This wide-ranging collection of essays provides diverse and concrete examples of how to study premodern societies from a transcultural perspective. Most of the authors—early career researchers and established scholars—were formerly engaged with a discussion on trading diasporas in the Eastern Mediterranean (1200–1700) on the occasion of a 2011 symposium hosted by the Transcultural Studies Programme at Heidelberg University. The conference and book title, “Union in Separation,” is a plea to consider the Mediterranean beyond the dichotomous narratives of conflict and cooperation. In addressing different case studies related to groups living in dispersal, most of the essays focus less on “diasporic groups and identities” and look more at processes of intercultural exchange. They do so by illuminating societal and institutional infrastructures that enable the interactions across borders, as well as the antagonisms that affected or even hindered them.

The volume opens with a set of five essays on the methodological questions involved in historical research on Mediterranean diasporas. Georg Christ’s introductory essay offers valuable analytical insights to sidestep the pitfalls arising from a diaspora-centric view. While the essays of Guillaume Saint-Guillain and Börner-Severgnini address ways of dealing with primary sources for studying human mobility and trade flows in the late Middle Ages, Sergio Currarini and Erik Kimbrough illustrate different approaches—network theory and experimental economics—in order to examine the economic behavior of diasporic groups. Following this methodological section is an extensive body of case studies taking into account different instances of intercultural encounters across the Eastern Mediterranean. These twenty-three essays are grouped into five sections focusing on several, sometimes overlapping, historical regions, covering the Latin East, Mamluk Egypt, late Byzantine Anatolia, the Black Sea with its commercial outposts, and the Hospitaller Rhodes. Except for Evelyn Korsch’s contribution on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Armenian trading networks, the other case studies span the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. While some papers center on particular groups, their economic strategies and social standing, most of the essays look at the dynamics of intercultural interactions against a background of changing rivalries and persistent exchanges. This translates into a prevalent focus on the ways that different polities tried to handle cultural diversity as well as how the displacement of people—elites, merchants, captives—across political and cultural divides shaped mindsets and societies.

The two following sections deal with different aspects involved in trade exchanges. In the first, David Jacoby and Heinrich Lang examine different cases of cross-cultural transfer: the former emphasizes the crucial role played by governmental initiatives in fostering global transfers of technology in the late Middle Ages, while the latter illuminates the ways that Oriental rugs came to be imported and recontextualized in Renaissance Italian culture. Benjamin Arbel examines the spread of cambio among Jews as a case of cultural transfer and adaptation induced by historical and economic circumstances. The second of these two thematic sections includes four valuable analyses providing diverse theoretical and empirical insights into formal and informal mechanisms of exchange. Regina Grafe, particularly, proposes an interpretative and analytic model based on the complementarity and multifunctionality of premodern commercial institutions in order to explain European commercial expansion. The essays collected in the last section overlap in themes with the previous ones while focusing mainly on early modern Italy. Taken together they portray the Italian Peninsula at the core of multiple global connections: the ways that these relations worked on the ground and what factors—legal, cultural, economic, political—shaped the dynamics of these interactions, are the main topics of inquiry. The book closes with a selected bibliography.

As expected from a volume hosting a vast number of essays, the texts collected here differ in terms of their quality and novelty. Still, approached as a whole, they present a number of good reasons to be considered. First, this book argues for a more cross-disciplinary approach to Mediterranean history; second, it moves away from a notion of diaspora centered on ethnicity toward a more inclusive conceptual frame, based on the collective experience of transcultural mobility. Finally, in undermining the notion of diasporas as bounded and isolated groups, the book illuminates them as structural components of premodern Mediterranean societies.