Abstract
Reviewed by: Terry Burke, University of California, USA
Is the Mediterranean a single historical space, or is it so riven with complexities as to make the concept implausible? For Braudel, the Mediterranean was characterized by its geographical and cultural unity. However, within this generous vision it was static and unchanging, and by the end of the seventeenth century its future was implicitly already pre-shaped by the lurking colonial binaries. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, whose Corrupting Sea (2000) has given a new impulsion to thinking the Mediterranean, saw the region as dominated by thalassocracies in which the dominant feature was a ‘fragmented topography of macro-space’.
Parallel to these interventions, a new generation of scholars informed by new questions and a broader historical vision has sought to reimagine the region as a space of cultural interactions. Focused primarily upon Iberia, the Balkans and the Italian peninsula, this new scholarship has come to emphasize the complexity and contingency of the interactions of Muslims, Christians and Jews across the region, and the trans-national and trans-cultural extent of the interchanges. However, until now this scholarship has mostly focused upon the late medieval and early modern periods.
One of the considerable merits of Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou’s edited collection is that it extends the period under study to the long nineteenth century (1750–1919). Simultaneously, it effectuates a second major innovation: it views the Mediterranean as a place of intellectual exchange and intercommunication, whereas previously it had been primarily examined in the context of various national histories. Third, the essays in this volume trace the role of cultural diasporas in the emergence of nationalism and modern politics through an examination of the braided lives of Mediterranean intellectual and political figures. This enables them to break with the older narratives, which had viewed the histories of Italy, Greece and Iberia primarily as reflections of northern European modernity.
Three new subjects of investigation emerge. The first is that of the interconnected worlds of Mediterranean liberal thought and politics that reverberated within the region in the period after the defeat of Napoleon. The ebb and flow of political tides in the 1820s and 1830s fostered the emergence of a culture of Mediterranean brotherhood, internationalism and volunteerism. These uprisings participated in the larger Western European patterns, but they were also propelled by anti-imperial and anti-colonial causes. For example, Juan Luis Simal’s chapter discusses the emergence of a liberal international in response to the interconnected fates of multiple diasporas generated by revolutions and counter-revolutions (in Spain, Portugal, Naples, Piedmont and Greece) in the early 1820s, based upon a reading of key texts written by participants in these events. Gabriel Paquette employs the writings of Almeida Garrett as a lens to examine the failed early nineteenth-century revolutions of Portugal. He shows how the experience of exile brought his protagonist to espouse a ‘System of Southern Liberty’. Maurizio Isabella’s chapter considers the political dilemmas liberal Italian and Greek patriots faced in the changing contexts of the imperial peripheries. He convincingly inserts the story of Mediterranean liberalisms into the larger frame of what Christopher Bayly has called global liberalism.
The second important innovation of Mediterranean Diasporas is the attention it gives to the Orthodox and Greek-speaking Mediterranean. Here it builds upon the increasing complexification of the story of Greek liberal nationalism. Konstantina Zanou’s chapter may serve as an example of this strand. Rather than being derived from a Paris-centred narrative strongly driven by the idea of the French Revolution, she suggests that Greek nationalism arose in a polycentric Mediterranean context, and was more reflective of the multi-level patria of the Ionian Islands, as well as the Greek diasporas in the Venetian, Russian and Ottoman empires. One of the big gains in her approach is to recover the provisionality of the story of Greek nationalism, and the provinciality as well as the cosmopolitanism of the ideas from which it emerged.
A third arena of conversation opened by the essays in this book is the world of Ottoman liberalism. The chapters by Ian Coller, Andrew Arsan, Vangelis Kechriotis, Artan Puto and Maurizio Isabella address different aspects of the subject. Ottoman liberalism, we learn, is not the same as liberalism in the Ottoman Empire. Albanian, Karamanli Greeks and itinerant subjects of Venice, Dubrovnik and Istanbul (in the remarkable intervention of Dominique Kirchner Reill) also evoke the elusive worlds of diasporic nationalisms and liberalisms avant la lettre.
This wonderful, inspiring volume can be expected to play an important role in how we tell (and teach) the story of Mediterranean history in the long nineteenth century. Connected history has never been so good!