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The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In capturing this heretofore lost space, it also presents a critical, conceptual history of the sea, leading the reader into the heart of Eurocentrism. The Sea, it is shown, is a vital element of the modern philosophy of history.
Alexis Wick is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. Contrapuntally, he explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, The Red Sea makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian’s craft.
Alexis Wick is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. Contrapuntally, he explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, The Red Sea makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian’s craft.
Price: $34.95
Pages: 280
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
19 January 2016
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520285927
Format: Paperback
"Scholars will appreciate the richness of the [book's] argument."
"Valuable... an enlightening read."
“A rich and erudite work.”
"A substantial and relatively groundbreaking piece of work with a sharp understanding of how geography is anchored in History with a capital H, and vice versa. Wick’s determined appeal for his readers to see both the Red Sea as a product of European design as well as space more generally as a host of discursively constituted and lived places and landscapes, each with a poetics, a history, and a sense of its own is absolutely refreshing, to say nothing of its necessity."
"Sophisticated and erudite . . . a very important work."
Alexis Wick is Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Beirut.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction. History at Sea: Space and the Other
1 • The Place in the Middle: A Geohistory of the Red Sea
2 • Thalassology alla Turca: Six Theses on the Philosophy of History
3 • Self-Portrait of the Ottoman Red Sea, June 21, 1777
4 • The Scientific Invention of the Red Sea
5 • Thalassomania: Modernity and the Sea
Conclusion. Rigging the Historian’s Craft: For an Epistemology of Composition
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction. History at Sea: Space and the Other
1 • The Place in the Middle: A Geohistory of the Red Sea
2 • Thalassology alla Turca: Six Theses on the Philosophy of History
3 • Self-Portrait of the Ottoman Red Sea, June 21, 1777
4 • The Scientific Invention of the Red Sea
5 • Thalassomania: Modernity and the Sea
Conclusion. Rigging the Historian’s Craft: For an Epistemology of Composition
Notes
Bibliography
Index