Imagining the Red Sea: Boundaries, Mobility and Spatial Integration
How should we think about the Red Sea and write its history/histories? The insight that most maritime spaces are innately fractured, fragmented and unstable arenas is certainly valid even for a maritime space as relatively small and circumscribed as the Red Sea.[535] This goes to the heart of the challenge of writing oceanic and sea histories.
Given that sea-centred scholarship on Red Sea history is still in its infancy, one can offer more questions than answers. If we are to apply David Armitage’s three-fold schema of circum-Atlantic, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic history to the Red Sea, most studies to date correspond to the cis-Red Sea concept (which can be the history of a port town or a region within a Red Sea context). In this and other essays, I try to make the case for employing a circum-Red Sea approach (the transregional history of circulation and exchanges in the Red Sea World) to a space characterised by geographical and historical unity.[536]A first conceptual problem encountered by the Red Sea historian is that of boundaries: what and where is the Red Sea region, area or world? What are its contours? Unstable notions of space and borders inevitably raise the question of connections between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean on the one hand, and the Indian Ocean, on the other. A closely connected question is whether to include the Gulf of Aden and the important port of Aden within the confines of Red Sea history, or even a Red Sea world. The crucial factor here is the peculiar wind regimes that limited mobility and shaped spaces of activity in the Red Sea area. In some periods, the Gulf of Aden was far more integrated with the southern half of the Red Sea than the southern and northern halves were connected to each other. This practically made the southern half of the Red Sea an appendage of the Indian Ocean.
This point would support the thesis that until the introduction of steamship navigation in the mid-nineteenth century, the Red Sea was not an entirely integrated space since its different wind regimes effectively divided it into two. One could hence advance the argument that this made the Red Sea a barrier between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, rather than a bridge. But this view is construed from the sole perspective of international longdistance trade. We know well that navigational challenges perhaps slowed down, but did not cut communications on all levels of mobility in the Red Sea basin (different sea vessels, cabotage networks, the interconnectedness of seaborne and overland transportation arrangements).A set of conceptual dilemmas wrestled with by historians of maritime spaces is whether they should limit themselves to writing about those people who crossed the sea and lived on its coastlines and in its port cities and islands, or should they include the lands bordering the sea (and if yes, how far inland?). A case for extending the boundaries of the Red Sea world inland can be made when evoking - once again - alternative overland transportation undertakings that grew out of the adversities of Red Sea navigation. The moving of goods overland - for example, from Aden to the North, along the Arabian littoral - was a way to compensate for difficult sailing conditions in the northern half of the basin. Merchants and shippers adapted and adjusted to the limitations posed by natural conditions by the dynamic complementarity of sea and land. This serves to make the case for a dynamic regional approach that does not limit Red Sea history to water and coast.
There is no question that the role of states and empires (both local and external) in integrating parts of the Red Sea could be critical. Economic, commercial, taxation, administrative policies, security practices and the policing of waters could promote spatial, but also political, economic and social integration.
In turn, the sea itself could play a role in promoting state formation and developing hegemonic ambitions in the Red Sea region. Intimately related is the role of states in establishing regimes of navigation and the policing of waters - and the ways by which local actors made efforts to circumvent them (e.g. smuggling, contraband and piracy). The question of spatial integration also raises the issue of economic interdependence among Red Sea (coastal - hinterland and intercoastal) populations. What was the nature of economic interdependence between different parts of the Red Sea region and to what extent has economic interdependence created coherent economic, social and, perhaps, cultural spaces in parts of the basin?In light of such issues, can we indeed imagine the Red Sea as a coherent region, and what specific political, commercial or technological factors could promote greater or lesser integration? Are parts of it more integrated than others and are there periods in which integration is more apparent? One example of an avenue for thinking about cultural integration is the question of architectural continuity, or what has been coined by Derek H. Matthews in the early 1950s the ‘Red Sea style’.[537] Matthews proposed that the built form around the rim of the Red Sea was characterised by a shared, coherent and unified architectural style. Confirming Matthews’s notion of Red Sea architectural unity, art historian Nancy Um went further to argue that ‘the Red Sea style represents a tangible case of sustained cross-cultural contact across a linked maritime region and thus moves beyond the conventional modern limits of continent and nation’.[538]