thalassoCraCies 147more grandiose wars, but furthering trade was a means to that end rather than an
end in itself; and if, as Mario del Treppo has argued, a western Mediterranean
“common market” was created linking Alfonso’s seven realms, this was with fiscal
advantages very much in mind (del Treppo, 1972).
One of the most remarkable Mediterranean thalassocracies, that of Great Britain,
also emerged without coherent planning. In the late seventeenth century the king of
England had acquired Tangier, but the cost of maintaining it proved too great and it
was abandoned. In other words, there was no great appetite for acquiring bases or
controlling Mediterranean waterways under King Charles II. Once again we seem to
see an empire being acquired through absence of mind. The acquisition of Gibraltar,
a by-product of the War of the Spanish Succession (formalized by the Treaty of
Utrecht in 1713) also carried with it the gift of Minorca, a rather desolate island that
did, however, prove to have some strategic value, because of its proximity to the
French naval base at Toulon. Britain was drawn deeper into the Mediterranean later
in the eighteenth century, confronting Napoleon in Malta and Egypt, and even bring-
ing Corsica briefly into union with the British crown (one in the eye for Bonaparte,
without a doubt). It is true that English shipping had been penetrating the
Mediterranean since the sixteenth century, alongside Dutch and other north- European
vessels, and a substantial English presence could be found at Smyrna (Izmir) on the
coast of Turkey from the seventeenth century to the destruction of much of the city
in 1922; still, the British navy was not patrolling the sea primarily in order to promote
British trade. Gibraltar was a naval base, not a commercial port. Malta became famous
for its dockyards. In the late nineteenth century, British commercial traffic through
the Suez Canal made the Mediterranean into a vital passageway en route to British
India—but it was just that, a passageway, even though politically the British presence
was greatly enhanced through gaining effective control of Egypt, as well as Cyprus
and eventually Palestine. British cultural influence reached deep into the societies that
fell under British rule: whether in the form of cricket in Corfu, sticky buns in Malta
or the Gibraltarian passion for simply being British (Abulafia, 2011: 488–523;
Holland, 2012).
The French Mediterranean empire of the nineteenth century might at first
glance look a more convincing case of thalassocracy. As early as 1830, the French
gained control of Algeria, and one result was the final extinction of the danger
from the Barbary corsairs, who had already suffered humiliation at the hands of
the American fleet at the start of the nineteenth century. And yet, even when
French control extended to Tunisia and eventually Morocco, and was further
enhanced by influence in Alexandria and a share in control of the Suez Canal, it
has to be admitted that the prime interest of France increasingly became the vast
hinterland behind the coast of the Maghreb, and the creation of French dominion
over most of the Sahara desert. However, one manifestation of this French domin-
ion stretching across the western Mediterranean lay in the realms of culture.
Algiers was partly rebuilt as a clone of Marseilles; at its university French scholars
proclaimed that France was restoring the lost Latin identity of the western
Mediterranean (they chose the term “Latin” rather than French because so many
settlers in Algeria were Spanish and Italian—the French were actually a minority
among European colonizers). This concept of a “Latin” Mediterranean can still
be perceived in Braudel’s Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, when, for0002063951.INDD 147 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM