The Making of the Modern Mediterranean

The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South grew out of a 2013 conference at Georgetown University, “The Mediterranean Re-imagined,” which was convened in memory of the late historian of the early modern Mediterranean and Georgetown faculty member, Faruk Tabak. As the title suggests, the objective of the conference and the collected volume was to rethink the Mediterranean from the perspective of its southern shore. This is not, of course, a new idea. When the father of modern Mediterranean studies, Fernand Braudel, settled on the sea as the focus of his dissertation in the 1930s, inspired by his years as a teacher in French Algeria, he determined to approach his topic “upside down,” as he described it, that is from the south looking north, rather than from the traditional, obverse vantage point. In doing so, he hoped to break down the “walled gardens” that constrained history within narrow political and cultural boundaries, and instead to engage the sea's past with a wide-angle lens.Despite Braudel's manifesto, as editor Judith Tucker points out in her valuable introduction, Mediterranean studies have tended to favor the sea's northern over its southern and eastern shores. The notion that Arab and Turkish voices have remained “rather faint” (10) in the field, however, strikes me as debatable, and this lopsidedness should not be overstated. Ottomanists such as the great Turkish historian Ömer Lûtfi Barkan were among the earliest to engage with Braudel, and there is now a long and rich list of important studies that approach the sea from the eastern and southern flanks that this volume aims to privilege. Indeed, the past two decades have seen a flourishing of work by young scholars working on the Mediterranean from both the bottom up and the outside in, including Tabak's own The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870: A Geo-Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), which appeared shortly after his death, and is a brilliant and expansive reading of the transformations and adaptations that characterized the early modern Mediterranean.Tucker's introduction efficiently surveys the broad trends of the field, from Braudel to his intellectual heirs, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, whose The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), re-energized Mediterranean studies and prompted a proliferation of new scholarship from all corners of the sea. She notes that scholars have often fallen on different sides of the eternal debate on Mediterranean unity, depending on their field of study. Environmental and economic historians, for instance, have generally favored the paradigm, while historians of politics, culture, and religion have been more ambivalent. Tucker argues that modern political agendas have also informed and deformed Mediterranean studies when it served their purposes and European politicians and scholars with imperialist ambitions readily linked their agendas to ancient Rome with visions of restoring the integrity of the region. This is most evident in, but certainly not limited to, Mussolini's ideology of Romanitas. Among Arab and Muslim scholars, in contrast, postcolonial scholarship often favored nationalist discourses over notions of pan-Mediterranean connectedness. Recent political developments in the region, in particular surging migration and sectarian violence, have led Europeans to abandon notions of cross- Mediterranean unity in favor of nationalist policies that emphasize difference and disconnection and envision the sea as a barrier. All this is to say that Mediterranean studies has tended to privilege a European perspective and, as Tucker asserts, the volume aims to foster “a more inclusive study” (9) of the region by bringing the experiences and perspectives of the sea's more understudied shores more fully into the conversation.One of the most intriguing essays in the collection, and the one that most directly addresses the premise of the volume, is by Nabil Matar. He traces Arab views and representations of the Mediterranean from the Middle Ages on and argues that they differed significantly from those of both Europeans and Ottomans. The application of the notion of the Mediterranean as a unified space was largely a product of early modern European writers and did not take hold among Arabs until well into the colonial era. Prior to this the sea was commonly known as Rūmī, or the sea of the Europeans. For Arabs the Mediterranean separated and divided rather than connected and unified, and indeed was often viewed as a space of danger that at any moment threatened abduction and perhaps forced conversion.Piracy and slavery are the focus of two of the volume's best essays. Joshua White examines the practice of what he terms “slave laundering”: For over a half century following Lepanto, Ottoman Christian subjects in the Aegean, Ionian, and Morean regions were regularly captured by fellow Ottoman corsairs and pirates, commonly working in consort with imperial officials, and then sold in the slave markets of North Africa. The sultans were largely unable to protect their subjects or prevent this trade as the center's ability to control governors on the empire's northern and southern Mediterranean peripheries weakened. At the heart of the practice lay the intractable question of subjecthood and religious identity and how this could be proven in the fluid interstices of the sea. Ottoman jurists repeatedly weighed in on this issue, as did officials in other political and religious contexts, but this did not resolve the practical difficulties of establishing who was legitimate prey for Muslim or Christian corsairs. Slave laundering was possible because of connections between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, but also due to their detachment.In her own contribution Judith Tucker argues that a pan-Mediterranean culture and protocol of piracy evolved in the eighteenth century, which established a “common regulatory system” (124) of shared legal and institutional norms and practices. North African and European