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 twenty-Seven
In his account of the historical geography of the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara,
Fernand Braudel presents both as open-ended spaces: “On going from the
Mediterranean to the Sahara all the distances grow longer, the scale changes com-
pletely. The supreme importance of transport is increased and comes to dominate
everything else” (1972–3: 173). The Sahara was the second face of the Mediterranean;
throughout its history, the sea has felt the pull of its desert pole, the southern section
of a zone that extended well beyond the shores of the sea in all directions. The south-
ern limits of the zone Braudel calls the “Greater Mediterranean,” the “Mediterranean
of the historian,” and the “Mediterranean of historical dimensions” extended to the
middle Niger basin, the Upper Nile valley, and the Ethiopian Highlands, correspond-
ing to what Muslim geographers call the bilad al-Sudan. Both the greater Mediterranean
and bilad al-Sudan imply a global collective of areas and formations that maintained
strong interrelations and was sufficiently integrated to exhibit systemic characteristics.
Specific topics and empirical orientations pursued by Africanist scholarship have
included patterns of local and trans-local interaction and integration, long- and
short-term trajectories of social development, cultural and intellectual production
of identities, sociocultural links, shared artistic traditions, cultures, and practices,
political–diplomatic and cross-cultural exchanges, inter-cultural identities, and cross-
craft interactions. These elements can be used to define the scope and meaning of the
greater Mediterranean. What are the identifiable points of convergence and diver-
gence in Mediterranean studies and greater Mediterranean historiography? The
present study does not answer the question but proposes a guideline in the form of a
set of queries.
The regional systems under review are traceable to what archaeologists call the
Trans-Saharan Pastoral Technocomplex. From the fourth through the first millennia
bce, it stretched from the central Nile valley in the east to the Atlantic Sahara in the
west and can be described as a sociocultural repository, a structural substratum, and
an abstract and practical fund from which regional formations in the Sahara, the
middle Nile valley, and the middle Niger basin could draw their content. Over the
The Mediterranean and Africa
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