Modern European powers tend to inscribe their power onto the urban fabric of its colonies and protectorates. In the process, colonial cities often became 'laboratories of modernity.' This course analyzes how — from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to decolonization in the 1950s — colonial urbanism affected the modern Mediterranean world. It does so by focussing on French, British, and Italian urban designs and politics in cities of the Levant and North Africa. We will pursue comparatively the cultural and material, economic and architectural policies of three major European imperial powers and contrast them to late Ottoman urban culture.