MEDITERRANEAN

The Mediterranean Sea has held huge economic importance for millennia. This virtually landlocked sea, bordered by three continents, has been a vital bridge for economic and cultural commerce over centuries. In the ancient period it gave rise to the world's first great civilizations, most notably the Phoenicians and the Minoans. In later periods it fostered major global developments such as the rise and dissemination of Christianity and Islam. While following the Middle Ages the Mediterranean went into decline, largely as the result of the so-called Age of Discovery and Europe's new orientation toward the Americas, it remained critical to the imperial regimes of the Venetians, Ottomans, and Habsburgs. In the early twenty-first century, following the initiation in the 1990s of the Barcelona Process, it has regained importance as a critical cultural and economic intersection between Europe, Africa, and Asia.

States along the Mediterranean's shores in the early twenty-first century include Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Two further states—Cyprus and Malta—are islands within it. Most of these polities were shaped by the nineteenth-century transition from Ottoman regional dominance to the establishment of separate nation states in the area. Traditionally, the Mediterranean Sea has had a unifying, rather than a dividing effect, and has served far more as a conduit for communication and cultural diffusion than as a boundary between different geographic regions. This unity notwithstanding, the region has over the course of millennia been a site of intense international and regional competition and warfare. The events of the "long nineteenth century" are a case in point.

At the time of the French Revolution the Mediterranean was divided up largely between the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Venetian Republic; by the end of World War II none of these empires existed. The most dramatic changes of fortune during the period were dealt to the Ottomans and to the Venetian Republic; struggles within the Mediterranean were the direct cause of the latter's decline, and a key component of the Ottoman Empire's ultimate demise.

During the French Revolutionary period and on into the nineteenth century, the Russians, French, and British were the primary contenders for control in the region. Following the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji (1774), the Russians were granted large latitude in Mediterranean seagoing trade within Ottoman waters and gained control of the Dardanelles, a narrow strait that links the sea in the northeast to the Black Sea. The treaty also gave Russia a protectorate of sorts over Greek Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire and as such contributed greatly to the growth of Greek dominance in Mediterranean trade.

The Ionian Islands, off the northwest coast of today's Greece, were the site of conflict between Venice, France, and Britain. Corfu, the largest of the island chain, was under Venetian control until Napoleon wrested it from Venice, effectively bringing about the end of the Venetian overseas empire. Some years later the islands came under a British protectorate, before being joined with Greece in 1864. The rapid growth of Napoleonic power in Europe made the Mediterranean a strategically vital site in the efforts of British, Habsburg, and Russian powers to stem the growth of France. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the basis for modern-day concepts of the balance of power, laid a plan for maintaining equilibrium between the Great Powers; equitable division of the Mediterranean was one of its core components. Over the course of the century, Britain and France took control of most of formerly Ottoman North Africa, most notably with France taking Algeria in 1830 and Great Britain taking Egypt in 1882.

Internal conflicts as well as international ones also led to significant changes in the region. Under Mehmet Ali (1769–1849), Egypt was modernized over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, and the port city of Alexandria emerged as the Mediterranean city par excellence. In 1848 revolutions within the Habsburg Empire, France, and particularly the Italian States further destabilized the region.

With the exponential growth of trade and industry in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth century saw the rise of a number of important port cities, known for their markedly high levels of liberal cosmopolitanism, cultural diversity, and multilinguality. Such cities as Izmir on the Asia Minor coast, Alexandria in Egypt, Salonika in Greek Macedonia, Trieste on the Adriatic in northeastern Italy, and Marseilles and Toulon on the French coast are prime examples. At the same time, vast engineering projects reclaimed some of the Mediterranean's earlier centrality to global seagoing trade. The Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and thus to the Arabian Sea, while the Corinth Canal (1893) linked the Aegean and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean. With this renewed economic importance, struggle for control of the region intensified further.

See alsoAfrica; France; Italy; Ottoman Empire.

bibliography

Abulafia, Daniel, ed. The Mediterranean in History. London, 2003.

Bradford, Ernle Dusgate Selby. Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea. London, 1971.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 2. Translated from the French by Siân Reynolds. Berkeley, Calif., 1995.

Kurth, James, and James Petras, eds. Mediterranean Paradoxes: Politics and Social Structure in Southern Europe. Providence, R.I., 1993.

Swain, James E. The Struggle for the Control of the Mediterranean Prior to 1848: A Study in Anglo-French Relations. Boston, 1933.

K. Fleming