The aim of this book is to study both historical change in the Mediterranean and the region's enduring unity, up into the period of its economic decline. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the Mediterranean economy collapsed, while the Baltic and the Atlantic rose. But according to the author, students have increasingly ignored the unity of the Mediterranean in their zeal to analyze the developments that reshaped it during its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century decline: “The analytical terrain charted by Braudel has not served as an especially fertile ground for studies mapping the collective destinies and the general trends of the Mediterranean during the ages of Baroque and reason” (p. 9). Leaving space only to insular, “regional” histories.

In their symbiotic relationship with the Castilian and Ottoman Empires, the two city-states of Genoa and Venice played (according to their often conflicting needs) a pivotal role in holding Mediterranean economic arena together from the thirteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century. After the end of the Genoese century, Faruk Tabak identifies different trends that explain the waning of the Mediterranean: the secular rhythms of the world economy, which focuses on the exodus of the spice trade to the Atlantic and on the cultivation of lucrative crops (cotton, sugar) outside the Mediterranean; the cycles of hegemony of the world-system that shifted the world-economy's center of gravity to the North Sea and the Atlantic; and the ecological pulse of the natural world and the climatic variability of the Little Ice Age. But at the same time, Tabak also highlights three processes that reshaped the social and economic geography of the Mediterranean. First, new crops were introduced into Mediterranean agriculture—especially maize as a food for the masses, which left countries east of Elbe the main role of breadbasket of the Amsterdam-centered European wheat market. At the same time, wine, oil, wool, and silk became the productive core of a commercial agriculture that moved away from low-lying coastal plains, because of erosion, malaria, deforestation, silt buildup, and a Little Ice Age. The second process was the shift away from maritime commerce to new commercial land routes, towards Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Poland, and Russia. The third process was the flow of capital towards land ownership, the diffusion of domestic industries in the country, away from the rigid corporate systems of the city but linked to the dense network of local markets and fairs that studded Europe. In the end, the eclipse of Genoa and Venice, the two city-states that had guided the Mediterranean economy until the seventeenth century, was not a dramatic crisis. “this did not mean that the city-states managed to retain their former power, nor did it mean that the part they played should be overemphasized. But the fact that they were not rudely routed gave them the luxury to make the transition to their lesser, diminished position in a leisurely fashion” (p. 185).

This is the most original part of the book. An excessive focus on Genoa and Venice and on other cities linked to commerce and the lack of attention given the territory that surrounded them have obscured the enduring resistance of the Mediterranean, which only the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century would finally force into crisis. The various strategies of the two city-states that from the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century separated the east from the west of the Mediterranean economic world, grew increasingly similar as the Mediterranean economy contracted and reshaped itself. Oriental cash crops (cotton and silk) relocated, arboriculture (olives, wine, mulberries) developed, manufacturing spread out, commercial wheat agriculture declined, and trade with the countryside grew: “All three processes that framed the eclipse of the Mediterranean were endowed with enviable longevity and had a lifespan of over three centuries. Even though the dynamics underlying these trends changed in the long run, the directionality of change remained stubbornly stable despite the twists and turns caused by world economic and political developments and despite the divergence of interests between the rivalrous city-states” (pp. 80–81).

The book therefore reconstructs a mechanism based on a limited number of factors, creating a framework in which there is a strong sense of determinism, in which the restructuring of the world market and climactic conditions are the critical forces. In Tabak's model, almost no role is given to the politics of states, the social conflict between landowners and peasants, or to religious ideologies, which also had a bearing on economic behavior. If since no one has produced a comprehensive rereading of the Mediterranean Braudel, historians have nevertheless done much work on particular subjects that yield limited, but nonetheless important, new readings. Above all else, the problem of decline has been neglected, and Tabak is right to return to it. But economic themes have been increasingly reread in the light of political changes and of social and cultural history. Fundamentally, Spain, the great power of the Siglo de Oro, was not only Mediterranean, but also an Atlantic state, and its model of a modern Catholic state brought about a decline that was the opposite of the great French growth. And Italy was made up not only of Venice, Genoa, and Florence, but also the Papal State and the Duchy of Savoy, which do not appear in Tabak's analysis. And the end of the Mameluks and the Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and in central Europe are themes which cannot be neglected, without making the triumph of history's victors appear inevitable. The book is dominated by an overtly geohistorical reading: human beings do not appear, only the impersonal forces of climate and the consequences of geographical discoveries. The shape of the Mediterranean world at the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, does not depend on choices and strategies, but on the tough necessities of world markets and adverse weather conditions. The Braudelian model is thus emptied, without any trace of social relationships, political strategies, the role of the emerging modern states, or religious conflicts. The author's references to the social characteristics of the countries that surround the Mediterranean tend toward a generic mention of concentrated land holding. But concentration—certainly not a general one of land ownership that, anyway, in the Mediterranean land ownership, left ample margins for the diffusion of sharecropping using mixed agriculture and for the victory of livestock husbandry over mercantile cereal production, with transhumance and the resettlement of plain dwelling populations in the hills.

As a student of the Ottoman Empire, the author seems not to know Italian, Spanish, or Arabic. His information is thus almost entirely drawn essentially from studies in English, Turkish, and more rarely, French. At least this is what one gathers from his bibliography. The book is weakened by this blindspot: its scope as a general history of the Mediterranean is too ambitious to neglect the wealth of work by local historians and to use only works which have been translated. The consequence of this is the presence of numerous errors of fact even in this fundamentally reliable construction of a general mechanism: a premature diffusion of the potato (p. 255), an improbably central role for Spoleto in the Italian economy (pp. 118, 181), a city of Naples in Liguria (p. 111), an important role for the Reformation in the consumption of oil (p. 164) whilst never mentioning the basic use of olive oil in the manufacture of wool, the diffusion of the cultivation of rice in Liguria and in Nice (p. 286), or a failure to distinguish between the widespread spinning of silk and the much less significant weaving manufacture, which had migrated early on towards Lyon and the north. And all the assertions lack quantitive references that would have allowed for comparisons.

One theme above all seems to me important in Tabak's book: according to an often contested but enduring tradition in the economic history of the age preceding the Industrial Revolution, he aims to deemphasize mercantile phenomena. But I believe, as Braudel has already taught us, that the process of expansion of the mercantile part of the economy is central to the interpretation of general change in the history of production and consumption.

Ultimately, the book constructs a suggestive model of crises and responses to crises that gives us a full outline of suggestions, but which leaves a number of doubts. In research into a uniform Mediterranean, elements of diversity unfortunately disappear and should not be forgotten. Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Maghreb, Egypt, and Turkey have perhaps many common characteristics from the point of view of geopolitics and their agricultural landscapes, but it is precisely in the course of the centuries examined here that diversities, delays, and differences proliferated.