Dominque Valérian. Ports et réseaux d’échanges dans le Maghreb médiéval

Dominique Valérian ranks among most important historians of the medieval economic history of the Mediterranean. He has changed conventional views on the role of the Maghrib in the medieval history of the Middle Sea. Many theoretical works and accounts by the Mediterranean school of historians have pushed for more data, more references to the Maghrib to provide a more complete picture of the history of the western Mediterranean as a social, economic, and cultural system. Valérian has done the hard and meticulous work of revealing that economic data through archival research in Europe and North Africa. Especially important was his remarkably comprehensive and lengthy case study of Bougie, in present-day Algeria, Bougie: Port Maghrébin, 1067–1510. The subject of this review, which can be translated as Ports and Networks of Exchange in the Medieval Maghrib, broadens his analysis considerably beyond Bougie. He argues that we historians of the Mediterranean need to reconsider established historiographies, especially those that portray the Maghrib in “eternal” or set terms. For instance, while the early 700–1000s medieval sources are problematic—focused on military and strategy over merchants—they are not entirely impossible as sources of a wider history of exchange. When it comes to the pre-eleventh century, Valérian sees the growing establishment of a network of exchange within North Africa that connects the Maghrib with the wider Islamic world. Most scholars, focused on the Egypt-based Geniza documents, have centered this system of Cairo. This now-popular view of the “world before European hegemony” (Janet Abu Lughod) focused on Cairo but ignoring, if not necessarily deliberately, the Maghrib, has made its way into most graduate-level reading lists for world history. Valérian rightly argues for the Maghrib as part of the world system as well. The infrastructure of the Maghribi port system was already in place by the time the Latins and Normans arrived in larger numbers in the eleventh century. Seaports on the Maghrib became more and more important, even as political centers, due to specific political action on the part of Maghribi rulers. Ports became integrated better into networks and interior poles—the hinterland. Most of this movement and economic change was placed within the Islamic world, irrespective of what was happening with Christian merchants of southern Italy in places such as Amalfi. He argues Christian ports were only marginally involved in making the Maghrib a significant part of Mediterranean commerce before the eleventh century. The ancient trade networks of the Atlas foothills came to rely more and more on littoral routes, as opposed to land routes, and the integration of the territory by these networks preceded and then accompanied political and religious integration under the Almoravids and Almohads. Valérian also argues that a rise in Mediterranean commerce and exchange occurred due to rising weight and importance of Tunis, Algiers, Bougie, and other Maghribi ports by the thirteenth century. These grew out of internal Maghribi political changes, not just in response to the rise of Italian or European commerce.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ethnology · Genizah · Hegemony · Islam · Judaism · Middle East · Political science · Politics · Port (circuit theory) · Subject (documents) · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classics · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Medieval History and Crusades