Book description
For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of
the great centres of world civilisation. From the time of historical
Troy until the middle of the nineteenth century, human activity here
decisively shaped much of the course of world history. David
Abulafia's The Great Sea is the first complete history of the
Mediterranean from the erection of the mysterious temples on Malta
around 3500 BC to the recent reinvention of the Mediterranean's shores
as a tourist destination.
Part of the argument of Abulafia's book is that the great port
cities - Alexandria, Trieste and Salonika and many others - prospered
in part because of their ability to allow many different peoples,
religions and identities to co-exist within sometimes very confined
spaces. He also brilliantly populates his history with identifiable
individuals whose lives illustrate with great immediacy the wider
developments he is describing.
The Great Sea ranges stupendously across time and the whole
extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa,
Venice to Alexandria. Rather than imposing a false unity on the sea
and the teeming human activity it has sustained, the book emphasises
diversity - ethnic, linguistic, religious and political. Anyone who
reads it will leave it with their understanding of those societies and
their histories enormously enriched.
David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at the
University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and
was until recently Chairman of the Cambridge History Faculty. His
previous books include Frederick II and The Western Mediterranean
Kingdoms. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, and in 2003 was made
Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana in
recognition of his work on Italian and Mediterranean history.
