Historiographic Perspectives, Old and New

Though attitudes to the Red Sea as a historical space have been generally characterised by scholarly apathy, there have been exceptions to this trend, mostly in France. A case in point is the work of Albert Kammerer (1871-1951), a career diplomat and a non-professional geographer and historian who developed a life-long passion for the Red Sea region (and the ‘Orient’, more broadly) after being posted in Egypt in 1922.

In 1925 Kammerer published an article titled ‘La mer Rouge à travers les ages’ (‘The Red Sea through the ages’) in which he recognised the sea basin as a geographical and historical entity and called for the writing of its history. Adopting a thematically driven longue duree approach, he surveyed this history from ancient Egypt and the aromatics trade, to the history of different ports in the Greco-Roman period, to Arab navigation in the medieval period, down to the role of the Red Sea in intraEuropean politics since the eighteenth century.^[505] One wonders whether Kammerer was influenced or inspired by Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), whose classic primer of historical geography appeared only three years beforehand.^[506] ^{^[507] Albert Kammerer went on to publish his monumental multi-volume eclectic work on the history of the Red Sea region, La Mer Rouge, lAbyssinie, lArabie... (1929-52).¹¹ In the preface to the first volume of this tour de force, Kammerer recognised what he perceived to be the oft-overlooked fundamental historical cohesiveness of the Red Sea: It is the history of a geographic region that is more homogeneous than is commonly thought, where a purely Semitic civilization developed. It comprises not only Arabia and the Red Sea itself, in other words the history of navigation and the commercial links between the Indies (‘les Indes’ and the Mediterranean, but it includes also the part of Africa that has a coast on the Red Sea (minus Egypt); in other words, Ancient Ethiopia, the medieval lands of Prester John, or Abyssinia of modern times.^[508]
An equally interesting effort to write the Red Sea into the historical narrative is the ‘introduction’ to that same volume written by the French statesman and historian Gabriel Hanotaux (1853-1944), and titled somewhat bombastically ‘The secret of the Red Sea: the Erythraean origins of Western thought’.^[509] Hanotaux opened his essay by stressing the critical geopolitical role of the Red Sea as a major trade route in the world.
Placing the Red Sea firmly in global history - but interestingly positioning it also vis-à-vis the Mediterranean and its history - Hanotaux went as far as claiming that in at least three different historical moments the fate of this sea determined the fate of ‘Civilisation’ itself: the first was when Alexander the Great took Tyre and then went on to establish Alexandria (331 BCE); the second moment was when the Portuguese appeared at the Bab el-Mandeb and challenged the privilege enjoyed by the trading cities of the Mediterranean (sixteenth century), and the third case was when, following the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), ‘Lesseps breathed back to the Mediterranean the life which had abandoned it and gave back to it this Oriental commerce that Christopher Columbus missed when he landed in America’.^[510] After highlighting the Red Sea’s role as ‘one of the points of departure of Civilization’, Hanotaux established its geographic and ethnic unity. The people who inhabit that space, he wrote, ‘constitute an ethnic corridor between East and West’. These are the Semitic people, whose history, he thought, was tied to the history of the Red Sea in its broadest sense (he included the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, up to Damascus) and whose history is rooted in the histories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Referring to the peoples of the Red Sea region as ‘nos Erythreens' (our Erythraeans, to be understood as ‘Red Sea people’), who were ‘splendidly isolated’ from other people living in more fluvial and agricultural settings, Hanotaux claimed their ethno-cultural homogeneity. Though studies relating to various topics in and around the Red Sea were undertaken in the second half of the twentieth century, only rarely did they adopt a sea-centred approach inclined to look at the region as a coherent historical and geographical unit, or that focused on phenomena on both shores of the basin. One exception is Roger Joint-Daguenet’s Histoire de la mer Rouge, a rather flawed semi-scholarly two-volume survey of the political history of the Red Sea region over the past 3,500 years published in 1995 and 2000.^[511] Far more important is the work of historian Michel Tuchscherer who, since the early 1990s, has published studies on trade, currency flows, the coffee economy, Red Sea islands and the multifarious relationships between the African and Arabian coasts of the Red Sea between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[512]
Current historiographical trends associated with the shift toward maritime conceptions of space, or the so-called oceanic turn (also, the ‘New Thalassology’), are reviving interest in the Red Sea as a historic space and a distinct region that deserves to be studied.¹⁷ The appearance of a spate of Red Sea-related monographs and special journal issues, as well as the organisation of panels, workshops and conferences in recent years, reflect the growing realisation on the part of the new ocean-centred historians that small(er) maritime arenas are excellent sites for testing aquatic-centred approaches.
