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The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, by David Abulafia
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Connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millennia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. In this brilliant and expansive book, David Abulafia offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the sea itself: its practical importance for transport and sustenance; its dynamic role in the rise and fall of empires; and the remarkable cast of characters-sailors, merchants, migrants, pirates, pilgrims-who have crossed and re-crossed it.
Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all a history of human interaction. Interweaving major political and naval developments with the ebb and flow of trade, Abulafia explores how commercial competition in the Mediterranean created both rivalries and partnerships, with merchants acting as intermediaries between cultures, trading goods that were as exotic on one side of the sea as they were commonplace on the other. He stresses the remarkable ability of Mediterranean cultures to uphold the civilizing ideal of convivencia, "living together."
Now available in paperback, The Great Sea is the definitive account of perhaps the most vibrant theater of human interaction in history.
- Sales Rank: #825263 in Books
- Published on: 2011-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.60" h x 2.50" w x 9.40" l, 2.79 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 816 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: In this expansive yet detailed historical gem, David Abulafia covers the full course of human history on the Mediterranean. Beginning more than 20,000 years ago with Cro-Magnon cave dwellers on Gibraltar and stretching to the present, Abulafia treats the Great Sea as “the Liquid Continent,” a place peopled and traveled—where trade, cultural exchange, and empire-building were forces as key to life as currents, tides, and weather patterns. The book deftly illustrates how the Mediterranean was always big enough to keep cultures apart, thus allowing them the space to flourish as unique entities, but that it was never so big that differing cultures couldn’t interact. The result is an epic story of trade and conflict, showing how differences in language, religion, law, and other human flashpoints sparked so much of what we think of today simply as culture. --Chris Schluep
Amazon Exclusive: Author Q&A with David Abulafia
Author David Abulafia
Q: What role did Greek mythology and Homeric poetry play in creating a lasting conception of the Mediterranean?
A: The seas described in Homer's Odyssey are a strange amalgam of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, of east and west. Circe the sorceress seems to live in the east, where the sun rises, while Scylla and Charybdis are often identified with the straits between Sicily and mainland Italy.
Despite those muddles, Homer does provide fascinating testimony to knowledge of the seas among the Greek colonists in Ionia (what is now eastern Turkey), whose dialect was the basis of Homeric Greek. He knew about Phoenician sailors and was not very complimentary about them. Above all, he placed Odysseus' kingdom at the western limits of Greece, on Ithaka, which he portrayed as an island where it was natural to know how to handle boats. What we see is a dawning conception of the extent of the Mediterranean and of the importance of the sea to the early Greeks.
Q: Beyond the historical, military significance of the Mediterranean, what happened culturally that we tend to overlook?
A: The Mediterranean has been a meeting place of many different ethnic and religious groups, inhabiting its shores and islands--in remote antiquity, Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians; in later centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims. Gathering in the port cities around the Mediterranean, such as ancient Marseilles, medieval Palermo and Alexandria, modern Livorno and Smyrna, these groups have interacted not just at the level of high culture but in everyday life. On the one hand you have the transmission of medical and astronomical knowledge from east to west in the Middle Ages, often via Muslim and Christian Spain, and on the other hand you have the peaceful interaction of traders and sailors doing business and respecting one another in the great ports of the Mediterranean. Often they were able to cross the boundaries between warring competitors for control of the sea, moving between Christian and Muslim lands under the protection of local rulers.
Q: Americans and Europeans have vastly different conceptions of the Mediterranean Sea, with most Americans thinking of the Sea and its shores primarily for its appeal as a tourist destination. What role, if any, has the Mediterranean had in shaping the United States?
A: The American involvement in the Mediterranean at the start of the nineteenth century is a fascinating story--not just an episode but something that decisively altered the Mediterranean world. By defeating the rulers of the Barbary regencies (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli), who detained their trading ships and sailors and demanded extortionate sums of money for their release, the American navy helped clear the Mediterranean of the five-century-long scourge of piracy. This was the first foreign war of the United States after independence, and it was now that the U.S. Navy came into existence. In the 20th century, the strategic significance of the Mediterranean in the Cold War brought the U.S.A.F. to Wheelus airfield in Libya and the conflict between Israel and its neighbors has also brought the U.S. Navy into the Mediterranean. Strategically, the Mediterranean has remained important to the U.S., as we see from the latest events in Libya.
Q: Will the Mediterranean continue to play a key role in the global economy of the 21st century?
A: Much depends on the relationship between northern and southern Europe, and between Europe and North Africa. With the Greek economy in desperate straits and the Italian and Spanish economies under severe strain, and with the Arab countries in turmoil, there is a big question mark over the assumption that rapid economic growth will continue in the region. One solution may be to build closer bonds between northern and southern Mediterranean countries, including free trade concessions to Tunisia and Libya. Tunisia possessed the strongest economy in Africa and it would be a disaster to ignore its great economic potential. Another question arises over Chinese investment and involvement in the Mediterranean, which has begun to accumulate. So we are looking at a particularly uncertain future.
