ABSTRACT
This chapter involves issues related to the urban history of Baghdad and the methods of its history writing. The available historical studies on Baghdad, specifically, are few compared with studies on other cities in the region, such as Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul. These limited studies designate unexplained aspects of the city’s history, and indicate gaps in the conventional historiography of Baghdad. Historians have been exploring the reasons for this mysterious history and the elements contributing to its contradictory character of brilliance and gloominess.
Firstly, this chapter outlines the context of Baghdad in relation to its strategic location, the vague representation of its urban spaces, the shortage of architectural documentations, in addition to its long history of creative writings. The preliminary goal is to introduce the ‘integrated interpretation’ method to discover further concepts of the social urban history of Baghdad. Secondly, it critically examines the urban history of Baghdad from its early moments until the present. And thirdly, it elaborates the accounts of Ottoman cities, as the focus of this book is on Baghdad’s urban history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is a crucial period in history.
