The titanic struggle for supremacy between Carthage and Rome, here reconstructed in vivid detail, paves the way for an era of Roman dominance which entitled the sons of the Tiber, more than anyone else before or ever since, to speak of the Mediterranean as ‘Our Sea’. The battle cries of a heroic Mediterranean merge with the clank of bronze and copper wares traded along vibrant sea lanes.Ī ‘Second Mediterranean’, covering sixteen centuries or so of history from about 1000 BC to the great watershed of around 600 AD, takes the narrative along the coasts of the Great Sea on board the ships of the ‘purple traders’ and their Greek counterparts, ‘heirs of Odysseus’, who transform the Mediterranean into a thalassocratic lake, whose waters, through the pages of this book, are made to reflect again the resplendent light of the ‘Lighthouse’ of the Ptolemies. A ‘First Mediterranean’, extending from 22000 BC to 1000 BC, is encapsulated in a sixty-page synoptic journey which lays out some of the main themes to unfold across the rest of this voluminous history – the forces of isolation and insulation, the interaction between Sea peoples and Land peoples. A Human History of the Mediterranean, the use of the singular in ‘Human History’ is as significant as that of the plural in the scheme of classification of enumerated ‘Mediterraneans’ that it adopts. In David Abulafia’s magisterial The Great Sea.

In the veritable renaissance that the study of the enclosed sea in all its different dimensions has enjoyed over the past few decades, the exportation of an ‘academic’ Mediterranean to a wider audience around the globe must be one of the hallmarks of the globalization of the subject, making it accessible enough to stimulate a scholarly search for parallel stories to the one that the old sea has to tell us. The latest addition to the growing library of books on Mediterranean history is one of the most outstanding. By Charles Dalli, lecturer in History, University of Malta

The great sea abulafia