Review
"This magnificent book...is teeming with colourful characters. Over the course of nearly 800pp, we follow faiths; sail with fleets; trade with bankers, financiers and merchants; raid with pirates and observe battles and sieges; watch cities rise and fall and see peoples migrate in triumph and tragedy. But at its heart, this is a history of mankind - gripping, worldly, bloody, playful - that radiates scholarship and a sense of wonder and fun, using the Mediterranean as its medium, its watery road much travelled."--Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Financial Times
"This memorable study, its scholarship tinged with indulgent humour and an authorial eye for bizarre detail, celebrates the swirling changeability at the heart of that wonderful symbiosis of man and nature which once took place long Mediterranean shores"--Jonathan Keates, The Sunday Telegraph
"An Everest of a book, brocaded with studious observation and finely-tuned scholarship...the effect is mesmerising, as detail accumulates meticulously."--Ian Thomson, The Independent
"David Abulafia's marvellous history of the Mediterranean is an excellent corrective to oversimplified views of geopolitics."--The Economist
"New, highly impressive book...magisterial work..."--Prospect
"Engagingly written, precisely documented, and liberally studded with tales of the fantastic and absurd, the book has much to offer the casual reader and is indispensible for specialists in the region."--Publishers Weekly
"Abulafia writes in a popular style with an eye for interesting sidelights on history, such as the backdating of the Trojan War by Homer and Virgil, and quirky asides about modern Mediterranean culture...this comprehensive, scholarly study contains much food for thought."--Kirkus
"A comprehensive, fair-minded history."--The National Interest
"The Great Sea deserves a place on the shelf next to Braudel's classic work."--Shelf Awareness
"David Abulafia's new book about the Mediterranean Sea, The Great Sea, has everything a major work of history requires. An important theme, solid research, magnificent writing and a perceptive insight into human nature...As an introduction to this story - and as a cautionary tale of what happens when the darkness in the human soul crowds out the light - there is no better place to start than David Abulafia's The Great Sea."--The California Literary Review
"For both specialists and interested general readers, this book will be a treasure and become the standard work on the topic."--Booklist Online
"Book of the Year" selection, History category--he Economist
"David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University, brings historians and interested readers the ultimate biography of this unique sea, as seen and used and experienced by the people who lived and still live on its long coastline."--Bookbanter
"This magnificent history, at once sweeping and precise, spans the period from 22,000 B.C. to 2010 A.D. to explicate the history of human activity on and around the Mediterranean Sea...[Abulafia] is a superb writer with a gift for lucid compression and an eye for the telling detail...He has taken on a grand subject, and has related and interpreted it with authority, exactitude, and verve. His work deserves a wide and appreciative audience."--The Atlantic
About the Author
David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University and the author of The Mediterranean in History.
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Wide-ranging, highly readable
By Duodentes
Written for educated non-specialists, The Great Sea covers the human history, largely commercial, of the Mediterranean. It traces the rise and fall of civilizations (mostly city-states) that depended on Mediterranean trade (Egypt, for example, properly gets short shrift until the Hellenistic era and the founding, long heydey, and decline of Alexandria).
The story follows colonizations and wars driven mostly by commerce--the search for new markets and new commodities--luxury goods and materials required by advancing technology.
There is a thesis, demonstrated repeatedly in a non-polemical way, that cities that tolerated ethnically/religiously diverse peoples prospered; those that didn't faded into obscurity.
This is a scholarly work in the sense that it provides source notes, though not a separate comprehensive list of works cited, mostly secondary but some primary; it does include several pages of recommended further reading.
I would guess, though, that the author wrote a great deal based on knowledge acquired over a lifetime of scholarship and didn't backcheck every fact, which probably accounts for the one minor error I noticed (he confuses Richard I of England's wife with his sister); there are probably others. This in no way diminishes the quality of the work. Even Homer nods.
I read this book on a Kindle. The footnote hyperlinking worked well. Other than many compounding anomalies (hard hyphens interpreted as soft ones), I noted no typos or formatting errors.
The illustrations appear at the end of the book and are awkward to reach; I used the Table of Contents and paged thru them. They are not linked from the text. On a standard Kindle, the illustrations are, of course, black and white and not high resolution, which is fine with me since I'm not willing to sacrifice megabytes of the Kindle's sadly limited storage space for high resolution versions of illustrations I found easy to track down on the Web when I wanted to see them in more detail.
The maps are another matter. They are interspersed in the text, are uniformly the entire Mediterranean with a few spots picked out for emphasis relevant to the section they're in, and are difficult to read even with a magnifying glass. They are not, however, essential to the book, so it's just a minor irritation.
