the Mediterraneans in all their plurality
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“The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean”, by David Abulafia, translated from English by Olivier Salvatori, Les Belles Lettres, 758 p., €35 .
Is the history of humanity governed by natural forces that go beyond it, such as geography, climate, epidemics? David Abulafia, in The Great Sea (published in English in 2011), chooses to study the Mediterranean, a seemingly immutable geophysical entity. This object is not innocent: the British academic tackles a monument of historical thought, the thesis that Fernand Braudel defended in 1947, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world at the time of Philip II (Armand Colin, 1949). For Braudel, who refused the event-based conception of history, the physical environment defined a long time, always prevailing over political events. David Abulafia reverses the perspective and places humans at the center of his story.
His ambitious choice – to draw a fresco running from prehistoric times to the present day – turns out to be a success. Rather than searching at all costs for an eternal Mediterranean, the historian emphasizes the diversity of experiences of exchange, conflict and coexistence between populations, at all times. Retracing continuities and ruptures, he describes the evolution of societies with joyful narrative pleasure, in a story teeming with characters and life.
The driving role of merchants
For the oldest eras, it offers the reader thrilling enigmas, such as those of the language and the origins of etruscan civilization in Italy. Comparing the fabulous stories that Antiquity delivered to our current knowledge – many Italian traits mixed with others, from more distant or still unknown origins, to form a singular culture –, he shows that this assembly of various elements was favored by the dynamism of Greek and Phoenician trade, which brought into contact the Mediterranean populations, their cults, their aesthetics and their social habits.
Because, for centuries, merchants played a driving role. Trading from shore to shore and communicating by means of a lingua franca made up of several idioms, they caused living standards to evolve, beliefs, determined settlements, influenced political struggles. This explains the characteristic plurality of the great Mediterranean ports, from Amalfi, in the south of Italy, to the giant Constantinople or Alexandria. From the pen of David Abulafia, the tortuous routes of navigators and the tricks of bankers or shipowners, their innovations and their thousand audacity, embezzlement and piracy included, give economic phenomena all the flavor and colors of the Mediterranean counters.
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