Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1976997
Brian A. Catlos
{"title":"The Sea in history – The early modern world/ La mer dans l’histoire – La période moderne","authors":"Brian A. Catlos","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1976997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1976997","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47194193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1976970
Yosi Yisraeli
concepts like “union”, “progress”, “equality” and “freedom” is here compressed into a view of transnational linkages between coal mines. Across the longer sweep of the book’s eight chapters, such analytical choices result in a peculiar winnowing of the possibilities available to those who found reason to challenge coalonialism’s steep inequalities and structures of domination: either direct confrontations with the material conditions surrounding coal’s extraction and combustion or modes of critique emanating from the shifting currents of Islamic thought. In showing how fear of disaster could serve as “an ethical force directing man to the righteous path” (191) or how the shar’i designation of coal as rikaz or “buried treasure” could underwrite Ottoman uses of fossil wealth for charity (218), Barak’s nuanced excavation of Islamic knowledge production around coal technologies and their hazards in the book’s fifth and sixth chapters is clearly intended to unearth elements of a usable past. In the book’s moving conclusion, through a daring leap into the present, he makes explicit the sense of urgency attending this search for alternative lifeways and imaginaries that might inform the “painstaking political work” of decarbonizing the world (226). But such compelling arguments about the messy and complex entanglements of global carbonization are undercut by the markedly narrower criteria according to which specific actions, concepts and movements appear to “count” as part of that political work within the book itself. Even if, in places, Barak’s methodological commitments thus serve to obscure the full range of political forces and ideas that might be directed against the powers of fossil fuel, he has written a magnificent study that reveals the breath-taking magnitude and sweep of the struggles that remaking a world forged out of coal’s blazing flames will entail.
{"title":"The quest for certainty in early modern Europe: from inquisition to inquiry 1550–1700","authors":"Yosi Yisraeli","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1976970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1976970","url":null,"abstract":"concepts like “union”, “progress”, “equality” and “freedom” is here compressed into a view of transnational linkages between coal mines. Across the longer sweep of the book’s eight chapters, such analytical choices result in a peculiar winnowing of the possibilities available to those who found reason to challenge coalonialism’s steep inequalities and structures of domination: either direct confrontations with the material conditions surrounding coal’s extraction and combustion or modes of critique emanating from the shifting currents of Islamic thought. In showing how fear of disaster could serve as “an ethical force directing man to the righteous path” (191) or how the shar’i designation of coal as rikaz or “buried treasure” could underwrite Ottoman uses of fossil wealth for charity (218), Barak’s nuanced excavation of Islamic knowledge production around coal technologies and their hazards in the book’s fifth and sixth chapters is clearly intended to unearth elements of a usable past. In the book’s moving conclusion, through a daring leap into the present, he makes explicit the sense of urgency attending this search for alternative lifeways and imaginaries that might inform the “painstaking political work” of decarbonizing the world (226). But such compelling arguments about the messy and complex entanglements of global carbonization are undercut by the markedly narrower criteria according to which specific actions, concepts and movements appear to “count” as part of that political work within the book itself. Even if, in places, Barak’s methodological commitments thus serve to obscure the full range of political forces and ideas that might be directed against the powers of fossil fuel, he has written a magnificent study that reveals the breath-taking magnitude and sweep of the struggles that remaking a world forged out of coal’s blazing flames will entail.","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45293011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1963944
Na’ama Ben Ze’ev, Gal Amir
From 1950 through 1953, Palestinian olive oil producers in Israel struggled against the state’s efforts to impose discriminatory marketing conditions on them. The confrontation took place under the government’s rationing policy and strict supervision of the Palestinian population, which at the time was subject to military rule. A coalition of state agents and public and private institutions cooperated in supervising and utilizing Palestinian oil production. The authors’ aim is to trace the actors in the “oil issue”, their diverse interests, and political motives, in order to contribute to the understanding of the Palestinian experience in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s. They focus their attention on the agency of the Palestinian oil producers, which primarily took the form of resistance. They argue that in the struggle to establish their rights, oil producers often utilized legal and parliamentary means enabled by the state. They were also aware of the gaps and disagreements within the coalition that confronted them, and managed to use them for their own advantage. Thus, they subverted a central idea of Zionist ideology – its claim to entitlement to the land – and they challenged the political ethnocratic practices applied to assert that claim.
