Mediterranean historian David Abulafia: Exchange between civilizations shaped human history, but it is no cure-all | Interviews

"What matters, rather, is tolerance born of practical self-interest. Once it rises to the level of religion or anything like it, people turn very harsh."

The Great Sea runs to more than 1,000 pages. Published in 2011, it was the first general history of the Mediterranean written by the discipline of history, and it covers everything that can be dug up about human dealings with that sea, from 22,000 BCE to 2014 CE.

General histories tend to be huge and tangled, and Mediterranean history especially so: it takes in three continents, several religions, and dozens of civilizations. Yet the author, David Abulafia, traces his interest back to a fairly simple question. The Mediterranean has long been the place where different human civilizations met and mixed most often — so how did that exchange shape human history, and the world we live in now?

"The theme of this book is to explore the process by which the Mediterranean was integrated, to varying degrees, into a single zone of trade, culture, and even — under Roman rule — politics, and how these periods of integration ended in violent disintegration, whether by war or by plague," Abulafia writes in the preface. "This book is concerned with... people who in some cases took part directly in trade between different cultures, and in religious or other intellectual movements; and who, it should be noted, may also have fought wars at sea in order to control the sea routes."

Abulafia, now 70, is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge. His first book, Two Italies, came out in 1977. It studied the relationship between northern and southern Italy in the 12th century and argued that the north exploited the south's agricultural resources, which is how it grew so fast in the later Renaissance.

Other books followed: Frederick II, Discovery of Mankind, Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean. In 2013 Abulafia was awarded the British Academy Medal, one of the highest honors in the humanities and social sciences in Britain.

Looking back on his career, Abulafia now thinks that as early as Two Italies he was already watching how exchange between civilizations bends the course of history. And since the Mediterranean is the sea where such exchange happened most often, it naturally became the center of his research. There is another reason. Compared with other forms of exchange between civilizations, the people crossing the Mediterranean were mostly ordinary merchants, slaves, and pilgrims — people, Abulafia believes, that historians used to overlook.

Today the word "exchange" carries a romantic glow, even a sacred function. Many self-described progressives believe that if people simply keep talking to each other for long enough, differences and quarrels will dissolve and a more equal society will follow. Exchange has come to be treated as a cure-all for every social problem.

Abulafia, who studies exchange between civilizations for a living, is wary of exactly that. Holding up Mediterranean history as a mirror, he says: "There is today a tendency to romanticize the Mediterranean as a center of fusion, which is fair enough, but the dark facts of early modern trans-Mediterranean exchange should also be kept firmly in mind."

On the good side, trade across the Mediterranean really did produce a degree of fusion. A typical Mediterranean port city could hold several different ethnic and religious communities at once, and that was hard won. On the other side, trade usually came bundled with piracy running loose along the coasts, which in turn produced captives and slaves in large numbers.

Abulafia's work makes the point that exchange is not always peaceful. It is also full of violence and friction, and even its final outcome — good or bad — is hard to predict. So his overall attitude toward exchange between human civilizations is a cautious one.

That attitude has put him on the opposite side from most scholars and intellectuals. In 2015 Abulafia helped found a group called Historians for Britain. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron had just won a general election, and to keep a campaign promise he announced a referendum for 2016 on whether Britain should stay in the European Union.

On Britain's relationship with the EU, Abulafia argued, in a letter co-signed by the scholars in the group, that Britain should not stay in the EU unless the EU reformed itself completely.

His position was quickly read as support for Brexit. But the argument he made is closer to a liberal conservative's. He believes Britain has a different legal system and a different form of political organization from the rest of the EU. Britain should not shut itself off from the European continent, but with so many differences in play, any dealings with the EU should be handled carefully, taking longer to work out the relationship between the two sides rather than swallowing whatever comes out of Brussels.

"I mainly study European history, and I go to Europe from time to time," Abulafia says. "But I do feel that even when I'm in France, I'm someone from another country... That means being fully absorbed into the EU would be very hard for us. It could easily damage the future development of our legal system."

Just as his work on Mediterranean history shaped his view of exchange between civilizations, Abulafia believes that history also gives people a reference point for understanding where they stand today.

