[BLANK AUDIO] [BLANK AUDIO] How have historians viewed this world, at once fascinating and chaotic, European yet foreign? As surprising as it may seem, very few historians dealt specifically with the Mediterranean as a whole until the end of the second world war. The fact that its waters are surrounded by numerous different countries with very different cultures, religions, and economic, social and political systems meant that historians tended not to view the Mediterranean as a whole. This was especially the case in the 19th century when history with a capital H was national history and the Mediterranean was a multinational world. It is therefore no coincidence that the most important book written to date about the Mediterranean, perhaps one of the most important history books written in the entire 20th century, was not published until 1948, just a short time after the end of the second world war. Although it's true that its author had been working on it for a long time, as you may have guessed, I'm referring to the celebrated book by Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The title of this book is a little misleading because far from limiting himself to the period of the second half of the 16th century, the period in which Philip II reigned, what Braudel actually does is attempt to interpret the Mediterranean in its entirety. The first contribution of Braudel's book is the presentation of the Mediterranean as a unitary subject. In Braudel's words, the Mediterranean is a character, a character capable of deeply affecting the lives of its populations with geographic, environmental, and climatic elements. The geographic and climatic conditions that have dominated the existence of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean have evolved very slowly. This brings us to the second great contribution of Braudel's book: The importance of slow time, the longue dur�e, in observing the changes that take place in the history of the Mediterranean. Braudel's book pays much closer attention to the continuities in time over centuries, to transformations than to brusque transformation, to dramatic events. The dominant trait of this geographic space was, for Braudel, exchange. For him, the Mediterranean is first and foremost a web of exchanges. A web without a visible centre. This brings us to the last of the contributions of Braudel's book that I want to emphasise today. Over time, exchanges have created a cultural space, a space in which apparently very diverse people come together, like Andalusians, Sicilians, Libyans, and Algerians. This notion has led some people to begin using a term that, in my opinion, is highly debatable, "Mediterraneanism". It is a term that directly evokes Edward Said's famous concept of Orientalism. Mediterraneanism is a term that, from the perspective of some anthropologists, sums up a certain view of the world that inhabitants of the Mediterranean had based on a very specific way of organising their family life. In 1985, the year that Ferdinand Braudel died, so did Shelomo Goitein, the author of a monumental work in six volumes. A Mediterranean Society, The Jewish Communities of the Arab World published in 1967. Although Goitein's influence was nowhere near as intense as Braudel's, he was in fact the first to call attention to a a point that has attracted an enormous amount of attention from historians in recent years. I'm talking about the role of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities and their ability to move within the Mediterranean geography, beyond the limits imposed by states or by official observations of faith. The presence of high numbers of individuals and groups in constant movement, unyielding to the pressure of assimilation had a direct effect on the political history of the Mediterranean. As the American Greek historian Anthony Molho points out, the mobility and vitality of these minorities made it difficult to form solid states in the countries of the Mediterranean basin like those that, especially after the 17th century, were being created in the countries of northern Europe. For a long time, historians have viewed this characteristic as a weakness of the Mediterranean world. A weakness, the lack of a solid state that has repercussions even today and that, as some believe, can still be seen in, for example, southern Italy or even in Greece, where the presence of the state in people's lives is still very limited. As we have seen, Braudel's influence on the historians of the Mediterranean has had a very long reach. This doesn't mean that Braudel has not come up against criticism. He's had detractors and plenty of them. And, without question, the most ambitious of these attempts to go beyond Braudel's vision in recent years has been at the hand of Cambridge University professor David Abulafia. His book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, has been translated into many different languages and several editions have been published in a short time, which would suggest that it is well on its way to becoming a classic. And perhaps to becoming Braudel's book's biggest competition. [BLANK AUDIO] [BLANK AUDIO]