jurists drew on their diverse legal traditions to confront and attempt to control piracy in ways that at times converged in both theory and practice. This included systems of authorization of piratical activity, the development of passports to ensure safe conduct moving across the sea, an expanding system of maritime courts and consuls, and growing numbers of reciprocal treaties that enshrined piracy as a “legitimate business” that required “joint regulation” (139). Despite the sometimes tenuous capacity of Mediterranean polities to assert their authority, pirates often accepted political interventions because of the benefits that conforming to these norms brought. This process resulted in a sea of “shared understandings, if not always tranquility” (143), which was only upended at the dawn of the modern era.Another group of essays clusters around Mediterranean literatures. In an engaging, if occasionally uneven, chapter Osama Abi-Mershed examines the Saint-Simonian author Michel Chevalier's Système de la Mèditerranée, a series of articles published in France in 1832. For Chevalier the long conflict between Islam and Christianity was “the most colossal, the most sweeping, and the most deeply-rooted” (162) division the world had known. He believed that scientific progress could overcome the sea's historic divisions and reunite its peoples in “the nuptial bed” (149). Despite the optimism of Chevalier's vision, Abi-Mershed argues, at its core is an imperialist notion of the West's superiority and its civilizing mission vis-à-vis the decadent Orient. In the Enlightenment worldview Occidental rationality distinguished it from the “decomposing Ottoman body and ... archaic Islamic civilization” (164–65). Rather than futile conquests, such as Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, Chevalier envisioned a soft, or “moral” (165) expansion of both Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas and ideals, with the concomitant extension of French power and influence in the region through industry, technology, capital, and communications. At its core, this vision is largely a repackaged rationalization for European expansion into and domination of Islamic lands.William Granara's piece is situated more squarely within the sea's southern littoral and addresses the issue of Mediterranean unity more explicitly. Drawing on the work of the Tunisian writer Zīn al-‘Abdīn al-Sanūsī, Granara argues that Tunisian literature in the 1930s and 1940s was linguistically, culturally, and politically Arabic, but at the same time it was Mediterranean in terms of its geography, “historical consciousness,” and its cross-cultural aesthetic and attitude (175). Granara views Sanūsī and other Tunisian writers of the era as responding to Louis Bertrand's 1899 canonical epic of the French pied-noir conquest of Algeria, Le Sang des races, whose racialized narrative marginalizes the Islamic era as a “simple hiatus” from the authentic, Latin history of North Africa, which was reasserted by European colonial domination. Sanūsī both challenges French hegemony and reasserts Muslim and Arab legitimacy by using fictional historical narratives that present these latter as authentic Mediterranean entities whose historical presence was as deep and legitimate as that of any European state. For Sanūsī the Mediterranean was not “monolithic or unified”; rather, it was a shared space and contact zone in which diverse cultures have interacted with both antagonism and “peaceful coexistence” (195).As is often the case in collected volumes, the quality and relevance to the larger theme of the contributions can be inconsistent. Julia Clancy-Smith's essay draws frequently, sometimes verbatim, on her excellent book, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Peppered with intriguing nuggets on topics such as language, shipwrecks, and swimming, the essay swings from the minute to the broad with a lack of clearly articulated diachronic parameters. Although it posits several suggestive avenues of inquiry, these are not fully pursued, and it ends up feeling like a hodgepodge of parts lacking a clear focus or direction. Similarly, Edmund Burke III's contribution is a minimally revised reprint of an article published in 2013 that proposes rather imprecisely to examine the Mediterranean and modernity within a broad global context. The essay is synthetic, and while a number of suggestive ideas are raised, it is ultimately weighed down by problematic generalizations on notions of Mediterranean staticity, decline, and civilizational conflict that felt past their expiration date when the piece was originally published and are even more passé today. It is unclear why the piece was republished here.In the final analysis I found this volume both intriguing and uneven. I am not sure that the volume says anything particularly new or revealing about the sea: Some of the authors engage the question of Mediterranean unity and connectedness, as well as the utility of the sea as an analytical category head on, others only minimally and obliquely. I found the volume more of a collation of somewhat disparate essays that serve a largely compensatory role by attempting to tilt the balance of Mediterranean studies a bit more toward the south primarily, but also the east. Even there, several of the essays effectively come at the Mediterranean from the top down, with only minimal gestures to the south. This is not to say that this volume is not valuable; on the contrary a number of the essays are excellent in their specificity, even if they do not address the larger themes that the premise dangles tantalizingly. Taken as a whole, this is a modest collection that does a nice job of inviting us to continue in the endeavor begun by Braudel and embraced now by several intervening generations of scholars, and to think harder about the Mediterranean as a space, and about the interplay of its southern, eastern, western, and northern shores

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• Bibliography of Recent Works 16 November 2020–15 February 2021

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