Julia Clancy-Smith's intellectually sophisticated and deeply engaging book is a welcome addition to the growing body of works on the history of the Mediterranean world. It complements and adds important insights to recent scholarly reassessments of the seminal legacy of Fernand Braudel, to whom the field of Mediterranean studies owes its conceptual and epistemological genesis. More significantly, Clancy-Smith attempts to provide a corrective touch to some of Braudel's wider brush strokes, particularly to those patches on his canvas where his Mediterranean appears as a fixed and ‘curiously immobile’ space. Indeed, with Clancy-Smith, the ‘central Mediterranean corridor’ – the area extending from Tunis and Algiers to Marseille, Leghorn, Sicily and Malta – is above all a ‘fascinating array of crossroads and intersections of all kind’; a subsystem that moves according to its own rhythms of life and growth, yet is still connected in fundamental and complex ways to the ‘pushes and pulls’ from other external systems. At one level, therefore, her project consists of testing the validity and potential in applying Braudel's multidimensional perspective to a history of migration. In doing so, she offers a richly textured and multisided historical ethnography of movement in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century.
The opening question that Clancy-Smith probes is why and how the politics of population movements in the Mediterranean were fundamentally transformed in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, why was the same British navy that had raided North African port cities in 1816 to obtain the release of Christian captives held therein, suddenly forcing the rulers of Tunis in 1836 to accept impoverished ‘surplus’ Europeans into their societies? What had led to the transmutation of Europeans in North Africa from renegades, captives or slaves into labour migrants within this brief span of time?
The answers to this question propel the book's nine chapters, each grappling with discrete thematic dimensions to migration history while still intersecting with broad theoretical and historiographical concerns. Thus, there is not one sustained linear chronology or unilateral narrative to bind the individual chapters. Their unity is found rather in the work's overarching interplay between Braudel's notions of ‘structure’ and ‘conjuncture’. Indeed, Clancy-Smith deploys interchangeably the skills of the muralist and those of the miniaturist to deliver a problem-centered exposition of population movements in the central Mediterranean corridor. She acts as an ethnographer as she weaves multiple micro-histories into a larger tapestry of daily life in a ‘borderland society’ forged by trans-Mediterranean migrants and mobilities. She then delves into spatial theory and history in order to make sense of the exchanges and connections between local circuits of movement and the slower moving processes of historical and natural change. In the author's own vivid vocabulary, her approach to migrations and migrants is meant to juxtapose the ‘hang glider's perspective’ with the ‘truffle hunter's view’. The result is a longue durée of sorts that manages to explain the wider currents of transformations in the Mediterranean world of the nineteenth century without losing sight of the human factor or the capacity of the slightest patterns of human activity to reflect, even influence, the larger spatial history of that world.
Accordingly, the book operates along two different levels and units of analysis. First, Clancy-Smith tracks ‘the grand rhythms of the long nineteenth century’ and the protracted processes that attended the making of the modern nation-state, the expansion of imperial power, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the shifts in global labour movements. Yet, she aims precisely to reverse the conventional way of looking at such historical transformations and to see them not just as a state would do. Her focus on the ‘largely undocumented’ migrations of Southern Europeans towards North Africa and their settlement therein allows her to study ‘from below’ the profound social changes the immigrants brought to their host societies, as well as the various legal, social, economic, and moral problems they raised. More importantly, by focusing on the social universe of migrants and their wide-ranging impact on local views, beliefs, practices, and institutions, Clancy-Smith recreates an understanding of borderland societies with which to challenge binary or autocentric constructs of history. Her chapters demonstrate convincingly the value in embracing historical narratives that eschew monolithic perspectives in order to emphasize variable movement, multifaceted causalities, the heterogeneity of time, and the ‘fleeting facts’ of human interactions.
Throughout her study, Clancy-Smith displays impeccable fluency in an astounding array of historical archives, sources, and conceptual tools, and while she does not intend to deliver here a definitive verdict on trans-Mediterranean mobilities, her book will decisively redirect our conceptualization and understanding of the political, economic, and sociocultural histories of the Internal Sea. As she did previously with Rebel and Saint, Clancy-Smith is forging new vistas and prospects for future historical research. Students of North Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean would do well to follow her once more into the breach.
