The title of this edited collection echoes the “clumsy” one E.P. Thompson defended in 1963, suggesting that the “modern Mediterranean,” like his English working class, “was present at its own making.” With an introduction and seven chapters organized in rough chronological order, The Making of the Modern Mediterranean challenges European scholarly traditions that deny agency to the peoples who lived along the sea's southern and eastern shores between the 16th and the 20th century. At the same time, the book invites scholars of Arab and Ottoman lands—a region more commonly studied in national, imperial, and other geopolitical units—to consider the Mediterranean as a useful frame of historical analysis.
The Making of the Modern Mediterranean came out of a 2013 conference at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University held in honor of the late Faruk Tabak (1954–2008). A noted sociologist who put environmental history at the center of his final work, he saw the pre-industrial Mediterranean as one “pulsating unit.” While the contributions to this volume adopt different methodologies, exploit more diverse types of evidence, and come to disparate conclusions about the sea's cohesiveness, they all pay homage to Tabak's geographic scope. Analyzing Ottoman and Islamic juridical rulings, European treatises and bilateral treaties, Arabic chronicles, novels and ship logs, among other materials, the authors tackle big questions about the nature, parameters, and meaning of the Mediterranean across time and space.
Though trained in literature, Nabil Matar has made major contributions to the field of history, in part by examining European paradigms “through Arab eyes.” His chapter argues against conceptions derived from European sources of a unitary early modern Mediterranean and for a recognition that Ottomans and Arabs perceived the sea in distinctive ways. From the medieval period, Arabic maps and documents, far from describing a single body of water, referred to multiple nautical frontiers, many of them controlled by dangerous enemies. Without the material power to supply the requisite imaginative power, Matar suggests, Arabic-speaking peoples were unable to conjure the Mediterranean as a marine basin connecting distant territorial possessions. In his telling, Arab adoption of singular Ottoman (“white”) and European (“in-between”) nomenclature for the sea was a 19th- and 20th-century occurrence, a byproduct of established colonial rule.
Reprising themes from her important 2010 book and proposing new directions for research, Julia Clancy-Smith also calls for a shift in perspective—not away from European sources per se but away from grand narratives that neglect North Africa and overlook maritime corridors, minor ports, uninhabited islands and coastal hinterlands; a multitude of objects that circulated by sea; and the experiences of ordinary women and men who traversed the waves or lived “on the water's edge.” Her chapter offers both historiographical synthesis and snippets of stories, some of them extracted from documents in mixed language vernaculars that previous historians have tended to ignore. According to Clancy-Smith, painting a more inclusive portrait of the Mediterranean requires reading a variety of such material against the grain, creatively engaging with other disciplines, and asking new questions, especially about gender. It means acknowledging people and things—past and present—as active agents in complicated historical processes in, of, on and around the Inner Sea.
A pioneer in the integration of world and environmental history, Edmund Burke III provides a slightly edited reprint of a 2013 essay that put the Mediterranean in a global frame. Taking as a premise “the common historical experience of all Mediterranean countries,” he rejects out of hand orientalist views of the region as either a culturally deficient, static backwater or a stage for stark, civilizational conflict. Instead, he ventures a set of ecohistorical explanations for the Mediterranean's decentering and decline after 1500. Then he analyzes political, economic, and technological pathways to modernity during the long 19th century; and examines ensuing struggles over the ownership of land, the place of religion and the status of women. Burke's comparative reflection concludes by tracing some of the multidirectional migrations before, during and after colonialism. From this “long durée perspective,” the Mediterranean appears as a distinct zone but also one deeply connected to the wider world.
Joshua White's chapter, like his 2017 monograph, presents a riposte to traditional, one-sided interpretations of Mediterranean piracy and slavery featuring rapacious Muslims and innocent Christians. Based on careful research in Ottoman records, his work reveals a more complex dynamic among victims and villains whose allegiances did not necessarily fall along religious lines. White defines the “Ottoman Mediterranean” as a space where imperial law purportedly held sway. Here, he illustrates one way agents of savvy administrators evaded Istanbul's legal reach in the 16th and 17th centuries. Slave “laundering” involved taking illegally-enslaved, non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, selling them off in distant provinces (mostly in North Africa), and using the proceeds to buy legally-enslaved enemy infidels. Such a practice, White points out, demonstrates the fragility of Ottoman subjecthood and the limits of Ottoman authority, as well as the limited utility of binaries for thinking about the early modern Mediterranean.
In fact, Ottomans were not alone in slave laundering—or ship laundering, as Judith E. Tucker shows in a chapter framed by the tale of a Portuguese vessel captured by Algerian corsairs. Its fate reflects her overall argument that by the 18th century polities around the Mediterranean had developed convergent approaches to regulating maritime violence. A specialist in Islamic law and Middle East history whose research took a Mediterranean turn, Tucker construes piracy as a cohesive force. Across North Africa and Western Europe, she contends, it pushed state and local actors to grapple with similar legal problems; to establish mutually comprehensible forms of identification; to rely on comparable institutions for adjudicating prizes; and to sign numerous bilateral, if asymmetrical, diplomatic accords. Yet according to Tucker, this level of connectedness could not survive the naval ascent and imperial ambitions of European powers, which in the modern era changed the Mediterranean balance of power and delegitimated sea robbery in all its forms.
Osama Abi-Mershed's chapter, drawn from his 2010 book, stands apart from the others by taking a northern view on the Mediterranean. His focus is the Saint-Simonian theorist Michel Chevalier whose 1832 writings fantasized about the sea as “the nuptial bed” for East and West, Islam and Christendom. Once consummated via French technology and industry, he imagined, such a mutually regenerative union would bear the fruits of civilization: a modern, peaceful, integrated region. While Chevalier never mentioned the conquest of Algiers, a cadre of Saint-Simonian engineers and administrators seized the opportunity to apply his ideas in a colonial context, inaugurating a new form of techno-political governance for France and its trans-Mediterranean possessions.
In the last chapter, William Granara seeks to bridge divisions in the study of North African literature by reading three Arabic works from the 1930s and 1940s in light of a French novel from 1899. Authors Zin al-ʿAbidin al-Sanusi, an ardent critic of French colonialism in Tunisia, and Louis Bertrand, a strong apologist for France's rule over Algeria, made opposing national claims to the Mediterranean. In his epic tale, the “Latinist” Bertrand portrayed France fulfilling its imperial destiny to restore Rome's mare nostrum after centuries of physical and political degradation. In his play, novel, and short story, by contrast, al-Sanusi depicted the sea as an expansive crossroads rightfully belonging to a myriad of peoples: Europeans and Africans, as well as Arab-Muslim Tunisians.
As these summaries make evident, The Making of the Modern Mediterranean shies from any unified approach or a single takeaway about unity. What it does, overall, is showcase leading scholarship that embarks from non-European points of departure and uncovers inhabitants of the sea's southern and eastern coasts and beyond shaping the modern world on their own terms.
