David Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University, tackles history on a grand scale in The Great Sea, taking the reader on a journey that begins with Neolithic Sicily in 22,000 B.C. and ends with the transformation of the Mediterranean into a tourist destination after 1950. Summarizing his subject as "those who dipped their toes into the sea, and, best of all, took journeys across it," he considers islands, ports and wind patterns, sailors and merchants, the exchange of goods, religions and ideas, and the rise and fall of empires. He tells new versions of old stories: the fall of Troy, the founding of Carthage, the mysterious origins of the Etruscans, the emergence of Dubrovnik as the "Jewel of the Sea," the impact of the Barbary Corsairs and the building of the Suez Canal.
The comparison with French historian Fernand Braudel's groundbreaking The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II is inevitable. Abulafia deals with it head on. He describes Braudel's work as horizontal history, focused on cultural continuity based on regional geography. In contrast, he claims that his own work is vertical, emphasizing change over time. In fact, the two books differ in both scope and focus. Where Braudel concentrates on the hinterlands that support the Mediterranean shore, Abulafia focuses on the sea and the men who crossed it.
Whether horizontal, vertical or upside down, The Great Sea deserves a place on the shelf next to Braudel's classic work. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins