2/ 019/38852/1 and 2; LMA CLC/BII92/0I9i31522h7s, p. 1845. For the duality of colonial towns ("black" /"white") in the case oflndia, see Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Moderni!J, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London:. Routledge,

2oos), 76- 135, and Prashant Kidambi, 17ze Malcing if an lndian Metropolzs: Colonzal Governance

and Public Culture in Bombay, I8go-Ig2o (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 32-36.

55· Frost, "Coping in Their Own Way." s6. Levant Herald,]une 21, 1871, in LMA CLC/B/Ig2/0igl315221261, p. 193·

S7· Insured total sum 1869: ;[146,176; 18?g: ;[1,554,247; 1879: [751,148, LMA

CLC/B/1g2/ Oig/3885212.

5a. LMA CLC/B!I921o1g/315221266, PP· 285, 349·

Imperial Russia's Urban Fire Regimes,

I700-I905

CATHY A. FRIERSON

I n the late Soviet Union ofMarch and April 1985, courtyard fires behind the

domùtory for foreign graduate students on Shevchenko Street in Leningrad reminded those from the so-called kapstra'!J, or capitalist co un tries, who walked by that the USSR was poo rer and Jess weil governed than they had expected of a superpower. The fires bumed in metal garbage bins, sometimes in metal drums, sometimes in the dumpster. Like the garbage that overflowed the receptacles, these fires were out of place in the urban spaces of a modern, industrial system heated by nuclear power stations and reputed to be tightly controlled by an intrusive, omniscient government.

A decade later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist

Party-state, the piles of garbage in (by then renamed) Saint Petersburg's court­yards had grown considerably, becoming mountains of refuse next to overstuffed and oozing dumpsters un der the windows of apartments where sorne of the Soviet Union's most privileged physicists associated with the Ioffe Physical­Technical lnstitute lived. Stray dogs scavenged; elderly citizens did, too. The garbage piles smoked, seemingly in various stages ofspontaneous combustion. No one paid them any notice; no one took it upon himself or herselfto clear the garbage or extinguish the fires.