A Fragmented Mediterranean, 1945–1990

Abstract

The Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War, like that in the First, left the Mediterranean unsettled. After Greece emerged from its civil war with a pro-western government, there were ever louder rumbles in Cyprus, where the movement calling for enôsis, union with Greece, was gathering pace again. Precisely because the Greeks sided with the West, and because Turkey had kept out of the war, during the late 1940s the United States began to see the Mediterranean as an advance position in the new struggle against the expanding power of the Soviet Union. The explicit theme was the defence of democracy against Communist tyranny. Stalin’s realism had prevented him from supporting Communist insurgency in Greece, but he was keen to find ways of gaining free access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. In London and Washington, the fear that Soviet allies would establish themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean remained real, since the partisan leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, had played the right cards during the last stages of the war, even winning support from the British. Moreover, the Italians had lost Zadar along with the naval base at Kotor and chunks of Dalmatia they had greedily acquired during the war, while Albania, after an agonizing period of first Italian and then German occupation, had recovered its independence under the Paris-educated Communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose uncompromising stance was to bring his country into ever-greater isolation. When he took power, Hoxha imagined that his country would form part of a brotherly band of socialist nations, alongside Tito’s renascent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Close ties with the Yugoslavs were sealed by economic pacts which reveal Tito’s hope of drawing Albania into the Yugoslav federation. Hoxha had other aspirations, and in his view Albania’s right to defend every square inch of the national territory extended into the waters off the Albanian coast: the Corfu Channel, long used as a waterway linking Greece to the Adriatic, was mined to prevent foreign incursions. Britain decided to send warships through the channel, asserting its right to police the Mediterranean on behalf of the nations of the world.

Slave voices and experiences in the later medieval Europe

“…51–60). Towards the end of the period, early forms of plantation slavery were emerging in places like the Canary Islands, imposed by the Portuguese and drawing on the legal and cultural frameworks of slavery familiar from Western Europe (Abulafia, 2011, p. 411). The conditions of slavery were clearly appalling: this was human trafficking, sexual abuse and exploitation on a major scale.…”

“…2–3). Race is a key element here: it is commonly assumed that many were not visually distinguishable as slaves (Heers, 1996), but that the increasing enslavement of people of colour increased levels of stigmatisation (Abulafia, 2011).…”

“…342–5). Slavery played a major role in the intense commercialisation of the later Middle Ages, in trade and in banking (Abulafia, 2011, pp. 345–70; Spufford, 2002, pp.…”

Border and im/mobility entanglements in the Mediterranean: Introduction to the special issue

“…Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) also note that the Mediterranean has historically been home to the circulation of ideas, people, goods and technologies, thus complicating a unidirectional understanding of transfer and reception. As David Abulafia (2011) explores, it has been a source of manifold conflicts between empires for territorial control and the administration of passage and flows, while threats posed by army enemies and groups, such as pirates, have influenced routes, brought alliances into being and fostered and constrained certain types of mobility and not others. Ian Chambers (2008) also highlights the historical and cultural construction of the “liquid materiality” (5) of the region and interrogates it through a “more fluid cartography” (24).…”

The meandering trajectories of financial innovations: commercial paper and its uses in sixteenth-century Lyon's trading networks

“…Economic agents of varying capacities undoubtedly operated on the European scene in the early modern period. The dominance of different merchant groups and financial centres fluctuated over time, as exemplified by the transfer of economic power from southern to northern Europe in the seventeenth century (Rapp 1975; Abulafia 2011, pp. 411–41; Malanima 2013).…”