The Mediterranean Metaphor in Early Geopolitical Writings

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 cvivilization’, and transformed the Middle Sea into a metaphor for the universal mission of Europe.