Nigel McGilchrist writes:

The title of David Abulafia’s magisterial book comes, as he reminds us, from a Hebrew blessing, to be recited when setting eyes on the Mediterranean: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea.’ His book is a two-fold history: first of the trade and the traders who discovered the sea, created its ports and never ceased thereafter to animate it in pursuit of commerce. Second, it is a history of religious and territorial struggles and subsequent accommodations. A vast body of material and reference – some of it quite new – is astutely marshalled. Abulafia sketches out five successive epochs of Mediterranean history, and gives fair emphasis to Muslim, Christian and Jewish stories. Individual lives – of nomadic Jews, Arab pilgrims, Italian antiquarians – illustrate the pleasures and hardships of travel by sea in pre-industrial times.

(LRB 22 March 2012)

Penguin | Paperback 816 pp. |ISBN: 9780141027555