The Great Sea: A Capacious History of Technology and the Mediterranean
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A massive work of wide-ranging scholarship, David Abulafia’sThe Great Sea is, as the title states, a human history of the Mediterranean, mare nostrum to the possessive Romans (and later, albeit less realistically, to Mussolini and the Italian fascists); yam ha-gadol, “the Great Sea”, to the Jews of antiquity and the Middle Ages; Akdeniz, “White Sea”, to the Turks; and Mittelmeer, “Middle Sea”, to the Germans. Sailors and airmen who fought for control of its waters in two world wars, and today’s Sub-Saharan African refugees who cross it to escape the brutal realities of their homelands, no doubt had and have more graphic names for it. The diverse names do more than amuse, however. They reveal the diversity with which peoples, cultures and civilizations have exploited the sea and been shaped by it. That is the underlying theme of this work by Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge.
In geographic scope, The Great Sea deals with the Mediterranean proper, from the Straits of Gibraltar in the west to the Dardanelles and the littoral from Alexandria to Jaffa in the East. These boundaries are stretched on occasion to include Constantinople, Portugal and Britain because of their importance to the ebb and flow of Mediterranean commerce. The book’s primary concern is with what transpired on the Mediterranean and in littoral communities around its rim, with particular attention to major port cities: in rough order of chronological appearance, Tyre, Athens, Syracuse, Carthage, Alexandria, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Algiers, Tunis, Salonika, Smyrna and Tangiers. The book’s coverage ranges from 22,000 BCE (that is not a typo) to 2010 CE, focusing on the last four millennia.
This scope is at considerable variance with that of French scholar Fernand Braudel’s classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (published in French in 1949 and in English in 1972), with which The Great Sea will inevitably be compared. Indeed, Abulafia himself touches on this comparison in the introduction, as is almost obligatory in light of the historiographical impact of Braudel’s work. Braudel was a leader of the Annales School from 1945, and of the “Sixth Section” of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, which he founded in 1962. His temporal focus in The Mediterranean was on the “long” 16th century, with a horizon extending through what he calls three scales of time: geological, structural and that of events, the latter being time as we ordinarily think of it.
Geological time measures developments in geography and climate, where change is very slow. Next comes structural time, measuring the rate of change of basic human structures, such as marketplace economics, feudalism, empire and the rise of the nation-state. Structural time moves more rapidly than geological time but far more slowly than events. Events like wars, revolutions, elections, epidemics and so on can move very quickly indeed; they can take our breath away when we find ourselves caught up and hurled forward along with them. Braudel’s premise was that we cannot properly understand events without considering the geographical and structural stages upon which the historical actors responsible for them played.