The Mediterranean World, 1450 – 1800

With the steady stream of refugees attempting the dangerous crossing from North Africa to Italy and the Israeli destruction of Gaza in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks, the Mediterranean has returned to the political map with a vengeance. But the larger issues these tragedies raise – migration and exclusion, war and political strife, ethnic and religious difference – have been constitutive of this region for centuries.

This paper examines the Mediterranean in a key period of its history, namely the early modern period (1450-1800). Although the sea was riven by political, religious, and geographic fault lines, it was also densely interconnected and was united by ecology, trade, and culture. The paper thus deliberately integrates geographies often thought of as separate – European and African, Christian and Islamic, coastal and mountainous. Throughout the course, we will be evaluating the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a spatial category and discussing the distinctive geographies created by trade, diplomacy, slavery, or pilgrimage, to name only a few. Recurring themes of the paper will thus be mobility and immobility as well as the extent to which we can write of the early modern history of the Mediterranean as a connected history.

There is a powerful and important historiography on the Mediterranean Sea with Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II at its centre. Recent historical writing, however, has explored more actively links to the south, in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to the east, in the Balkans. In turn, while the Mediterranean was an important theatre of war and state formation and a nexus for European trade, this paper will also draw from broader questions in oceanic history, animal studies, and queer history, among others, and, in this way, reveal the limits of and alternatives to the Mediterranean paradigm in early modern history.

The course is organized by twelve foundational themes and four communities which allow students to explore and compare different contexts across the chronology of the paper. One of the lectures will be held in the University Library, and there will be an object handling session in the Fitzwilliam Museum in addition to the lectures. Students will be encouraged to draw from the histories of the following Mediterranean cities in order to anchor their knowledge of the Mediterranean to specific urban contexts: Algiers, Barcelona, Istanbul, Marseille, Naples, and Venice.

Although the course is organised thematically, lectures and supervisions will always be given with an attention to change over time including a consideration of deeper historical time, or the longue durée, alongside micro-historical change drawing from Braudel’s idea of plural temporalities. As such, students will be expected to have a knowledge of the sea’s basic political, religious, and economic transformations.

Some topics which may be covered in lectures and supervisions are: Slaves and Captives, Boats and Astrolabes, Travel and Encounter, and The Mediterranean by Food.