All in all, I enjoyed The Great Sea immensely; it's highly readable, and I learned a great deal. Recommended.
180 of 190 people found the following review helpful.
A perspective changing read and an important book
By Robert Johnston
This is a can't miss read or gift for the history buff.
Between 22,000 and 6000 years ago, 4 trans-Mediterranean civilizations can be traced to evolve from out of Neolithic enclaves and to grow into distinctive civilizations and then disappear without a word. 13,000 years ago these seafarers traversed and traded from one end of the Mediterranean to the other to leave their patterns. The symbols of the fifth civilization defies translation and the earliest Minoans advanced like none before and are then erased beyond our purview. Only in the 6th iteration and beginning just over 5000 years ago, can we begin to peek into the human mind through its words and remnants. Abulafia places evolving civilizations in the humbling context of space and time and to be considered as numbered days in humanity's progression.
The Great Sea is written in 5 chronological parts from most ancient to present. The parts weave and intertwine the past to the next. The Great Sea has hosted the spectrum of human care takers and chaos. The Great Sea is a sweeping and compelling read that links the snippets of civilizations of one after the other. History has been well written on specific events and times, Peloponnesian and Punic Wars, the Crusades and Gallipoli and you might miss the far greater context that the Great Sea perspective provides.
The Great Sea is a disciplined focus of the history of humanity in the context of the Mediterranean. Abulafia's discipline is evidenced that this history excludes the Mesopotamians and the early Egyptians until descendants emerge onto the Sea to attempt to contend. These other civilizations were river people and land people and they earn their place among the Great Sea-farers of this story.
Political fabrications are irrelevant in the Great Sea. Geography and power alone rule the Great Sea. Colonies, outposts, and civilizations appear and disappear in this time machine. The patterns repeat over and over to the present day. Abulafia resists the temptation to extrapolate a future from the history and he doesn't need to. History repeats itself and so the reader is free to envision a future trajectory or tragedy. The feeling of continuity is very present.
In 800 pages and 150 pages of notes, this is a massive addictive tale that can include an `all-nighter'. The reader is left to consider the temporal irrelevance and civilization of Minoans, Phoenician's, Carthaginians, Greek's, Roman's, Genovese ... the EU and Islam. Civilizations struggle mightily to rival the cadence of the socio-technical-economic demands of this continental junction which is the "Great Sea".
The enjoyment in these reads is the relentless evolutions of civilization to possess a thing that can not be possessed for long. The nearest approximate read to compare with the Great Sea is the Durant's 11 volume "The Story of Civilization" and that's too much and not effective in conveying the story that Abulafia frames. I was struck that I've been to Malta, Crete and Cyprus and seen the remains of the most ancient Mediterranean civilization against the backdrop of the most modern and I quite missed imagining the story of everything that radiated out and in between. I've wandered among the strange Cyclopean remains in Malta, then the Cycladic places of Greece, without appreciating that Cycladic were the epoch distant successor of the Cyclopian. The time scales are hard to imagine. Abulafia does the best job I've seen in pulling it together. This is an important book and a must read. There's a good chance that the reader's perspectives might be adjusted ... it's a 5 star great read and a 'wow' that will stay with you.
p.s. I have gone back after several other reviewers noted a disconnect in the maps. I read the book and not the Kindle which is getting some tough reviews. I have to say that I noted Abulafia had aligned adequately illustrated, narrative matching maps. The exclusion of political boundaries for modern reference differing to a focus on 'centers' is part of Abulafia's story. I was previously unaware of a Sardinian (proto-Basque?) contender (pg 120) and had to go to Wiki for a closer look. Abulafia's use of maps seems adequate.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Absolutely Astounding!
By bonnie_blu
This is a magnificently written, remarkable, view changing book. It is impossible to write a thorough review of this 600+ page book (not to mention the over 100 pages of notes/references) that covers the history of the Mediterranean Sea from before written history to the present day. However, let me say that Abulafia does an absolutely astounding job of relating this history without pre-conceived notions or prejudice. The book is highly readable and an eye-opening joy. Simply by reporting on the peoples and events that shaped the lands around the Mediterranean over thousands of years, Abulafia shows that people are people regardless of the time in which they live. The history of the Mediterranean is one of human triumph and tragedy that repeats over and over again simply because human beings are human beings. The only time in the history of the Sea that it was peaceful for hundreds of years was during the Pax Romana, that period when the Roman Empire ruled all of the lands around the Mediterranean (called the "Mare Nostrum" by the Romans - "Our Sea"). The book is divided into five chronological sections from 20,000 BCE to the present. Each section is amazing in its breadth and not only includes information from the most recent archeological finds, but also details how these finds relate to each other, to other lands and peoples around the Mediterranean, and to the past (and possible future) of the Sea. I give this book my highest recommendation.
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