At the end of The Great Sea he writes: "Easy connections across the globe — physical links by air, virtual links by the internet — mean that political and cultural ties can now be maintained over long distances. In that sense, the world is turning into one great Mediterranean. Inside that great Mediterranean, the world turns around the great sea."

At a moment when people are in contact more often and in conflict more sharply, this is Abulafia's way of reminding them that although the main channels of exchange between civilizations no longer run across the surface of the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean's story is not over.

Q: QDaily

A: David Abulafia

Q: Looking at your academic career, most of your research has been on Mediterranean history. Where did your interest in the Mediterranean come from?

A: My next book is actually about seas other than the Mediterranean. I also have a book, Discovery of Mankind, about the Atlantic — about how people's understanding of humanity changed when Columbus sailed to the Americas. But yes, I have a particular interest in the Mediterranean, because it touches Europe, Africa, and Asia, and different cultures come together there. That is what I find especially interesting, and that convergence goes back thousands of years.

When I was still a student I was especially drawn to Mediterranean archaeology, above all the remains left by the ancient Greeks fishing in the Mediterranean. My education played a part too — in those days school required a great deal of Latin, and some Greek as well. And of course, for a northern European like me the Mediterranean sun has its own pull, the way it did for the 19th-century composer Wagner, who wrote Parsifal in Italy.

Q: That's the general answer. Was there something specific in your own life that got you started on the Mediterranean?

A: There was. My ancestors came from Spain. They were expelled in 1492 and went to what is now Israel, and only later moved to Britain. These connections across the Mediterranean really are part of my identity. If you come from a multicultural background — partly Jewish, partly traditional British, plus influences from many other places — then the Mediterranean, as a place where different cultures meet, becomes a very natural interest.

Q: I'm curious how an ancestral identity like that actually works on you, since by your account it happened 500 years ago.

A: This attention to ancestry may be a particularly British thing. You can certainly find it in the United States as well — a family that proudly calls itself Polish or Italian by descent. What I mean is that there is an awareness that you can be a citizen of one country and carry many different cultural backgrounds at the same time. In modern society I think that matters a great deal.

Many European countries have some degree of discrimination against ethnic minorities. On the one hand we want to encourage people to identify with their own cultural background; on the other we want people from different cultures to blend into mainstream society. There are many ways to strike that balance. The French clearly chose a different one from the British. And yes, it does not always work. We have this problem in Britain. Jews and Indians have integrated fairly well, but it may not have worked as well for Muslims. If we show respect for tradition, we might get some good results.

Beyond respecting the value of tradition, an important thing is how to keep these people from losing their link to it, whether that tradition is cultural or religious. All of it is inseparable from humanity's past.

Q: In the book you divide Mediterranean history into five stages. What is the reasoning behind that?

A: The divisions are actually based on the decline of civilizations. You might guess this has something to do with Marx's theory of class struggle, but it doesn't.

Go back to the Bronze Age, to roughly 1100 BCE. At that point the Mediterranean was only partly linked as a trading zone. In political terms, many regions had not yet been drawn into a Mediterranean world. Look at what happened under those conditions and you find that the two most important cultures were the early civilization of what is now Palestine and, a little earlier, the decline of Troy.

After that comes another stage: the revival that followed the decline of Trojan culture, what we now call ancient Greek and Roman culture. They are the classical world. That classical world then declined in turn. Scholars argue a great deal about that decline, of course, but for my purposes it marks the end of the Mediterranean's second stage.

The end of the third stage seems easy to pin on Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the discovery of the New World, because that opened the route to the Americas and the Mediterranean's influence began to be challenged. In fact the challenge appeared earlier than a single date like the Age of Discovery. It is tied to the Black Death sweeping 14th-century Europe. That brought changes to the political and economic structure of the whole Mediterranean world, which pushed Europe's transformation along and later laid the ground for industrial development around the Mediterranean.

I put the line between the fourth and fifth stages at the digging of the Suez Canal. Once the canal opened, the Mediterranean formally became a waypoint on global shipping routes, with ships able to pass through to India and China. It joined the Mediterranean formally to the world's other great seas.

