A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter seven
Unlike other historical terms of periodization, the phrases “the modern Mediterranean”
and “Mediterranean modernity” seem debatable if not outright oxymoronic. Both
the Mediterranean and modernity have been defined and qualified in various ways; in
most of them, where the one ends the other starts—be it chronologically, geographi-
cally, or conceptually. “Modern” usually refers either to chronology—for example,
since 1800 ce—or to an image of society. In either case, it is almost diametrically
opposed to the way the Mediterranean is defined. The social worlds of the sea either
expire with the advent of modernity or do not present the prerequisites of modern
social order. This is not to say that discussions of modernity and the Mediterranean
do not exist, quite the contrary. Yet even for those scholars who study the Mediterranean
in modern times, it is clear that modernity came to the Mediterranean, an encounter
that invites the liberating use of the plural on either side of the joining moment:
Mediterranean modernities or Mediterranean worlds in modern times (Abulafia, 2011;
Burke, 2010). We may therefore learn a great deal about how both Ms have been
treated in the last century by examining them together.
The conclusion that neither Mediterranean modernity nor a modern Mediterranean
exists has condemned the ethnographically-observable Mediterranean to an intellec-
tual quarantine. On the one hand, the things for which it is academically famous—
honor and shame, patronage, and cosmopolitanism (the only non-deprecating term
of the three)—are usually considered as emblematic relics from the sea’s past. On the
other hand, the myriad current events and processes like clandestine migration or
transnational and sub-national conflicts are not examined as elements in a constella-
tion parallel to those of the ancient, medieval, or early modern Mediterraneans, but
rather in their respective disciplinary and contextual realms.
The study of the Mediterranean since circa 1800 ce is a unique pursuit within
Mediterranean studies for two reasons. First, the Mediterranean in this period has
seen the events and transformations that shaped the intellectual axes of social sciences
that attempt to understand it—from the Napoleonic wars and their impact on
European social thought, through two world wars and the cold war, to the latest
Mediterranean Modernity?
naor Ben-yeHoyada