Following in the footsteps of Braudel, Michel Fontenay studies trade and racing in the Mediterranean between the XVIe and the beginning of XIXe century, a time of economic marginalization of the region. It shows the maintenance of intense circulation between the two banks, but its view remains most often that of the north bank.
The first of two volumes, this work brings together, as in the second volume to be published, articles and communications written by Michel Fontenay, honorary lecturer at Paris 1, first trained in rural history and who became one of the best specialists in Mediterranean racing in modern times. The nine chapters, resulting from works published between 1975 and 2006, do not constitute an agglomeration of objects closed in on themselves. Rather, they form an archipelago accessible to the curious eye as well as to the initiated observer.
The author opens the first part of the book with a synthesis of the history of the Mediterranean perceived according to the classic problem of the progressive economic marginalization of this region initiated at the time of the great discoveries. The following three chapters guide the reader first on the paths taken by a Lorraine pilgrim and a Breton pilgrim heading towards the Levant in 1531 and in 1589-1590, then on the footsteps of traders “ Western » in the scales of the Levant to XVIIe century. Finally, the five chapters of the second part deal with the author’s favorite subject, the Mediterranean race, from different angles: in the western Mediterranean ; and in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The whole is part of a worthy tradition inaugurated in 1949 by Fernand Braudel in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the time of Philip IIwho insisted on the importance of a history open to other social sciences, a history of what is permanent in “ long lasting “. Mr. Fontenay’s work also finds its distant origins in “ the ideological choices of an era » marked with “ decolonization and the first steps of Third Worldism ”, who nourished a desire to “ resurrect the dark side of the West with its relationships in the Muslim world » (p. 11). Following this initial project, Michel Fontenay forged the concept of corso which defines a Mediterranean form of brigandage on the borders of racing and piracy involving, “ under the guise of a crusade » (p. 359), both Christians and Muslims between the XVIe and the beginning of XIXe century.
The corso, the captive and the other Mediterraneans
By this notion of corso placing the Muslim race in interaction with the Christian race, Michel Fontenay contributed with other historians (such as Salvatore Bono and Godfrey Fisher) to break with a colonialist and anti-Muslim historiography which had overestimated the damage caused by the race “ barbaric “. The author also made it possible to conceive this interaction not only as a pure confrontation but also as an exchange: according to a form “ symbiotic more than parasitic » in a context of balance of forces in the Mediterranean ; then as the weapon of the weak, as a means seized to continue to benefit from a world economy whose center of gravity was moving slowly but surely towards the North-West of Europe.
In the study of these interactions, the author also drew attention to the specific transformations of slavery “ white » in the Mediterranean during this period. In the seventh chapter, Michel Fontenay recalls that the transition from galley to ship had notable consequences for servile populations. This resulted in the gradual reduction of the number of rowers, to be depreciated de facto L'” slave » « as a labor force » to highlight the “ captive » as an object of redemption, in a complex economy of ransom in the Mediterranean (p. 352).
In addition to these two major contributions, we must add a third quality: the ability to leave an initial field of research (namely the Maltese case) to take into account neighboring areas (Maghrebi and Levantine) and confront them with different other configurations of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These oceanic configurations were the subject of tensions between centers “ imperial » and elites « provincial “. The clashes that took place there also gave rise to discourses of religious adversity and smuggling. But these other spaces of exchange and trafficking were marked, in the author’s opinion, by an ethnic and religious marquetry less complex than in the Mediterranean. Michel Fontenay recalls, from this point of view, the particularities of a Greek area that remained Christian but passed largely under Ottoman authority, and in fact, both victim and beneficiary of corso Christian and Muslim.
This multiplicity of perspectives also allows him to qualify the largely hackneyed observation of a conflict of civilizations in the Mediterranean which would have been won by the West. Like other historians, Michel Fontenay reestablishes the focus and prefers to see in the outcome of the multiple conflicts, an economic domination of the English, French and Dutch powers over all the Mediterranean commercial centers, from Venice to Aleppo via Alexandria.
Achievements and limits of a quantitative economic history
These conclusions, always of great political acuity, were made possible by the tools of a quantitative economic history and by the prism of a globalized history of the Mediterranean, the work of which allows both to recall the still fruitful contributions but also the methodological limits.
This economic history strived to place the actors in their material culture by reconstituting, in the present case, the conditions of navigation in the Mediterranean or the forced passages from the galley to the ship. This type of history invented its sources, approached them with ambition to draw objects of comparison. Michel Fontenay thus presents, in chapter 6, clever methods for estimating the share of active population involved in the race in Algiers (a quarter in 1581) and Malta (a tenth in 1590) or even for assessing the importance of taken compared to other income in each of the ports: in Tunis, slave ransoms only accounted for 5% of “ commercial relations with Christianity » at the end of XVIIe century (p. 307).
But this historical school, in the wake of the work of Fernand Braudel, had the main limitations of not having sufficiently questioned the capacities for action of historical agents and of having substituted for the categories of historical actors our classifications of the economic and of the social. To explain the economic and social changes in a desire for globalization, for totalizing generalization, the risk was also great of coming to cultural, even essentialist, causes, brandished on numerous occasions in this work: when the Ottomans were sent back to their past of hesitant steppe nomads “ to get started on the liquid element » (p. 216) or even when the mention of the persistence of the plague in the Maghreb at the beginning of the XIXe century, Islam is invoked both as “ civilization of cleanliness but for ritual purposes » or as a civilization of “ nomadism » but also like “ fatalistic religion » (p. 139).
A Northern Mediterraneanism
This work is also representative of a Mediterranean history which has sought to overcome compartmentalization into cultural areas, but which still struggles to make the big difference between the advances in the historiographies of the European and Ottoman worlds. If the author, throughout the different chapters, sometimes questions the categories of East and West (p. 29, 151), if he integrates advances in Ottoman historiography, if he fulfills more than his role as a historian of Mediterranean Europe by analyzing Western sources on the Maghreb and the Levant, the fact remains that the position and visibility of Ottoman societies and actors remain secondary both in the syntheses that he offers only in his original works.
Failing to be understood from the inside, the dynamics of these southern societies are sometimes underestimated. Judging that the Ottoman Empire “ did not know or could not integrate the privateer risk » on the grounds that unlike “ from the West » (p. 360), Istanbul has not established “ systematic surveillance by a network of watchtowers “, is to assume, implicitly, that there is a Western model of protection of coastal populations ; it is also and above all to underestimate the particularities of Ottoman governance. Diagnose a “ progressive decline of the state » behind the rise in power of provincial notables during the XVIIe and above all XVIIIe centuries, it is to understand this question of Ottoman historiography solely from the side of the dissolution of the imperial center and not to think of this notabilization as a means of Ottomanizing the provinces.
Michel Fontenay, however, is not always so severe with this Ottoman world. He recognizes its capacity for technical adaptation, particularly with the adoption of the Nordic vessel at the beginning of the XVIIe century in Algiers and Tunis. And he does not give in to declinist determinism by recalling in particular, from the analysis of the penetration of English drapery in XVIIe century, the capacity of the “ indigenous production » to satisfy « the vast majority of local needs » (p. 200). However, this anthology, however precious it may be, is also representative of a historiography which still aims to write a global history of the Mediterranean, but starting from the north shore, in the choice of sources, its objects and its categories of analysis.