Page 96 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

trading patterns, mediterranean 1873

Genoa dominated the movement of material goods, pil- visiting the archaeological sites of Egypt, Greece, and
grims, and slaves across the Mediterranean, and formed Rome in large numbers.
a vital part of the trade chain that linked Europe with East
Asia (via the Silk Road) and Indian Ocean trading Steam Shipping and
networks. Tourism in the Modern Era
Perhaps the most important development in terms of the
Domination by the broader history of Mediterranean trade was the intro-
Great Powers duction of steam shipping, which had displaced tradi-
From the sixteenth century, the Mediterranean became a tional sailing craft by the end of the nineteenth century.
subsidiary of much larger trading zones, especially the Since then, land and air transport have diminished the
Atlantic.The Ottoman empire and a succession of Chris- importance of Mediterranean seaborne exchanges,
tian powers, beginning with Spain, followed by France, though mechanized shipping remains important for
Holland, and England, vied for domination, yet none of provisioning island communities and transporting
these powers relied heavily on the Mediterranean for their tourists. Oil tankers and luxury cruise liners have
prosperity.The Mediterranean world had lost its primacy, become a more familiar feature of the open seas. As a
and historians have been inclined to ignore its history source of wealth, the sea assumed renewed importance
thereafter. The sea, however, continued to nourish the through the late twentieth century. In 1973, 60 million
towns and cities of that world, even if life for Mediter- visitors enjoyed their summer vacations along the
ranean communities appeared more precarious than Mediterranean coastline. Numbers increased dramati-
ever. Indeed through most of the early modern period, cally with the establishment of cheap package holidays
the Mediterranean seemed to belong to no one. Large- and the rapid expansion of coastal tourist facilities from
scale Christian and Muslim privateering flourished, as did the 1980s, and nowadays, coastal tourism is a vital
the slave trade, yet such unsavory operations had always source of income for the Greek, Turkish and Spanish
formed part of the Mediterranean redistribution system. national economies. For the foreseeable future,
The period witnessed the rise of a new kind of port city, Mediterranean-trading patterns will be dominated by the
such as Livorno and Smyrna, which was relatively free of traffic in leisure-seeking people.
restrictive traditional trading practices and political
Nicholas Doumanis
authority, which welcomed foreigners, regardless of faith,
and which laundered pirate plunder. See also Greece,Ancient; Islamic World; Roman Empire;
By the nineteenth century, the Mediterranean was the Ottoman Empire
subject of rivalries between the great powers, espe-
cially following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
Further Reading
By the 1880s, British, French, United States, and Ger-
Abulafia, D. (Ed.). (2003). The Mediterranean in history. London: Chatto
man commercial and financial interests were investing & Windus.
heavily in the Mediterranean, especially in Egypt and Attentborough, D (1987). The First Eden:The Mediterranean world and
man. London: Collins/BBC.
the Ottoman empire. The burgeoning trade saw the
Braudel, F. (1972). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the
expansion of bustling multilingual entrepôts such as age of Philip II. London: Fontana.
Smyrna, Salonika, Alexandria, Haifa, Suez, and Beirut. Horden, P., & Purcell, N. (2000). The contentious sea:A study of Mediter-
ranean history. Oxford, UK: Blackwells.
Northern Europeans were also traveling more fre- Inalcik, H., et al. (1994). An economic and social history of the Ottoman
quently throughout the Mediterranean, especially after empire, 1300–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Pryor, J. H. (1988). Geography, technology and war: Studies in the mar-
the Maghreb had been cleared of corsairs by the 1830s,
itime history of the Mediterranean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
and by the end of the century bourgeois travelers were versity Press.