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The Mediterranean as a Borderland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Linda T. Darling
Linda T. Darling*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Extract

A useful paradigm for studying Mediterranean and world history is the concept behind a course I teach, “The Mediterranean as a Borderland.” The paradigm of the borderland was generated by policymakers and social scientists studying the American Southwest and developed for the field of history by Oscar Martinez at the University of Arizona. Arizona is in the borderland, the region close to the border between the United States and Mexico where the influence of Mexico can be directly felt. There is of course an equivalent region on the other side in Mexico that is directly influenced by its proximity to the United States. These two regions together comprise the borderland, and they are in many ways more similar to each other than either is to the rest of the nation it belongs to. Unlike the border itself, which divides one country from another, the borderland is the area where the two societies meet and overlap. The Mediterranean Sea is often seen as a border between Christian and Muslim civilizations to the north and south. It can therefore be studied as a borderland, the region where the two overlap. Such a study highlights similarities, influences, and exchanges rather than differences and oppositions; it forms a necessary corrective to today’s emphasis on the “clash of civilizations.” This paper gives a historiography of the borderland paradigm and its application in the Mediterranean, and compares it with the closely related concept of the frontier.

Type
Special Section: Mediterranean Encounters
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , Summer 2012 , pp. 54 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2012

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References

End Notes

1 Hansen, Niles, The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest (Austin: University of Texas, 1981)Google Scholar; Martinez, Oscar J., Border People: Life and Society in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1994)Google Scholar. This essay will not attempt to discuss all studies of borderlands or frontiers, but only those that explicitly employ those concepts.

2 Recently, U.S. historians of the West have revised the category of the frontier to include some of the concepts of the borderland; this is called “New Western History.” For purposes of clarity, I will continue to use the term in its older sense. See Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Limerick, Patricia Nelson and Rankin, Charles E. (New York: Norton, 1987); Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).Google Scholar

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34 Zartman, , pp. 1–2, 7–8.Google Scholar

35 Zartman, , pp. 10–14.Google Scholar