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92 Mediterraneans
history: that the questions one may ask about another culture
can easily be taken for granted when looking at what, to Western
historians, is the much more familiar one of the Mediterranean
Sea. At another level we have perhaps identified, in the
broadest outline, a fundamental characteristic of Mediterraneans:
the relative proximity of opposing shores, but the clear
separation between shores, enables different cultures to interact
with one another across what may at times seem almost impermeable
cultural barriers, such as the Christian–Muslim divide
in the Mediterranean Sea or the political suspicions which
sometimes led the medieval Japanese to hold the Chinese and
Koreans at arm’s length, while still enjoying a close rapport
with Chinese and Korean culture. In the case of the Mediterranean
of the Sahara ships of the desert brought the Islamic north
into contact with Black Africa, leaving a cultural and commercial
imprint that lasts to this day.
Yet it might all seem to be a truism. Of course seas divide as
well as link. And in a certain sense the early modern Atlantic,
opening out far beyond the ‘Mediterranean Atlantic’ described
here, became a vast Mediterranean in its own right, tying together
Spain and its colonies; superimposed on this was a
second Mediterranean, the western trading world of Portugal,
which shared parts of the same space, but had different priorities
and economic structures. And in the twenty-first century
the entire world could be said to be one Mediterranean, a
globalized Mediterranean, with the United States playing the
role that China had played in Japan’s Mediterranean, as both a
cultural idol and (to some) a suspect political force. Plotting the
routes taken by passenger and cargo planes, one could describe
a new worldwide Mediterranean characterized by exceptionally
intense trans-Atlantic contacts tying together Europe and
North America, and other very intricate webs around Singapore,
Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo.
So what is special about past Mediterraneans? In part it is a
question of scale, of ease of movement, which is a good reason
for arguing that the global Mediterranean is something only
created by air travel and other forms of rapid communication
(electronic as well as physical). Mediterraneans conjure up the
history of coexistence—commercial, cultural, religious, political,
as well as that of confrontation between neighbours aware