108 naor ben-yehoyada
“clash” c. 2001. In that sense, we belong in the Mediterranean that we study, which
turns our inquiries into a journey “through the looking-glass” (Herzfeld, 1987).
Traditionally, scholars have used modernity as a yardstick for the social, cultural, eco-
nomic, political, or psychological realities they encountered. In the first decade of the
twenty-first century, some scholars have used the Mediterranean as an alternative to a
European-centered modernity they critique as interrupted, porous, and filled with
discontents (Chambers, 2008).
Second, the wide consensus among scholars in the second half of the twentieth
century, when modernization and the Mediterranean were brought under scrutiny,
was that modernity stood for north-western European modernity. While many voices
of dissent have questioned north-western European monopoly as the monochromatic
cradle of modernity, the alternative candidates come from other early-modern impe-
rial and economic cores far from the circum-Mediterranean lands (Pomeranz, 2000).
The discourse about modernity thus changed the geopolitical imagination of the
Mediterranean: it split the region into southern Europe and the rest (North Africa,
Levant), according to these areas’ relative proximity to the core of modernity. A
reconstruction of a modern Mediterranean, if successful, would offer a geopolitical
cognitive map orientated not, or not only towards Paris. Since in a modern world the
Mediterranean is supposed to expire as an intelligible unit, a counter-example would
question the norms of intelligibility that have declared the sea’s death.
I begin this chapter by discussing the views of a Mediterranean modernity and a
modern Mediterranean as symmetrically opposing mutual exclusions. I then show
how in the three main realms of inquiry—honor and shame, patronage, and
cosmopolitanism—the contemporary Mediterranean has been defined in contrast to
corresponding images of European modernity. I then show how a conception of the
Mediterranean as a spatial constellation undergoing recurring formation and dissolu-
tion would make the notion of a modern Mediterranean plausible and reveal its
structural similarities and connections with the sea’s previous lives.
A modern Mediterranean?There is a near consensus among historians that the Mediterranean they reconstruct
from pre-modern times no longer exists, though, as Molly Greene shows in her chap-
ter in this volume, some aspects of such pre-modern Mediterranean worlds—as well
as the main preoccupation regarding the Mediterranean’s unity and attempts to unify
it—have made it to our times. For some, the Mediterranean they excavate from
archives and sites—from the days of binary religious divisions, sails, corsairs, and the
slave trade—“waned” since the seventeenth century, with the Mediterranean’s dimin-
ishing importance in a world system turned both national and global (Tabak, 2008).
The question whether the “Northern Invasion” nationalized and thus ended a bipolar
monotheistic world (Braudel, 1972–3: 615–642) or complexified it by adding nation-
ality to religion (Greene, 2002) postpones the end of the Mediterranean so conceived
throughout the seventeenth century. As Greene shows in this volume, by examining
the Mediterranean from the east, with the relationship of the Ottoman Empire with
Russia and eastern Europe through the Black Sea, the relationships between political
sovereignty and commercial networks that characterized this period extend through
the long eighteenth century. For others, the distinctiveness of Mediterranean history,