Sea of Troubles

A lively, sweeping account of how a once great Islamic civilisation was defeated by European powers.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, approximately three quarters of the Mediterranean coastline and its hinterlands were controlled by a vast Islamic power, the centuries-old Ottoman Empire. However, by the end of the First World War, this great civilisation - once regarded by Christian Europe with awe and fear - had been completely subjugated, its territories occupied by European powers. The history of imperialism in the Mediterranean involves not one but six European powers - Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary and Russia - jostling for control of the trade, lands and wealth of those they saw as the existential other'. The competition between these states made their conquest of the Islamic Mediterranean a far more difficult and extended task than they encountered elsewhere in the world. Yet, as new contenders entered the contest, and as the rivalries in the Mediterranean intensified in the early twentieth century, events would spiral out of control as the continent headed towards the First World War. Set against a background of intense imperial rivalry, Sea of Troubles is the definitive account of the European conquest of the Levant and North Africa in the last three centuries.

Autorentext

Ian Rutledge is an economist, historian and Arabist. He obtained his PhD in Economic History from Cambridge University. He has taught at the Universities of London and Sheffield, and for the Workers' Educational Association. Rutledge has published articles in academic journals, as well as the Financial Times and The Guardian. His other works include the critically acclaimed Enemy on the Euphrates: The Battle for Iraq, 19141921

Klappentext

From the author of Enemy on the Euphrates and Addicted to Oil comes a lively, sweeping account of how the Ottoman Empire, a once great Islamic civilization, was defeated by European powers.

Inhalt

Epigraph
Preface

PART ONE c.1750 - 1830
Chapter 1: Islam, Christian Europe and the Mediterranean: Social Structures, Incomes, Living Standards and the Role of Religion
Chapter 2: Islam, Christian Europe and the Mediterranean: the Ottoman 'Economic Mind', Industry and Trade
Chapter 3: At the Gateway to the Mediterranean: Britain and the 'Empire' of Morocco
Chapter 4: State, land and taxation: the fiscal crisis of the Ottoman system
Chapter 5: The Ottoman Regencies and the Barbary Corsairs
Chapter 6: The Russians in the Mediterranean
Chapter 7: Ottoman Egypt: the Empire Fraying at the Edges
Chapter 8: A Spanish Disaster
Chapter 9: 'Liberating the Egyptians': the Origins of French Republican Imperialism
Chapter 10: The French in Egypt: from Military Victory to Colonial failure
Chapter 11: The Troubled beginnings of Britain's 'Blue-Water Empire'
Chapter 12: The Beginning of the end for the Ottoman Regencies

PART TWO 1830 - c1870
Chapter 13: The Multiple Crises of Mahmud II
Chapter 14: The French Invasion of the Regency of Algiers and the growth of the Resistance 1830-36.
Chapter 15: Saving the Sultans
Chapter 16: Algérie Francaise, Morocco, Britain and the defeat of the Resistance
Chapter 17: Syria, Suez and the France's Second Imperial Venture in the Eastern Mediterranean
Chapter 18: The Industrialised and the Non-Industrialised

PART THREE c.1870 - c.1900
Chapter 19: The Age of the Rentiers
Chapter 20: The Bailiffs arrive
Chapter 21: The slow death of the 'Empire' of Morocco

PART FOUR c.1900 - 1918
Chapter 22: Imperialist Realignment and the French Intervention in Morocco
Chapter 23: Imperialism on the Northern Shore: Austria-Hungary and Bosnia-Herzegovina
Chapter 24: From Mediterranean Imperialism to World War: Morocco, Libya and the Southern Balkans

Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index