Further Reading
Few historians have attempted to write comprehensive accounts of the Black Sea over the longue duree. The two reference books in English are Neil Ascherson, Black Sea: The birthplace of civilisation and barbarism (London, 1995) and Charles King, The Black Sea: A history (Oxford, 2004); the former is an evocative book of historical nonfiction and a good travelogue; the latter represents the most extensive overview of the Black Sea history to this day.
We could not leave out George I. Bratianu’s La mer Noire: des origines a la conquete ottomane [The Black Sea, from the origins to the Ottoman conquest] (Munich, 1969): it is a pioneering synthesis that covers the period beyond the end of Antiquity, alas never translated into English. Some recent journal issues cover the history of the Black Sea (albeit limited in their temporal or spatial scope), such as ‘Nations, nation-states, trade and politics in the Black Sea’, Euxeinos, 14 (2014). There are, however, very few historiographi- cally oriented articles attempting to consider critically the Black Sea as a unit of research (an issue still subject of debate): on this, see Eyüp Ozveren, ‘The Black Sea as a unit of analysis’, in Tunc Aybak, ed., Politics of the Black Sea: Dynamics of cooperation and conflict (London, 2001), pp. 61-84, and Owen Doonan, ‘The corrupting sea and the hospitable sea: Some early thoughts toward a regional history of the Black Sea’, in Derek B. Counts and Anthony S. Tuck, eds., Koine: Mediterranean studies in honor of R. Ross Holloway (Providence, RI, 2010), pp. 68-74.On the environment of this sea, and particularly the controversy about the great flood, see Petko Dimitrov and Dimitar Dimitrov, The Black Sea, the flood, and the ancient myths (Varna, 2004) and Valentina Yanko- Hombach, Allan S. Gilbert, Nicolae Panin and Pavel M. Dolukhanov, eds., The Black Sea flood question: Changes in coastline, climate and human settlement (Dordrecht, 2007).
On its biology and ecology, consult Yu. P. Zaitsev and V. Mamaev, Marine biological diversity in the Black Sea (New York, 1997) and Zaitsev, An introduction to the Black Sea ecology (London, 2001). The maritime archaeology of the Black Sea is detailed by Robert D. Ballard, Fredrik T. Hiebert, Dwight F. Coleman, Cheryl Ward, Jennifer S. Smith, Kathryn Willis, Brendan Foley, Katherine Croff, Candace Major and Francesco Torre, ‘Deepwater archaeology of the Black Sea: The 2000 season at Sinop, Turkey’, American Journal of Archaeology, 105 (2001): 607-23. It is only recently that historians have started to give attention to the environment of that sea and its region: see, for example, Carlos Cordova, Crimea and the Black Sea:An environmental history (London, 2016).As for historical literature, contemporary works on the Black Sea reflect the successive periods of openness and closedness. In particular, historians and archaeologists devoted considerable research to proto- historic and Ancient times, with the first settlement of nomadic tribes, the process of maritime colonisation by the Greeks, as well as the incorporation of that region into the Roman civilisational sphere; see in particular: Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, ed., The Greek colonisation of the Black Sea Area: Historical interpretation of archaeology (Stuttgart, 1998); Mariya Ivanova, The Black Sea and the early civilizations of Europe, the Near East, and Asia (Cambridge, 2013). Among the works on later times spanning the Hellenistic period to the Ottomans (Roman, Italian, Mongol), with a focus on the trade and economic/social developments of the Black Sea, see Alan W Fisher, ‘Muscovy and the Black Sea trade’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 6 (1972): 575-94; Nicola di Cosmo, ‘Mongols and merchants on the Black Sea frontier (13th-14th c.): Convergences and conflicts’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, eds., Turco-Mongol nomads and sedentary societies (Leiden, 2005), pp. 391-424; Victor Ciociltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, trans.
Samuel Willcocks (Leiden, 2012); Mikhail B. Kizilov, ‘The Black Sea and the slave trade: The role of Crimean maritime towns in the trade in slaves and captives in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries’, International Journal of Maritime History, 17 (2005): 211-35. For the Ottoman era, see Gilles Veinstein, ‘From the Italians to the Ottomans: The case of the northern Black Sea coast in the sixteenth century’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 1 (1986): 221-37; Halil inalcik, ‘The question of the closing of the Black Sea under the Ottomans’, Archeion Pontou, 35 (1979): 74-110; Carl M. Kortepeter, ‘Ottoman imperial policy and the economy of the Black Sea region in the sixteenth century’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 86 (1966): 86-113. The opening of the Black Sea region to foreign powers during the modern period was researched in Vassilis Kardassis, Diaspora merchants in the Black Sea: The Greeks in southern Russia, 1775-1861 (Lanham, MD, 2001); Gelina Harlaftis, ‘The role of Greeks in the Black Sea trade, 1830-1900’, in Lewis R. Fischer and Helge W. Norvik, eds., Shipping and trade, 1750-1950: Essays in international maritime economic history (Rotterdam, 1990), pp. 63-95; Andrew Robarts, Migration and disease in the Black Sea region: Ottoman-Russian relations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (London, 2017). On the port-cities of the Black Sea, see Flora Karagianni, ed., Medieval ports in North Aegean and the Black Sea: Links to the maritime routes of the East (Thessaloniki, 2013); Patricia Herlihy, Odessa:A history, 17941914 (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Charles King, Odessa: Genius and death in a city of dreams (New York, 2011); and Constantin Ardeleanu and Andreas Lyberatos, eds., The port-cities of the Black Sea, port cities of the western Black Sea coast and the Danube (Corfu, 2016). Finally, for a few more works on the issue whether the Black Sea should be considered at all as a region and a unit of research, see Charles King, ‘Is the Black Sea a region?’, in Oleksander Pavliuk and Ivana Klympish-Tsintadze, eds., The Black Sea region: Cooperation and security building (London, 2004), pp. 13-26; Daniel S. Hamilton and Gerhard Mangott, eds., The wider Black Sea region in the 21st century: Strategic, economic, and energy perspectives (Washington, DC, 2008); as well as Ruxandra Ivan, ed., New regionalism, or no regionalism? Emerging regionalism in the Black Sea area (London, 2012). This debate would benefit from more interaction between historical research and geopolitical studies on the Black Sea.