The past decade has witnessed the emergence of an impressive subfield of urban history and urban anthropology that focuses on the cities of the Persian Gulf, especially their imbrication in networks of empire, capital, and labor. At best, this work has situated Gulf urbanism in historical processes of global import, thus challenging the long-standing exceptionalism that has characterized the region's scholarly treatment. While the port cities of the Red Sea littoral have not received the same attention from scholars, Ulrike Freitag's A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries should be placed among these newer works. It is a welcome addition to the field of Middle Eastern urban history and the subfield of Red Sea and Indian Ocean studies.

The book adopts a thematic structure. After the introduction, the second chapter offers a historical overview of Jeddah's history under Egyptian, Ottoman, and, finally, Sharifian and Saudi rule. The third chapter considers the diversity of the city's population: its scholars, sayyids, merchants, and slaves, revealing the extent to which the port city was linked to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean through networks of human mobility, both voluntary and involuntary. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to subjects of urban development and urban life, looking at both the material development of the city, its quarters and suburbs, and the modes of organizing social life in the city in an era of rapid change. Chapter 5, in particular, provides an extremely useful account of urban organization and governance that presents detailed accounts of the household, Jeddah's various quarters, guild and labor organization, and the cycle of religious observations that punctuated social life in the city. The final two substantive chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) cover the city's economic life, particularly its dependency on the pilgrimage and local government as it developed through the Ottoman, Sharifian, and Saudi periods. A conclusion revisits some of the book's main themes and proceeds up to the present day.

Any book that sets out to cover the history of a city's past will undoubtedly be characterized by a surfeit of detail and, by the very nature of the endeavor, an insufficiency in coverage. Freitag brings to Jeddah's urban history an impressive command of source material in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, in addition to European languages, gathered from a number of archives, libraries, and interviews she conducted in Jeddah. Consequently, there is much to be gleaned from the text and its footnotes, though at times the level of detail can distract from the greater concerns of the book. One of the more important elements of the analysis is its emphasis on historical continuity rather than rupture when discussing urban governance. This point is especially useful in understanding the city's incorporation into what would become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. It is important to remember that the Saudi political project in the Hijaz was reliant, at least in its early years, on the Jeddahwi elite, even if they were ultimately displaced by Najdi appointees (pp. 293–94). Freitag also emphasizes the comparability of Jeddah's urban institutions with those of other Ottoman cities, such as Beirut, Izmir, and Cairo, an important move in light of the Arabian Peninsula's often marginal place within the historiography of the modern Middle East.

Even so, this level of detail does require some conceptual scaffolding to hold the narrative together, and Freitag sets out a potential framework in the introduction that is not fully realized in the following chapters. Freitag begins, seductively, by invoking the Saudi poet Talal Hamza's poem “Jeddah Ghayr,” or “Jeddah is Different.” This sentiment of the city's otherness is meant to frame the study as an investigation into “the urban history of Jeddah in order to understand how people managed to live in a very diverse setting” (p. 4). The use of “difference” as a foundational analytical category in an urban history of a Red Sea port city is potentially productive, especially since this has been an interest of critical urban geography for some time, bringing to mind Michel Foucault's idea of “heterotopia” and Edward Soja's notion of a “third space” among other concepts. Freitag, instead, looks to the concept of “cosmopolitanism,” a potentially fruitful lens for making sense of Jeddah's Ottoman and post-Ottoman history as a center of regional trade and the primary port of embarkation for the hajj. In an effort to work beyond a Kantian understanding of cosmopolitanism that is grounded in the post-Westphalian state order, Freitag suggests a possible vernacular, or Islamic, form of cosmopolitanism grounded in the concept of ḍiyāfa, or hospitality. Yet, the overall point of emphasizing Jeddah's difference seems, to a certain extent, to be contradicted by the very comparability of the city's institutions with other urban centers in the Ottoman Empire. Rather, Jeddah's difference seems to become visible primarily in relation to Riyadh and other towns in Najd; that is to say, Jeddah's “otherness” has emerged in the context of a modern Saudi state dominated by a Najdi elite and a religious sensibility influenced by so-called Wahhabi Islam. In short, Jeddah's difference is less ontological than historical and relational. Moreover, the conceptual work performed by Freitag in the introduction rarely informs the substantive chapters of the book. After the introduction, for example, the subject of cosmopolitanism is not discussed again until the final chapter of the book. The concept of hospitality, which has been central both to scholarship on the Indian Ocean and on cosmopolitanism (Jacque Derrida's Of Hospitality, for example), is similarly addressed in the introduction but plays no discernible role in the analysis that follows. As a result, the introduction seems somewhat disconnected from the rest of the text, which reads largely as a social history of urban life rather than a historical case study of a non-Western cosmopolitan urban form and practice.

These criticisms notwithstanding, A History of Jeddah is well worth reading closely. It is a deeply researched and well-written account of the city's history and a noteworthy contribution to the urban history of both the Middle East and the Red Sea.