Old serpentine road that used to connect the Ottoman/Montegrin hinterland with the Venezian / Habsburg coasts and the Adriatic Sea.
Old serpentine road that used to connect the Ottoman/Montegrin hinterland with the Venezian / Habsburg coasts and the Adriatic Sea.

Mediterranean Disentanglement: The Southern Adriatic in the Age of European Territorialization, 1718-1856
 

Research project  by Jovo Miladinović

Instead of studying Southeastern Europe exclusively as a terrestrial space, my project proposes to approach the history of Southeastern Europe through a maritime perspective, as the region is surrounded by five seas that have strongly influenced its history. The Adriatic Sea was the central communication space between North Africa, Southeastern Europe, and Central Europe. Using the Adriatic as an example, I examine the Adriatic policies of Venice, Vienna, and Istanbul between 1718 and 1856 in order to compare imperial perceptions and practices of maritime territorialization and to examine them in terms of the history of relations. A maritime turn can significantly expand and complement the historiographical image of Southeastern Europe as a contact zone between Europe, Africa and Asia –a still contested intersection of empires, cultures and religions– and overcome terrestrial clichés of the Balkans. This maritime turn can overcome and challenge a narrowing terrestrial view of the historical and deep-rooted scholarly spatial categories in scholarship. It is about the interaction between sea, coast and hinterland, i.e., three spaces whose boundaries should not be considered deterministically. I want to focus not only on the entire Adriatic but also on its interconnections and interactions with North Africa and Central Europe. The maritime turn requires an examination of maritime and terrestrial connectivities, disconnectivities, and the movements of people, goods, and ideas. To overcome the focus on the northern and western Adriatic, I focus on the Republic of Dubrovnik, the Venetian Bay of Kotor, and the three Ottoman provinces: Montenegro, Herzegovina and Albania, where the Venetian, Habsburg and Ottoman Adriatic overlapped. With these actors from the southern Adriatic, Venice, Vienna, and Istanbul had to cooperate and compete when it came to the question of who owned the Adriatic. To understand terrestrial territoriality, I will include its development in maritime spaces. Using the southern Adriatic as an example, I will look at the transformation of territoriality on land and sea beyond the imperial metropoles and through the prism of the mobility of people and goods (wood, grain, livestock, fish, slaves) as trade competition and cooperation established new spatial, social, and political boundaries. In doing so, I draw on the interplay of spatial and environmental history. I argue that it was only towards the end of the period under study (1718-1856) that Southeastern Europe and North Africa became disentangled and strongly integrated into the Central European cosmos, caused for instance by the peace treaties of the 18th and 19th centuries, which have very often been overlooked in previous historiography. As a result of this reorganization and marginalization of the Adriatic region, from the perspective of the imperial centers, Southeastern Europe henceforth appeared as backward, tribal and incapable of being “modern”, disconnected. The added value of this research project is to show paradoxical consequences of “global modernity” for Southeastern Europe; for this space was far more closely connected to other parts of the Mediterranean world in earlier centuries than in the 19th century. I aim to 1) create a multi-perspective expansion of the view of the Adriatic and Southeastern Europe, which should be considered in their larger Mediterranean context, 2) show the transformation of the system of connectivity during the “Sattelzeit”, 3) to complement the notion of territoriality with a bottom-up and environmental-historical perspective, and 4) to examine the struggle for resources in order to reconstruct transformation and resilience beyond ethno-nationalist narratives. The findings of the research project will lead to a new conceptualization of the history of Southeastern Europe and the Adriatic. They will accomplish a change in perspective and contribute to the renewal of Southeast European history as part of Mediterranean studies.