Mediterraneans

Abstract We talk of the Mediterranean and of the Mediterranean Sea, and we often assume we mean much the same thing. But here lies the root of a significant confusion. ‘Mediterranean’ means that which is between the surrounding lands. Yet histories and geographies of ‘the Mediterranean’ may concern themselves mainly with the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples who have inhabited them, to the extent of paying rather little attention to the bonds that have linked the opposing shores of the Mediterranean world: studies of Mediterranean Europe, for example, that are more concerned with the inner history of Provence or Catalonia than with the impact of the Great Sea upon the societies that developed in such regions. Many associations of ‘Mediterranean historians’ are really concerned with research on the lands that border the Mediterranean, and the Society of Mediterranean Studies based in the United States goes even further afield, taking in all those societies that trace their cultural origins back to the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, including not merely Portugal (which for various reasons has often been counted as an honorary Mediterranean land) but Brazil and Spanish South America.