In her new book, Empire, Architecture and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914, Zeynep Çelik has taken on a complex and ambitious task: the comparative examination of empire building in two different contexts, the French colonies of North Africa and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This is a messy, even unruly comparison given the different political structures and geographies involved, complicated further by the uneven resources and disparate structures of the archives on which...