{"title":"Rural producers in the High Court: the struggle for control of olive oil production in Israel, 1950–1953","authors":"Na’ama Ben Ze’ev, Gal Amir","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1963944","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1963944","url":null,"abstract":"From 1950 through 1953, Palestinian olive oil producers in Israel struggled against the state’s efforts to impose discriminatory marketing conditions on them. The confrontation took place under the government’s rationing policy and strict supervision of the Palestinian population, which at the time was subject to military rule. A coalition of state agents and public and private institutions cooperated in supervising and utilizing Palestinian oil production. The authors’ aim is to trace the actors in the “oil issue”, their diverse interests, and political motives, in order to contribute to the understanding of the Palestinian experience in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s. They focus their attention on the agency of the Palestinian oil producers, which primarily took the form of resistance. They argue that in the struggle to establish their rights, oil producers often utilized legal and parliamentary means enabled by the state. They were also aware of the gaps and disagreements within the coalition that confronted them, and managed to use them for their own advantage. Thus, they subverted a central idea of Zionist ideology – its claim to entitlement to the land – and they challenged the political ethnocratic practices applied to assert that claim.","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45952322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1976992
Francisco Apellániz
manding narrative deserves. Especially the perspectives of those Eastern Christians, whom Eliano spent the majority of his life trying to convince of his Catholic truth, are given rather short shrift. More sustained comparison with other Catholic missionary efforts to the Ottoman Empire – from those of the merchants Giovanni Battista Vecchietti and Giovanni Battista Britti, to those of the Jesuit Giulio Mancinelli and the papal legate Léonardo Abela – would have been another insightful way to peel back the many layers of Eliano’s narrative. One could also object that it is at times not immediately apparent how the specifics of the shifts described in the book – that is, the order’s rising scepticism regarding its Jewish-lineage members – played out in Eliano’s case. For not all of Clines’s inferences on these points are borne out by the evidence he cites. It is not unlikely that Eliano indeed had to recalibrate the nature of his Jewishness in light of the apprehension about religious dissimulation that filled the Society of Jesus in the late sixteenth century. But numerous other developments – from Eliano’s disastrous first attempt at converting the Copts and the Order’s remarkably fervent belief in his abilities, to Eliano’s training as a Jesuit priest – can explain why he and his superiors made decisions the way they did. The book would thus have benefited from a more thorough analysis of the tensions between the contingencies of Eliano’s own life and the broader currents of change that swept through the Society of Jesus and the Mediterranean in this period. And, therefore, depending on how much liberty one allows Clines to fill the gaps in the historical records and how much contingency one looks for in excavations of this kind, some readers may find the book a touch too deterministic and reductionist. Notwithstanding these concerns, as a portrait of the only Jewish-born member of the Society of Jesus, A Jewish Jesuit succeeds in demonstrating that for Eliano “becoming Catholic was far more difficult than being baptized” (87). Clines raises a number of fundamental questions about the nature of early modern conversion, and illuminates in great detail how one convert – through words and works – carved out a life for himself as a missionary, proving his worth and looking to allay suspicions of religious dissimulation. And Clines does so in engaging and highly readable prose and through dozens of colourful vignettes. The book is therefore a valuable contribution to our understanding of that intricate nexus of conversion and missionary work in the early modern eastern Mediterranean.
{"title":"Piracy and law in the Ottoman Mediterranean","authors":"Francisco Apellániz","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1976992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1976992","url":null,"abstract":"manding narrative deserves. Especially the perspectives of those Eastern Christians, whom Eliano spent the majority of his life trying to convince of his Catholic truth, are given rather short shrift. More sustained comparison with other Catholic missionary efforts to the Ottoman Empire – from those of the merchants Giovanni Battista Vecchietti and Giovanni Battista Britti, to those of the Jesuit Giulio Mancinelli and the papal legate Léonardo Abela – would have been another insightful way to peel back the many layers of Eliano’s narrative. One could also object that it is at times not immediately apparent how the specifics of the shifts described in the book – that is, the order’s rising scepticism regarding its Jewish-lineage members – played out in Eliano’s case. For not all of Clines’s inferences on these points are borne out by the evidence he cites. It is not unlikely that Eliano indeed had to recalibrate the nature of his Jewishness in light of the apprehension about religious dissimulation that filled the Society of Jesus in the late sixteenth century. But numerous other developments – from Eliano’s disastrous first attempt at converting the Copts and the Order’s remarkably fervent belief in his abilities, to Eliano’s training as a Jesuit priest – can explain why he and his superiors made decisions the way they did. The book would thus have benefited from a more thorough analysis of the tensions between the contingencies of Eliano’s own life and the broader currents of change that swept through the Society of Jesus and the Mediterranean in this period. And, therefore, depending on how much liberty one allows Clines to fill the gaps in the historical records and how much contingency one looks for in excavations of this kind, some readers may find the book a touch too deterministic and reductionist. Notwithstanding these concerns, as a portrait of the only Jewish-born member of the Society of Jesus, A Jewish Jesuit succeeds in demonstrating that for Eliano “becoming Catholic was far more difficult than being baptized” (87). Clines raises a number of fundamental questions about the nature of early modern conversion, and illuminates in great detail how one convert – through words and works – carved out a life for himself as a missionary, proving his worth and looking to allay suspicions of religious dissimulation. And Clines does so in engaging and highly readable prose and through dozens of colourful vignettes. The book is therefore a valuable contribution to our understanding of that intricate nexus of conversion and missionary work in the early modern eastern Mediterranean.","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44370978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1976971
