Rolf Petri: The 'Mediterranean World:' European Power Politics and the Geographical Mind, 1571–1973, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Brill, 2026, ISBN 978-3-11-914348-6 FORTHCOMING
The book offers a long-term view of the “Mediterranean World”, a geographical division whose individual traits supposedly set it apart from all others. It traces the gradual emergence, between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries, of ideas that associated the Mediterranean Sea with meanings that referred to something other than just a sea. It is a text on how these ideas were condensed into a distinct narrative of Mediterranean-ness at the service of European power politics during and after the Napoleonic period. It describes how the later variants of the same narrative served colonial and neo-colonial interests until the height of the Cold War, up to a moment when Western geopolitical hegemony in the region and the wider world shifted away from Europe to the United States of America. While centred on the history of ideas and concepts, the text weaves its analysis into a comprehensive narrative, thereby making it accessible to readers outside academia and usable as a historical textbook in fields such as International Relations.