Q: In The Great Sea you write: "This is a history of the Mediterranean Sea, not of the lands around it." Could you expand on that? How does it change your subject and your method?

A: Plenty of people have claimed to be Mediterranean historians. Every day I get emails inviting me to conferences and forums on Mediterranean history. But when many of them discuss Mediterranean history, what they offer is a topic like Greek politics — and that is not Mediterranean history.

To me, Mediterranean history is a way of looking at the Mediterranean as a space, and of understanding it through human activity on top of it. As I said, three continents meet here, many countries are scattered along the shores, and the sea itself holds many islands, which makes for very dense exchange.

Think about it that way and you notice that historians are far too used to studying the history of states and peoples. Then you start to ask whether it is possible to write history with human activity on the surface of the sea as the subject. This book is called The Great Sea; it is about the history of human life on the sea, which is not the same as human life on land. Of course, to write the history of the sea you have to record where people set out from, so port cities became a subject of the book too.

Port cities are bound up with questions of identity, because in them you can see people of different ethnicities and religions living together. So the book has a chapter about such cities — Alexandria, for example. Before the 20th century this phenomenon drew very little attention. Which naturally leads to a point: people need to learn to respect others, and to find ways of profiting from the mixture of different languages and cultures.

Q: So can we put it this way — Mediterranean history is the history of human exchange?

A: Exactly. If I had to give an example it would be Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean. Over the past several centuries many different cultures have shown up there. In the Middle Ages you could find Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Catholics, and Armenians on the island. That is where people invented the cocktail. Sicily also became a hub for shipping goods. And it was a place where scientific and philosophical work was traded.

Q: When you fix your research on the Mediterranean, do the results of that exchange stay within the sea, or do they reach further inland?

A: That's a good question. The reach of the Mediterranean has in fact always been shifting. Traditionally the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Suez Canal have been taken as its limits. But some people would fold the Black Sea coast into the Mediterranean as well. Not long ago I got an email from a university in Crimea. Since Britain does not recognize Crimea's status, I did not reply. But it raises an interesting question: what exactly is the Mediterranean? For the people there, adding the Black Sea makes a greater Mediterranean region. Some scholars would also count the waters off Portugal, the waters off Morocco, even the Red Sea. For me, the standard I use in my research is to look at where exchange between civilizations was most active.

Q: Why did you choose exchange between civilizations as the standard for observing and studying the Mediterranean, rather than some other measure?

A: Also a good question. Historians can of course look from a political angle — how a medieval king spent year after year of his reign conquering the countries next door. But when different cultures meet other cultures, how they affect each other through culture and through trade is a particularly interesting thing.

This theme is not unfamiliar in Chinese history either. While Europe was in the Middle Ages, Buddhism was spreading from India into China and having an enormous effect on Chinese politics and religion. Nor should one forget the relationship between China and Japan. So understanding these cultural exchanges helps explain the world we live in now; its roots are all planted in history.

Q: Could you say more about which part of Mediterranean history has had the most direct effect on the world order today? Is the Renaissance the most important one?

A: I can correct a misconception about the Renaissance here. People usually think the Renaissance happened in 15th- and 16th-century Florence, and perhaps Venice too. That view is especially common in American universities. But historians today take a more open view of it. They have come to see that looking only at Italy gives a very one-sided picture. Developments in northern Europe, above all in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, also mattered a great deal to how the Renaissance unfolded.

If I had to pick the Mediterranean's deepest mark on today's world order, I would choose the effects of decolonization — the history that played out in the 1950s in Mediterranean countries such as Algeria, Egypt, and Libya. I don't say this to defend colonialism. But once the Soviet Union began, in the 1950s, to work its way into Mediterranean politics through Yugoslavia, it brought a new way of understanding the relationship between imperial powers and colonies, and that way carried something destructive, even aggressive, in it. It was highly destructive.

The destruction lay in this: newly independent countries such as Algeria and Libya were unwilling to build a close relationship with their former imperial powers. They were in too much of a hurry to break away, and what they got instead was a very fragmented outcome. This was a huge problem in the history of the 20th century.

