Histories of a Sea: Commerce, Culture and Material Conditions in the Mediterranean World (original) (raw)

“Histories of a Sea” aims to familiarize students with the long debates and different conceptualizations of the Mediterranean as a historical space. It traces the genealogy of the historiography of the Mediterranean by looking at the different explanations for the connecting factors behind the unity of the Mediterranean, or conversely what brought the end of that unity. Trade, culture, or the environment were the main explanations behind the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Each weekly seminar will thoroughly examine one approach, exploring the main trends in the different visions of the Mediterranean. The course will thus examine the key themes and processes that forged the Mediterranean world, whether one sees it as united, divided, or united-in-diversity. By the end of the course students will: be able to think and work with big analytical categories; move between different scales of analytical thinking, e.g. local, regional, imperial, global; appreciate the shared and overlapping historical processes across or in parts of the Mediterranean; have the capacity to critically evaluate the political connotations of various conceptualizations of the Mediterranean; have synthesized between different approaches to the Mediterranean.