The last fifteen years have witnessed a noteworthy renewal and propelling of Red Sea studies.¹⁸ Archaeologists and historians such as Timothy Power and myself recognise that the space between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean should be historicised as an integrated maritime space whose historical trajectories and orientations were not limited to the sole role of bridging the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.¹⁹ Such efforts to recast the history of the region with the Red Sea as an organising framework for historical and social scientific analysis allow us to think more usefully about the Red Sea as a region sui generis. New thinking about the Red Sea recognises more fully and unequivocally that the particularly narrow bodies of water in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden constitute an arena of multilayered, interconnected and overlapping circuits and networks characterised by brisk flows of people, goods and ideas. In other words, and transcending traditional characterisations
the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York, 2002), pp. 28-45; Tuchscherer, ‘Coffee in the Red Sea area from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century’, in William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, eds., The global coffee economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500-1989 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 50-66; Tuchscherer, ‘Les echanges commerciaux entre les rives africaine et arabe de l’espace mer Rouge golfe d’Aden au seizieme et dix-septieme siecles’, in Lunde and Porter, eds., Trade and travel in the Red Sea, pp. 157-63; Tuchscherer, ‘Iles et insularite en mer Rouge a l’epoque ottomane (XVIe-debut XIXe siecle)’, in N. Vatin and G. Veinstein, eds., Insularites ottomanes (Paris, 2004), pp. 203-19.
¹⁷ To my knowledge, it was only in 2014 that Michael Pearson, a leading historian of the Indian Ocean, has included the Red Sea in a list of potentially promising maritime spaces to be studied in a general historiographic essay on oceanic history.
Michael Pearson, ‘Oceanic history’, in Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori, eds., A companion to global historical thought (Chichester, 2014), p. 338. ¹⁸ In this context one should mention the United Kingdom-based ‘Red Sea Project’ and the six international conferences that it has convened between 2002 and 2013. (See precise references to the conference proceedings in the Further Reading section below.)
¹⁹ Jonathan Miran, ed., ‘Special issue: Space, mobility and translocal connections across the Red Sea Area since 1500’, Northeast African Studies, 12 (2012): ix-307 and Miran, ‘Mapping space and mobility in the Red Sea region, c. 1500-1950’, History Compass, 12, 2 (February 2014): 197-216. An application of such orientation for the first centuries of the Islamic era is Timothy Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate, AD 500-1000 (New York, 2012). of this area, new studies, for example by John Meloy on Mamluk Jiddah and the Hijaz, and Eric Vallet’s work on the Yemeni Rasulid state, increasingly take into account the interactions of both coasts of the Red Sea as well as the multiple dimensions of regional and transregional trading ambits between Egypt and India. This approach helps to bring into sharper focus the host of inter- and intra-regional and transmarine political, commercial and religious circuits and networks that produced spaces with varying degrees of cohesiveness and integration.^{^[513]} Other work, for example, by Steven Sidebotham on Roman Berenike, Roxani Eleni Margariti on medieval Aden, Li Guo on thirteenth-century Qusayr, Nancy Um on Mokha in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Philippe Petriat on the Hadrami merchants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jiddah and my own work on Massawa in the same period, explores, among other themes, the ways in which transcoastal and transregional connections and interactions - including the broader Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean regions - shaped Red Sea port towns, their social and cultural environments, characteristics and cosmopolitan urban societies.^{^[514]} Much like the Arabian/Persian Gulf, such work increasingly inserts the Red Sea into conversations on the broader picture of Indian Ocean history.^{^[515]}
The place and role of the Red Sea region in global history is also gradually gaining greater recognition and attention.
As much as it has long served as an important route from Europe and the Mediterranean to Indian Ocean Asia, cross-Red Sea social and cultural contact, circulation and exchanges spurred the development of vibrant civilisations emerging in northeast Africa and south Arabia in the first millennium of the Common Era. The Red Sea area has also been the site of globalscale imperial struggles between world powers, at least since Antiquity.^[516] Furthermore, the region has been the source of prized commodities such as frankincense and myrrh, coffee, mother-of-pearl and pearls, which have been used in religious ritual and as traditional medicine, or have shaped fashion trends and modes of sociability in different parts of the world. The birth of Islam and the most spectacular of annual global pilgrimage flows (the hajj) are also centred on this region. For example, in his transregional/translocal history of Southeast Asians and the hajj, Eric Tagliacozzo firmly locates the Red Sea in its regional context noting that ‘few places in the world can boast as complex a history as the Red Sea and its coasts in the early modern era’, or that the Red Sea was ‘one of the most important spaces on the planet’ around the turn of the twentieth century.^[517] The connection between mobility on a global scale and the Red Sea region is also at the centre of Valeska Huber’s work on the Suez Canal as a lynchpin of different forms of mobility.^[518] These are but a few examples that underscore the importance of the Red Sea in world history.}

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

Historiographic Perspectives, Old and New

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