On Perspective and Possibility in Mediterranean History

Extract

Transnational patriotism widens our understanding of the Mediterranean and the interactions and entanglements that constituted its social and political landscapes at a conjuncture of great transformation. Zanou's anti-teleological reading of early nineteenth-century intellectual mobility challenges hegemonic frameworks of the nation-state that obscure her book's protagonists in national historiographies. The perspective of the Ionian and Dalmatian characters (to simplify the complex array of languages of expression and locations of origin) retells in compelling fashion the history of modernity's possibilities and contributes to a growing body of scholarship on these Adriatic worlds. Zanou takes the reader on a journey beyond the sea's shores and into various hinterlands, but we also travel beyond ideas about exchange and interaction that insist upon port cities as primary nodes in regional connectivity. That geographical framework has come to dominate much of the recent historiography in and of the Mediterranean and, in Zanou's book, we learn how invariably intertwined are patterns of social and political relocation. She illustrates how ‘patria’ and belonging are at the centre of these mercurial intellectual circles, but that their definitions do not conform to ex post facto renderings imposed by the social and political containers of the nation-state. In focusing on this transformative conjuncture of meaning which defines the transition from early modern to modern worlds, Transnational patriotism is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Mediterranean.