R. Calis
{"title":"A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean: early modern conversion, mission and the construction of identity","authors":"R. Calis","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1976971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1976971","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45159041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1911431
Relli Shechter
{"title":"Egypt’s occupation: colonial economism and the crises of capitalism","authors":"Relli Shechter","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1911431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1911431","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09518967.2021.1911431","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47897037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1909252
{"title":"Byzantium between East and West SPECIAL ISSUE in homage to the memory of David Jacoby","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1909252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1909252","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09518967.2021.1909252","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43600553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1900164
Gang Wu
The article originates from a record David Jacoby drew attention to but left mostly unaddressed in his path-breaking article on the silk industry in western Byzantium. It examines three underexplored hagiographical texts concerning the endeavours of Arechis II, the prince of Benevento (758–787), in the translation of holy relics. These texts all feature the word phocaicus when describing the luxurious textiles Arechis dedicated to the relics. This article argues that this word is a geographical designation pointing to a so-far unidentified centre of the Byzantine silk industry sometime around 1050–1150, most likely Phokis in Central Greece.
{"title":"The myth of phocaicus: new evidence on the silk industry in Byzantine Central Greece","authors":"Gang Wu","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1900164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1900164","url":null,"abstract":"The article originates from a record David Jacoby drew attention to but left mostly unaddressed in his path-breaking article on the silk industry in western Byzantium. It examines three underexplored hagiographical texts concerning the endeavours of Arechis II, the prince of Benevento (758–787), in the translation of holy relics. These texts all feature the word phocaicus when describing the luxurious textiles Arechis dedicated to the relics. This article argues that this word is a geographical designation pointing to a so-far unidentified centre of the Byzantine silk industry sometime around 1050–1150, most likely Phokis in Central Greece.","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09518967.2021.1900164","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42078915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2021.1900183
Avital Heyman
The concept that cultures are neither pure nor immutable but diverse and flexible is not a new one. Cultural hybridity reflects the effort to retain a sense of balance among traditions, beliefs, practices, institutions, rituals, and imagery within a multicultural venue. The cultural encounter that the conquering Crusaders experienced in the Latin East entailed the process of the hybridization of sociocultural constructs, resulting in a new, sophisticated identity that reflected a vital social organism, which resided both within and beyond the margins of country, race, ethnicity, class, and linguistic diversity. Strangers and conquerors in the Land of the Bible, the Latin Crusaders and pilgrims sometimes felt that “it would be long to tell” about that cultural and multi-creed blend. This paper refers to Queen Melisende (1105–1161) as the cultural agent who in herself represented hybridity, and in whose patronage the religious and public domain of Jerusalem was designed anew, demonstrating intriguing diversity and intrinsic artistic patterns of the Frankish contextualization of local Eastern and foreign occidental components within the political boundaries of the relocation. This article analyses three visual case studies that embody the new, Frankish performative imagery, and in particular that of Queen Melisende, who in all probability commissioned them. The selection of artefacts follows David Jacoby’s major research interests.
{"title":"Was the East Latin?","authors":"Avital Heyman","doi":"10.1080/09518967.2021.1900183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2021.1900183","url":null,"abstract":"The concept that cultures are neither pure nor immutable but diverse and flexible is not a new one. Cultural hybridity reflects the effort to retain a sense of balance among traditions, beliefs, practices, institutions, rituals, and imagery within a multicultural venue. The cultural encounter that the conquering Crusaders experienced in the Latin East entailed the process of the hybridization of sociocultural constructs, resulting in a new, sophisticated identity that reflected a vital social organism, which resided both within and beyond the margins of country, race, ethnicity, class, and linguistic diversity. Strangers and conquerors in the Land of the Bible, the Latin Crusaders and pilgrims sometimes felt that “it would be long to tell” about that cultural and multi-creed blend. This paper refers to Queen Melisende (1105–1161) as the cultural agent who in herself represented hybridity, and in whose patronage the religious and public domain of Jerusalem was designed anew, demonstrating intriguing diversity and intrinsic artistic patterns of the Frankish contextualization of local Eastern and foreign occidental components within the political boundaries of the relocation. This article analyses three visual case studies that embody the new, Frankish performative imagery, and in particular that of Queen Melisende, who in all probability commissioned them. The selection of artefacts follows David Jacoby’s major research interests.","PeriodicalId":18431,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Historical Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09518967.2021.1900183","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41268861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}