mediterranean modernity? 109
the combination of relatively easy seaborne communications and a fragmented
topography of microregions, lost its central role since the late nineteenth century:
During the twentieth century, the Mediterranean region itself has also to a considerable
extent been disintegrated, and the network of its microecologies radically reconfigured,
by the involvement of its coastal nations in the credit economies, political alliances,
technologies and communications networks of the North and West or the Far East.
(Horden and Purcell, 2006: 3)Whether modernity stands for European transoceanic colonial expansion,
nationalization, or nation-states’ sea-shunning consolidation, it is said to have sealed the
sea’s fate. Economic globalization, for example, is dated to the period 1870–1914, a
period during which the economic gap between western and southern European coun-
tries only widened (Pamuk and Williamson, 2000: 4).
More generally, because the Mediterranean is defined on the basis of historically-
delimited characteristics that are said to expire before modernity, applying any con-
ception of the Mediterranean from the historiography of earlier periods to the present
runs the risk of anachronism. It matters less whether the aspects or areas of the
Mediterranean are believed to be immune to change (as Braudel would have it; 1972:
1239) or to incorporate coping strategies for instability and unpredictability, that is,
incessant change (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 13). When the noun is the sea and the
adjective the period, there is no “modern Mediterranean.” What about “Mediterranean
modernity?”
A Mediterranean modernity?Modernity has been defined in various, often contradictory ways. As a social, cultural,
economic, and/or political state of being, it denotes either the end product of or
the demand for modernization (Cooper, 2005: 113–131). With relation to the
Mediterranean, it usually denotes one or more of these processes (or the absence or
late arrival thereof): individualization, urbanization, nationalism and state-formation,
the spread of European merchant capitalism with its expansive projects, imperialism
and colonialism (Tabak, 2008). These processes are usually used to distinguish
north-western Europe from the continent’s Mediterranean littoral, and it is assumed
that the hierarchy extrapolates outwards toward the sea’s Asian and African hinter-
lands. The latter are described as increasingly excluded from these same processes,
violently exposed to them by northerners (north-western Europeans and/or
Ottomans), or changed so significantly by them that their social composition qualita-
tively disintegrated.
Yet the distinction between the “modern” and the “traditional” includes in the
Mediterranean case more than discursive othering and colonial domination. Here, the
distinction includes a discourse of historical separation. If European colonial expan-
sion in sub-Saharan Africa, America, the Pacific, and South Asia was perceived as a
series of encounters or re-encounters after millennia of separation, the changing rela-
tions between north-western Europe and the Mediterranean were actually taken to
constitute a gradual detachment. When the industrial and economic dimensions of
modernity are the focus of attention, the Mediterranean becomes northwestern