Take Egypt. Nasser became president in 1954. Europe and the United States read the situation completely wrong. They had a chance to help Nasser build a sound economic system, and they handed it wholesale to the Soviet Union. That deepened the conflict between the Arab world and Israel, and Egypt itself never built a mature political system, which caused a great many social problems. Before that, reconciliation between the Arabs and Israel had actually been possible. But the Soviet Union was more interested in using the hatred. The hatred running around the Mediterranean then grew steadily worse. Meanwhile the economic plans the Soviet Union offered Egypt were far from satisfactory. For a country that was not yet wealthy, their approach was not a good way to develop.

One thing deserves particular attention: in the 19th century Egypt's rulers had quite different ideas. They were seriously weighing whether to become part of Europe, at least economically. Looking back, none of those plans came to anything.

Q: My own view is that after the Second World War the former colonies' desire for independence may have been so radical that they turned to very violent means. In fact those countries may have had no other choice.

A: You're right. Judging by today's research, many independence movements saw themselves as left-wing movements, and a great many of them carried a deep streak of nationalism. In the end those movements destroyed the peaceful coexistence between different ethnicities and religions that you could once find in Alexandria and Cairo. Go to Alexandria today and there are very few cafés run by Greeks, no Jews, and certainly no Roman Catholics. The local police are now under enormous pressure, because the prejudice against these minorities runs deep. The whole make-up of the city's population was remade; it became an entirely Arab city. I am not saying that is 100 percent a bad thing, but in the process something precious that had existed was destroyed.

Q: Once that kind of destruction has happened, can it be undone?

A: That's interesting. A few years ago I took part in an academic conference in Barcelona on immigration. On the same panel was a leader of the government of Catalonia, the autonomous region Barcelona sits in, which is working toward Catalan independence.

What was interesting about his view is that he did not stress what people seeking independence traditionally stress — history, descent, Catalan culture and language. His dream was that, with large numbers of immigrants slowly arriving in Barcelona, those immigrants would come to identify with Catalan culture, and on that basis a new multicultural city would take shape.

Unfortunately I don't personally think this idea has much of a future. It might work, but in many nearby cities — Marseille, for one — multiculturalism has not performed especially well in recent years, and there is serious social conflict. That is also tied to certain old prejudices, the belief that immigrants will change how social and economic resources get shared out.

Q: It sounds as though you're somewhat pessimistic about the future of multiculturalism. What's interesting is that in your book, and just now in this conversation, you also point to many periods in Mediterranean history with plenty of examples of different ethnicities and religions living in the same city. It looks like a paradox.

A: I really am somewhat pessimistic about the Mediterranean's future. Any attempt to create some shared undertaking covering the whole Mediterranean is nonsense; it will not work.

On the coexistence you raise, I think it was, to a large extent, a calculation of practical interest. Go back to medieval Spain and you really do see Jews, Christians, and Muslims living side by side, with Muslims and Christians holding political power in different periods. But whoever held power always had a practical consideration in mind: stability matters.

You may not like your neighbor. You also know how easy it is to tear people apart. Create tension between different groups and antagonism is very likely to follow. Take Yugoslavia — they most likely all spoke the same language, but the moment religious difference was put on the table they could turn on each other very fast.

What matters, rather, is this kind of tolerance born of practical self-interest. Once it rises to the level of religion or anything like it, people turn very harsh.

Q: Can that tolerance only exist on such a practical level? Is tolerance for different religions and cultural customs possible on a higher one?

A: This is a very big question. In Britain we already have a situation in which any statement at all can meet resistance — anything touching race or gender can be shouted down. Yet many people, when they speak, do not mean to give offense, or do not realize they might. And it is precisely this state of affairs, where anything you say might be shouted down, that has produced the result: the whole space for speech, for discussion, has vanished.

That creates a serious problem. Take Britain now. On the surface our government and our parties oppose every form of racial discrimination, and at the same time there is evidence that antisemitism is spreading fast, like a virus. It matters to let people ask questions, and the questions themselves may well be controversial. If you don't allow argument, then under a surface of social stability people will store up resentment, anger, and intolerance.

Q: This problem may be getting worse in the world today. At the end of your book you say that with air travel and the internet the whole world is becoming one great Mediterranean, which means people will be in contact more and more often. If they grow less and less tolerant under those conditions, there could be even more conflict.

