From permeable frontiers to strict border divisions. The geostrategic construction of the Mediterranean on the ruins of the ancient narrow seas

Abstract

This work underlines that by the late 19th century, rival Western European powers – particularly the British and the French – projecting their imperial strategies/operations in the region, came to construct homogenised (unidimensional) geostrategic representations of the Mediterranean Sea. These ascending Eurocentric Mediterranean vistas accompanied the Western industrial powers’ financial, commercial and colonial projections, legitimising the complete dislocation and devastation of the various, overlapping, ancient narrow-sea complexes as that in the Central Mediterranean. Against this background, he will direct attention to, and build on, that historical literature which engages with these issues in order to at least reconstruct the central Mediterranean narrow-sea nexus.