Further Reading
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s weighty study, The corrupting sea: A study of Mediterranean history (Oxford, 2000), has become the indisputable reference point for the ongoing debates on Mediterranean unity, history in the longue duree and environmental/ecological approaches to the sea’s history.
Another influential histoire totale, with a specific focus on the declining importance of the Mediterranean in the early modern period, is Faruk Tabak’s The waning of the Mediterranean 1550-1870: A geohistori- cal approach (Baltimore, MD, 2008). Several good general histories of the Mediterranean have been published in recent years: Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita have edited A companion to Mediterranean history (Chichester, 2014) and David Abulafia edited The Mediterranean in history (New York, 2003). The chronological and thematic sweep of both volumes is admirably broad and helpful but, as with most general studies of the Mediterranean, coverage of the European shores is stronger than that of the Muslim Mediterranean.See Cyprian Broodbank’s The making of the Middle Sea: A history of the Mediterranean from the beginning to the emergence of the classical world (New York, 2013) for the first emergence of the Mediterranean. O. R. Constable’s Housing the stranger in the Mediterranean world: Lodging, trade and travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003) covers the transition from the ancient to the medieval world through the perspective of institutions of hospitality. Medieval Iberia continues to attract the attention of historians. For Mediterranean historians, Hussein Fancy’s Sovereignty, religion and violence in the medieval Crown of Aragon (Chicago, IL, 2016) is especially attractive because of its close attention to events on the southern shores, in today’s North Africa, and their important consequences for the history of Iberia.
Fancy’s work also engages with the literature on boundary crossers that is an essential theme in E. Natalie Rothman’s Brokering empire: Trans-imperial subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY, 2012). Eric Dursteler’s Renegade women: Gender, identity and boundaries in the early modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD, 2011) focuses on women who crossed between Islam and Christianity. For the medieval period in the east, see Angeliki Laiou’s Economic history of Byzantium from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries (Washington, DC, 2002) which provides, among other things, a Byzantinist perspective on Latin domination of the Mediterranean in the late medieval and early modern period. On the Islamic Mediterranean in the medieval period, see Hassan Khalilieh’s Admiralty and maritime laws in the Mediterranean Sea (ca. 800-1050): The Kitab Akriyat al-Sufun vis-a-vis the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (Leiden, 2006). Molly Greene’s Catholic pirates and Greek merchants: A maritime history of the Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ, 2010) also looks westward from the east, this time during the Ottoman centuries. Greene’s is also one of the few studies of Christian, as opposed to Muslim, piracy. Alberto Tenenti’s Piracy and the decline of Venice, 1580-1615 (Berkeley, CA, 1967) remains a classic, as does Godfrey Fisher’s Barbary legend: War, trade and piracy in North Africa, 1415-1830 (Oxford, 1957). J. H. Pryor’s Geography, technology and war: Studies in the maritime history of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge, 1988) and John Guilmartin’s Gunpowder and galleys: Changing technology and Mediterranean warfare at sea in the 16th century (London, 2003) are essential reading for maritime warfare in the pre-modern Mediterranean. For studies of the port cities of the Mediterranean, see Lois Dubin Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist politics and Enlightenment culture (Stanford, CA, 1999), Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine world, 1550-1650 (Seattle, WA, 1990) and Edhem Eldem, Bruce Masters and Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman city between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (Cambridge, 1999.) See Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the present day(London, 2010), ed.
Biray Kolluoglu and Meltem Toksoz, for a study that connects the Mediterranean and the concerns of global history. Nabil Matar’s studies have opened the previously unknown connections between Morocco and England in the early modern period. See his Britain and the Islamic world, 1558-1713 (Oxford, 2011). Ann Thompson’s Barbary and Enlightenment: European attitudes towards the Maghreb in the eighteenth century (Leiden, 1987) effectively conveys French engagement with the Mediterranean, while Thomas Gallant’s Experiencing dominion: Culture, identity and power in the British Mediterranean (Notre Dame, IN, 2002) is a study of the expansion of British power in the region in the nineteenth century. We still lack a synthetic study of the Napoleonic era in the Mediterranean but Daniel Panzac’s Barbary Corsairs: The end of a legend, 1800-1820 (Leiden, 2005) explores what the Napoleonic wars meant for the maritime world of North Africa. Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou, eds., Mediterranean diasporas:Politics and ideas in the long nineteenth century (London, 2015) considers the dramatic events of the nineteenth century from a Mediterranean, rather than a European, viewpoint, including the Muslim world. Julia Clancy-Smith’s Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an age of migration 1800-1900 (Berkeley, CA, 2010) makes for particularly interesting reading, considering the situation in the Mediterranean today.