Judith E. Tucker (editor) - The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South

Richard William Seale, chart of the Mediterranean Sea, 1745. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Judith E. Tucker

What is the Mediterranean? What are its borders, its defining characteristics? Is it a space of connection or an arena of conflict? Does it make sense as a unit of historical analysis? What forces of nature or politics or culture or economics have made the Mediterranean, and how long have they endured, or how long will they endure? How can we most productively think about the Mediterranean as a place? And, most germane to this collection, what happens when we rethink the Mediterranean from its southern or eastern shores? These questions and tensions linger in the field of Mediterranean studies, despite its embrace of the general concept of coherence.

At the outset, there is the issue of geography. John Agnew, in his essay on space and place, draws our attention to the different ways of thinking about places: as nodes in space that are acted on by external economic, social, or physical processes, on the one hand, or as milieus that play a role in shaping these processes, on the otheror, as he terms it, a geometric conception of place as a mere part of space, as opposed to place as a distinctive coming together in space. One of the best illustrations of these different ways of thinking about place, for Agnew, comes directly out of the study of the Mediterranean:

If the classic work of Fernand Braudel (1949) tends to view the Mediterranean over the long term as a grand space or spatial crossroads in exchange, trade, diffusion and connectivity between a set of grand source areas to the south, north and east, the recent revisionist account of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) views the Mediterranean region as a congeries of micro-ecologies or places separated by distinctive agricultural and social practices in which connectivity and mobility

The difference between Braudels vision of the Mediterranean as a watery space of economic and cultural connections, forged by forces emanating from an evolving world economic system, and Horden and Purcells vision of the Mediterranean as a site of multiple distinct places linked by mutual needs is more than a matter of emphasis. Braudel asserts a claim to physical Mediterranean unity on the basis of shared environment and climate, but his work pivots in the main around the Mediterranean as a human unit of collective destinies arising from the movement of peoples and goods on the sea, as a result of the economics of trade and the politics of empire in the early modern period. It was these seaborne movements in time and space that produced striking similarities and overlaps in patterns of civilization and conflict.