The article focuses on the view of the Mediterranean in early geopolitical writings. Through this lens, it looks at the space metaphors and imaginative geographies that defined the core meanings of the Middle Sea over the last 200 years. The author discusses the role that the Enlightenment philosophy of history had in the shaping of classical geography. Moving on similar grounds, early geopolitical writers believed in the 'force of history' as a generator of spatial order. They used episodes of the Mediterranean past as a parable for the spatial articulation of contact, conflict and power in the overall 'process of civilization'. In their writings recurs an idea, which resonates also in later key texts regarding the same maritime space. It is the idea of a 'greater Mediterranean' that after the fifteenth century was destined to gain worldwide importance thanks to transoceanic expansion. In doing so, geographers, historians and philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the Middle Sea into a metaphor for the universal mission of Europe and the West.
Although emotions already had a history in historiography, during the last ten or fifteen years they have achieved a prominent place in historical research. Among the immediate reasons for this may be political conflict, terrorism, warfare and their representation in the mass media as well as the economic crisis and the loss of confidence in the future that characterises present western societies. If compared to the well-ordered world that strategic equilibrium and economic prosperity created after the Second World war, unexpected occurrences seem to offer new proof that "irrational" behaviour and emotion-guided decisions drive history. Another plausible reason relates back to the cultural turn in social sciences and history, which produced new interest both in collective expressions of feeling and personal experience in history.My essay makes no claim to offer a bibliographical overview; the number of studies is too huge and still increasing. I hope, however, to offer a reasonable itemisation of the three main streams in this field of study: the history of individual emotions, the study of the role that emotions have in historical processes and the reflection on the influence of emotions on history writing. The second part of the article is devoted to the methodological and theoretical status of the study of past emotions. Following the linguistic turn, the majority of the historians of emotion would define themselves as cultural historians. This article will criticise the definition of emotions as merely cultural phenomena. It will go back to earlier debates in historiography, philosophy and social sciences and briefly consider recent research in the humanities and neurosciences. I maintain here that the cultural history of emotions should be able to deconstruct its own history and contextualise histor-
Review of Vasileios Petrogiannis, European Mobility and Spatial Belongings: Greek and Latvian Migrants in Sweden. Stockholm: Elanders, 2020. 334 pp. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-41915 To view the full text, click on the button "HTML".
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