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The Mediterranean Metaphor in Early Geopolitical Writings
Author(s) -
PETRI ROLF
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/1468-229x.12326
Subject(s) - geopolitics , metaphor , enlightenment , power (physics) , history , articulation (sociology) , fifteenth , aesthetics , literature , sociology , ancient history , philosophy , politics , epistemology , art , political science , law , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics
The article focuses on the view of the Mediterranean in early geopolitical writings. Through this lens, it looks at the space metaphors and imaginative geographies that defined the core meanings of the Middle Sea over the last 200 years. The author discusses the role that the Enlightenment philosophy of history had in the shaping of classical geography. Moving on similar grounds, early geopolitical writers believed in the ‘force of history’ as a generator of spatial order. They used episodes of the Mediterranean past as a parable for the spatial articulation of contact, conflict and power in the overall ‘process of civilization’. In their writings recurs an idea, which resonates also in later key texts regarding the same maritime space. It is the idea of a ‘greater Mediterranean’ that after the fifteenth century was destined to gain worldwide importance thanks to transoceanic expansion. In doing so, geographers, historians and philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the Middle Sea into a metaphor for the universal mission of Europe and the West.