The Mediterranean and Global History

Resistance to the Mediterranean as a legitimate category of research has also come from broad intellectual trends both in history and in anthro­pology. Area studies - which operated under the assumption ‘that knowl­edge was culturally and historically specific’ - came under attack from the 1990s due to several major shocks to the world system; the rise of China, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the financialisation of the global economy.

At the same time that area studies were being put on the defensive, anthropologists, too, began to cast a critical eye on their own discipline. As early as 1984 Michael Herzfeld, one of the leading anthropologists of the Mediterranean (even as, over many decades, he has very deliberately wrestled with the Mediterranean as a legitimate intellectual category), castigated anthropologists for their development of the analytical cat­egory of the ‘culture area’. Such a concept, he wrote, encouraged stereo­typing - the very opposite of what the field desired. Instead they should be engaged in ‘intensely localized’ ethnography and then synthesising these studies into ‘a globally effective portrait of humankind’.^[468] We see here, too, an emphasis on the global which Adelman described, although the methodology remains rooted in the local.

Recently, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direc­tion, although that ‘other’ is not identical to what was left behind in the 1990s.

The new global history, however, can lead in a different direction. In his article on the history of the field, Adelman makes a point that, while seemingly obvious, has not received sufficient attention: global disinte­grations are as much a part of the historical narrative as the better known triumphs of integration.^[471] Given recent developments - Brexit must now stand alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 - it seems likely that an interest in historical processes of disintegration will grow.

Here the Mediterranean has much to offer because historians have proclaimed its demise as a unified area at least three times. The earliest, and still the most famous breakup, came in the seventh century, and was made famous by the Pirenne thesis. In sharp contrast Hess’s Forgotten frontier, which argues that a hostile frontier divided the formerly inte­grated western Mediterranean, is little known outside of the specialised fields of early modern North African and Spanish history.^[472] This obscu­rity is not due to any deficiencies in Hess’s scholarship.

Critics of the Pirenne thesis have convincingly shown that, by the time the Arabs showed up in the Levant and in North Africa, there was little of the Roman Mare Nostrum left; trade between the eastern and west­ern half of the Mediterranean had been dwindling for a long time prior to the seventh century. Responses to Hess have been slow in coming but they raise similar questions about the relationship between military conquest and trade patterns. In this case, however, the argument is that trade not only did not dry up in the wake of 1492 (or 1581, when an Ottoman/Habsburg truce signalled the end of military engagement in the Mediterranean between the two great powers), but that Spanish com­merce with the Maghrib actually grew in the early modern period.^[474] On both sides of the supposedly impenetrable and violent frontier, various actors used the ransoming of captives as a vital source of funds and as a way to justify trade, formally prohibited, with the enemy. The Spanish Crown placed North Africa under a system of ‘permanent exception’ to the prohibition, and if a Christian merchant sought a licence to trade with the Maghrib, ‘all he had to do was declare that he would use his profits to ransom Christians rather than invest them in goods to be redis­tributed back in Spain’.^[475] On the North African side we see the Pasha of Algiers taking steps to ensure the safe arrival of the Mercedarians (one of the Spanish religious orders of redemption) in Algiers, instructing the viceroy of Majorca to warn them about the presence of English corsairs in the area. He took this step even though at this time (1604) Algiers was formally an English ally, and the Mercedarians were the agents of an enemy state. The Pasha, of course, had his eye on the generous ransom­ing budget the Mercedarians were bringing with them.^[476]

This new work on the western Mediterranean suggests that the early modern period was not so different from what had come before.

This brings us to the third iteration of the demise of the Mediterranean. As many scholars have noted, the Mediterranean seems to dissolve with the advent of modernity which, in the case of the inland sea, is conven­tionally seen to arrive with Napoleon’s armies. In Naor Ben-Yehoyada words, ‘where the one ends the other starts’.^[478] Through a combination of economic globalisation and nation-state consolidation, the argument goes, the Mediterranean disintegrated over the course of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Whether or not one agrees, the possibility that global integration in some areas was accompanied by disintegration elsewhere is certainly a question worth exploring. One highly distinctive fact about the Mediterranean in the modern age does stand out. Across the globe the rise of European hegemony has been perceived as a series of encounters (in the case of the Americas) or re-encounters (in China, for example). In the Mediterranean, modernity unfolded within ‘a dis­course of historical separation’.^[479] The countries of northwestern Europe, the place where modernity was seen to reside, forgot or buried their long history of engagement in the Mediterranean and turned the latter into an historical Other. Over the course of the eighteenth century, for exam­ple, French Enlightenment thinkers turned North Africa into a wild and unknown land, despite the fact that the city-states of southern Europe had been signing treaties with North African polities since the medi­eval period.^[480] This process of Othering takes us back to Hess and earlier pronouncements on the death of the Mediterranean. The idea that the Mediterranean cannot be modern is projected backwards as historians look for the moment of its demise: ‘histories of the Mediterranean [that] date the sea’s death to earlier periods - as early as the turn of the six­teenth century or as late as the beginning of the nineteenth - not because they agree on the conditions for the sea’s end, but rather because all accounts construct their respective Mediterraneans in opposition to the present’.^[481]

A more self-conscious approach is called for.