A: You're right that air travel and the internet are good in some ways, but they have brought terrible problems too. Britain right now faces the spread of extreme Islamism, including problems on the dark web and so on. Since we entered the internet age all exchange happens extremely fast, on a scale we could never have imagined 30 years ago, and that really does throw up a lot of problems.

On this I am very pessimistic; governments look completely unable to handle it. Internet giants like Google and Facebook may have to take on greater responsibility. Of course there is the question of where those giants' legitimacy comes from, and that is a very big question. I can't say they would replace governments. What is needed here is a new structure of governance. We very likely need a new framework for discussing the problems society now faces, whether that is the clash of civilizations the internet brings, or climate change, environmental damage, migration. I don't know whether the United Nations can serve that function — I'd rather not use a phrase like "world government" — but we do need to find a new model that lets these questions be discussed, instead of every government having its own separate policy.

Q: We seem to have talked a lot about the dark side of exchange. Does exchange itself bring any benefits?

A: Of course, of course. European culture has plainly been shaped to a great extent by different cultures — take the way Roman imperial culture pushed north into Europe. Many words in English today can be traced to Mediterranean roots. There is certainly some benefit in that, even if the dark side can't be avoided either.

Q: Speaking of the Roman Empire, that's my next question. Rome once straddled Europe, Asia, and Africa, carrying the same ideas, institutions, and legal system into very different regions. Yet as the empire fell, those regions seem to have gone off on completely different paths. Does that mean the effects of exchange may not last very long?

A: It's complicated. On one level it has to do with later political developments, including the influx of Germanic and other peoples. It would clearly be wrong to say that European civilization today is simply a continuation of the Roman Empire. It inherited part of Rome, and it also carries the influence of other peoples. At the same time, Rome's own internal workings played a part. The ancient Romans understood what a legal system could do, but they did not treat everyone alike, and their way of governing in particular was brutal and bloody.

Q: This may connect to how you divide Mediterranean history into stages — civilizations rise and fall through history. Rome was a peak in the development of human civilization, and soon afterward Europe sank into the Middle Ages. Do you think human civilization is in a trough now?

A: I understand the question. To a large extent the state of the world today does come down to how people defend democracy. Europe is troubled by the rise of populism. You could say Trump is America's populist. Poland and Hungary have the same problem.

At bottom, I think each country has taken a different path in dealing with its current political problems. Take Brexit — at its core it is a question of how to recover sovereignty; decisions made by the British Parliament sometimes count for less under the EU. Of course, exactly how to recover it is itself contentious. The important question is still this: if people show a preference or reach a decision through an election or a referendum, then protecting that preference or decision and seeing it carried out is what matters most.

Q: Most historians oppose Brexit, and your position isn't theirs. Could you explain it?

A: True, though some historians do agree with me. What we want to say is that Britain's political culture and political traditions differ from those of our neighbors in Europe. One example is that our legal system is entirely different. We also have no written constitution. We had never discussed any of this with the EU beforehand. Another issue is that decisions taken by the EU sometimes greatly weaken the force of decisions taken by the British Parliament. These are all very important but neglected questions, and right now all the attention goes to economics.

I lean toward Britain and Europe keeping a fairly loose connection. I do not support Britain cutting itself off from Europe entirely. The problem is that the British government has had far too little autonomy over the past two years. I support Britain joining a common market, a free-trade area. That would indeed limit British sovereignty to some degree.

Behind the EU's development as it stands is a concept of a European federation: they want the EU to keep expanding until it becomes something that can match the United States, China, and Russia. I don't think that's right; that should not be the way European countries come together. Europe is a mixture of many different cultures and of people with different political concerns. The Greeks, for instance, care most in foreign policy about Turkey, which is clearly not what the Irish or the Finns care about. Folding the whole of Europe into a single agenda is a dangerous thing to do.

We have already seen what happened with the euro. It has done a great deal of damage. In places like Spain and Portugal the euro has caused no shortage of economic problems.

Britain's relationship with Europe needs more time to be worked out, and the EU's expansion and integration so far have been too fast and too abrupt.

Cover image / Troy; Oxford University Press