Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Steven Hutchinson (review)

Abstract

When Fernand Braudel’s monumental study of the Mediterranean was first published in 1949, little appeared to have escaped his masterly purview. Even the mea sured John H. Elliott noted that the French historian had obviously employed in his “total history” the mechanics of “total war,” since they both require one to “throw in every thing you’ve got” (25).1 Indeed, in combining its geopo liti cal shifts, demographic strug gles, and financial systems, Braudel was able to tell us much of the history of the Mediterranean. What he left out, however, were many of its stories. Some seventy years later, Steven Hutchinson’s impressive Frontier Narratives succeeds in filling that void, recovering not only these stories, but also the voices, identities, and life experiences of their protagonists. Like Braudel’s, Hutchinson’s study encompasses the whole Mediterranean in its scope and tackles the everchanging crucibles of its plural and dynamic orbit. But Hutchinson’s monograph moves beyond Braudel’s, incorporating a wealth of historical and literary rec ords not available to the French historian. Frontier Narratives’s conceptual core revolves around slavery and religious conversion, central vectors that give way to the study’s other related subjects, such as martyrdom and apostasy. While each section is revelatory on its own, in my opinion, the book’s second chapter, on slavery, offers some of its most outstanding contributions. Hutchinson identifies three distinct modalities of enslavement sadly at play in the early modern world: the transAtlantic, the transSaharan, and what he calls the “Mediterranean frontier.” He is obviously most interested in the Mediterranean variant, which he defines as the “enslavement of Muslims by Christians and Christians by Muslims within the Mediterranean region” (40). This form of bondage affected millions of people and emerged as a residue of the sporadic warfare between