Staring into the Mediterranean

A massive work of wide-ranging scholarship, David Abulafia’s The Great Sea is, as the title states, a human history of the Mediterranean, mare nostrum to the possessive Romans (and later, albeit less realistically, to Mussolini and the Italian fascists); yam ha-gadol, “the Great Sea”, to the Jews of antiquity and the Middle Ages; Akdeniz, “White Sea”, to the Turks; and Mittelmeer, “Middle Sea”, to the Germans. Sailors and airmen who fought for control of its waters in two world wars, and today’s Sub-Saharan African refugees who cross it to escape the brutal realities of their homelands, no doubt had and have more graphic names for it. The diverse names do more than amuse, however. They reveal the diversity with which peoples, cultures and civilizations have exploited the sea and been shaped by it. That is the underlying theme of this work by Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge.