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The Great Sea

A Human History of the Mediterranean

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The Great Sea

By: David Abulafia
Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
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For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of civilization. David Abulafia's The Great Sea is the first complete history of the Mediterranean, from the erection of temples on Malta around 3500 BC to modern tourism. Ranging across time and the whole extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa, Genoa to Tunis, and bringing to life pilgrims, pirates, sultans and naval commanders, this is the story of the sea that has shaped much of world history.

© Dabid Abulafia 2011 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

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You could be forgiven if you thought this book was repetitive; it is, but only to the degree that commerce and conquest across the same stretch of sea over thousands of years necessarily is.

Abulafia's canvas is vast, and seemingly every millimeter gets filled across the course of this book. It's to date the best synthesis of the very longue durée history of the Mediterranean.

Although written for a broad audience it is scholarly, though historians will miss more direct engagement with various strands of relevant literature besides Braudel.

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The Great Sea is a phenomenal summary of the history of the sea surrounded by Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as the peoples who inhabited its shores over the centuries, Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Celts, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, South Slavs, Arabs, Ottomans and even intermediaries from beyond, like Crusaders, various renaissance european powers and even Russians. It also dives into the economic and geopolitical relations and how they transformed over the ages, from the trading colonies of the phoenicians and greeks over the transmediterranean trade zone of the united roman empire of antiquity and the relations between muslims and christians during the middle ages (from arab pirates plundering italian shores to the theft of holy relics from alexandria by venecian merchants), all the way to the modern age and the long decline of its geostrategic importance during the european age of discovery and the battles of the second word war.
This book is an excellent read/listenif you want to get an overview over the history of the mediterranean and understand the broader historical context of certain events before diving into the details. I highly recommend it.

The Mediterranean - the COMPLETE story.

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