A bibliography based on this book would be enormous and shapeless. This short note simply points out several works that have looked at the Mediterranean as a whole, though more often the surrounding lands than the sea itself. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000) is the first part of an ambitious and richly textured account of the localities around the Mediterranean and their interaction. Its main focus is antiquity and the early Middle Ages. A valuable set of essays edited by William Harris ponders their conclusions: Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005). Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translated by Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London, 1972–3), shaped research on the Mediterranean not just in the late medieval and early modern periods for a whole generation. Braudel’s thought-world is well explained by E. Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel: ‘La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II’ (1923–1947) (Athens, 1999) and in Braudel Revisited: the Mediterranean World 1600–1800, edited by G. Piterberg, T. Ruiz and G. Symcox (Toronto and Berkeley, 2010). Further perspectives on the historiography of the Mediterranean are provided by S. Guarracino, Mediterraneo: immagini, storie e teorie da Omero a Braudel (Milan, 2007). A rich study of the economic and ecological changes in the Mediterranean between about 1350 and 1900 was provided by F. Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550–1870: a Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, MD, 2008) – the dates do not do justice to the timespan he covered. On the Mediterranean environment, A. Grove and O. Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: an Ecological History (New Haven, CT, 2001) is especially worthwhile and thought-provoking. A short but important book within the Braudelian tradition is J. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean 649–1571 (Cambridge, 1988).
Several volumes of collected essays should be added to that edited by Harris: my own The Mediterranean in History (London and New York, 2003; also French, Spanish, Turkish and Greek editions), with excellent chapters by Torelli, Balard, Greene and many others; and J. Carpentier and F. Lebrun’s Histoire de la Méditerranée (Paris, 1998), which is rather skewed towards modern times but contains some vivid source material. On the religious setting, see the essays collected by A. Husain and K. Fleming, A Faithful Sea: the Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700 (Oxford, 2007). More specialized is A. Cowan, Mediterranean Urban Culture 1400–1700 (Exeter, 2000), with fine studies by Sakellariou, Arbel, Amelang and others; and Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by M. Fusaro, C. Heywood and M.-S. Omri (London, 2010). There is a marvellous collection of sources in English translation, edited by miriam cooke (spelt thus), E. Göknar and G. Parker: Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008).
Captivating musings on the Mediterranean are offered by P. Matvejević, Mediterranean: a Cultural Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1999). John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea: a History of the Mediterranean (London, 2006), wanders rather far from the shores of the Mediterranean and is not my favourite book by this author. P. Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (London, 2010) looks at Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut, in the era of ethnic and religious coexistence. Among important works published since the first edition of this book, three that stand out are C. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea (London, 2013), a captivating and original account of the pre-classical sea; R. Holland, Blue-Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800 (London, 2012); and C. Roberts, Ocean of Life (London, 2012), which extends far beyond the Mediterranean but addresses an ecological emergency that requires urgent treatment.
Lively travel accounts of the whole Mediterranean have been provided by the always readable Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules: a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (London, 1995), by Eric Newby, On the Shores of the Mediterranean (London, 1984), and by Robert Fox, The Inner Sea: the Mediterranean and its People (London, 1991). Lastly, no one with affection for the Mediterranean can ignore Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food (London, 1950) and more recent accounts of Mediterranean cuisine such as Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean Cookery (London, 1987).