ABSTRACT: Island Borderlands-Agents of Change in the Mediterranean during the Nineteenth Century
Presented by Christos Theofilogiannakos
This paper will be presented at the American Historical Association Conference in New York on January 3, 2015. It is part of a panel that will examine approaches to studying Southeastern Europe’s borderlands. My paper contributes to the panel by presenting new directions for studying the transmission of ideas in the Balkans during the 19th century. It follows recent scholarship and attempts to bring analytical focus on liminal spaces and the periphery in hopes of guiding historic analysis away from a nation-centered approach. Supporting a trans-disciplinary and trans-regional methodology, this paper provides a broad coverage of historiographical debates and also offers new avenues of research for the 19th century Mediterranean and Greece.
Two often-ignored fields in Mediterranean history that I focus on include borderland and post-colonial studies. Again, this paper highlights the importance of a trans-disciplinary approach to history and emphasizes the social and political ramifications of boundary changes on people living in border regions. It incorporates a new analytical model, which I refer to as, islands ecotones. This model borrows the term ecotones from geography in order to places an emphasis on zones of contact and friction between two distinct societies. My paper suggests that islands are ideal places to demonstrate how interaction across the Mediterranean provided historical incentives that fostered relationships between, liminal communities with their imperial rulers and nation states. Essentially, what emerged in my area of study, the Ionian Islands, was an intellectual, social, and cultural creolization of “Western” and the “Eastern” Europe.
Using examples from the Ionian Islands and their eventual incorporation into the Kingdom of Greece in 1864, this paper highlights key characteristics of borderland societies, especially cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity. It argues that the Ionian Islands were not passive participants during the onset of modernity but played a crucial role in the transmission and modulation of western ideas into Greek society during the long 19th century. As part of a larger trans-regional network of exchange, the Ionian Islands demonstrate that ideas were not simply imitated from the west, but modulated and relevant to local beliefs and politics.
In summation, while traditional studies of the Mediterranean have focused on port-cities and urban centers as sites for locating commonalities beyond borders and nations, this paper proposes that islands serve as important sites for the transmission, modulation and circulation of ideas.
christheofilo 