Description
Book SynopsisThe Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world's most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. This book explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. It offers a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian's craft.
Trade Review"Scholars will appreciate the richness of the argument..." -- J.C. Perry Choice "Valuable... an enlightening read." Mada Masr "...a rich and erudite work..." -- Akram Belkaid Le Monde Diplomatique "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." AAG Review of Books "Sophisticated and erudite...a very important work." New Perspectives on Turkey
Table of ContentsList 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
