This paper focuses on an event of silk factory arson perpetrated by artisans and some from the low ranks of the ulema in Bursa during the summer of 1862. This was not the only silk mill destruction to occur in the city during the late nineteenth century, when foreign observers easily judged that these events manifested religious fanaticism in town, since the factory owners were overwhelmingly Armenians. However, a closer look at these events reveals more complex reasons than mere sectarian outrage. Available documents, including police interrogation records and legal reports of Meclis-i Vala reveal a vacuum of authority in the provincial legal institutions and executive powers of the state in the aftermath of the centralizing and secularizing reforms of the Ottoman legal and administrative system. Provincial assemblies, secular courts and the Tanzimat governors seemed to be unprepared for the consequences of emerging capitalism and industrialization, including the environmental. This vacuum, when merged with the absence of new laws to protect the rights of urban dwellers against the negative consequences of industrialization and capitalism, led to violations of the “common good” and public-communal rights of urban populations that had once been safeguarded by legal courts and shari’a. Alongside the authority of the courts, the Tanzimat reforms also undermined the power of the fundamental institutions of “Ottoman civil society” of the classical ages and left little room for the formation of novel ones. Organizations such as the craft guilds used to negotiate with the state in pursuit of their interests, and evoke the rule of law in the courts, where litigants could make their claims on the basis of communal and organizational identities that embodied these communities’ power in urban politics. The burning of Kevork’s factory is a case that shows how Tanzimat’s centralizing reforms closed the old avenues for conflict resolution in the urban context, while the centralizing government was still impotent and legally unequipped to step in and resolve the problems of provincial society before their escalation. This small incident illustrates how small urban conflicts could turn into violent protests, laying fertile ground for future sectarian and class antagonism in late nineteenth-century Ottoman cities, particularly in those with multiethnic populations like Bursa, Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus and Salonika.

In the Sixteenth century cities underwent both physical and socioeconomic changes, in the process of urban revival. Urbanization linked different communities, such as the Greeks, Muslims, Jews as well as those of new migrants together, through people’s migration to the city and their conversion to Islam. While new quarters appeared, the size of old quarters also changed. The area of some quarters decreased, and other quarters merged together. People from various classes played different roles in this development: waqf founders both from the local society and from the administrative elite (especially the grand viziers) played a role through their pious foundations. Mosques, mesjids and other buildings of these foundations, created a socioeconomic infrastructure. Quarters were named after the mosques or mesjids which carried their founder’s name. Surviving mosques are testament to the role of the charitable foundations, and their founders. The history of the city offers more evidence than these surviving buildings. Other sources include visual representations of the city (town views and topographic paintings), books, and archival documents. Each of these provides clues related to the roles played by those who used the buildings. Sixteenth century Ottoman court records of Rodosçuk (today a city called Tekirda?) are telling about the immigrants at the edge of the city. Rodosçuk experienced a population growth of almost 80% at that time. The quarters surrounding the cart road were inhabited by the workers involved in the local industries: Cart-drivers, butchers, candle makers. All inhabitants of the city adapted to the rhythm of life. The outer boundaries of cities were settlement places for poor new comers. Their strategies of survival and relations with the ecology were determined by the early modern technologies of production, transportation, control, communication and the Ottoman institutional organizations. Ottoman city is more than the implementation of a specific model to different geographies by the central authorities or their agents. Emergent stories of the inhabitants from various classes, and the rhythm of life in relation to the ecology, are important factors that define a city.