For an age of globalisation, the history of cosmopolitan cities can be more instructive than the history of nation states. As Mark Mazower says in this masterly history of Salonica, the first in English, ‘different futures require different pasts’. The history of Ottoman cities like Salonica may be especially relevant, since over many centuries — in contrast to the overwhelmingly Christian cities of the West — Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together there, in nearly equal proportions.

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