Here's an 8 min. infomercial on the modern Alexandria container and cargo handling hub they have constructed. Yes, in Egypt. Dated Dec 2010. Reminds me of the shipyards in Virginia when I worked and lived there in the early '90's. You can learn what a container and shipping port does nowadays by watching the 2nd season of the HBO series "The Wire". Season 2 opener in 5 minutes gives a snapshot view.
Why again?
Found myself in another of those brief periods in Apri where a number of different sources all seemed to say basically the same thing to me. It's like watching different threads come together in front of you and twist themselves up by themselves. It tugs at the news too. What does it mean?
Sources I said,
like Dante, or the Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo or in this case, like Fernand Braudel, in The Mediterranean,
Another fascinating source I started a couple years ago is a three volume history of the Mediterranean Sea and it's own context, during the reign of Spain's King Phillip II in the 1500's. Trying to do this right he looks at 'context' as completely as possible. Even as it is a structuralist view (which is important enough in it's own way these days), it gives example of and goes a long ways toward explaining why I spend so much time with this stuff. This book is a great example of not only why I do it but in what inspires me to keep doing more of it: to get a deeper understanding of society and how it really works regardless of what people call it these days....
Dialing back:
After all the discoveries of places and things that filled up so many people's time in the 1800's, the 1900's seemed spent on making money and building things up and also for some to tear them down. In a big way. The US for its efforts, expanded hugely and our influence on the rest of the world was profound, but Europe seemed to tear itself apart with the world wars and still seems not to have gotten over it. But before, in the 17- and 1800's, Europe was effectively ruling, if at a distance, most of the rest of the world. Through trade and some wars. For example.
But prior to all that, in the sixteenth century there was a lot of change as well in Europe. In different ways they both were times when the people broke away from the church or quit going to the church for answers in different but profound ways. It was also times when people had to change their understanding of personal safety, of their security in actual terms and away from the church and spiritual ends and toward consumable goods and prices of things. Strange but it seems true. Of course the 1500's also saw the exploration of the new world which would have profound effects on Spain back in Europe but also on those who didn't make it to the new world. Oftentimes the one's that were still tending to the Mediterranean and what was still happening there. Places like Italy and France, Germany who worked at home or sent managers abroad to help organize things.
Much like we are doing overseas. Much of the 1500's for Venice though was in building bigger palaces and churches at home and making their city more costly than spending it on overseas ventures. So long as the shipments from abroad came in on time. In that way they were much like us.
So long as the shops were stocked and trade kept going, everyone managed to think of things as fine.
Locus:
"The Mediterranean" looks at those times first from the point of view of the sea. The geography, shaped by the mountains to the north and west and the desert to the south and east. There are only certain seasons when it was safe to sail, certain seasons which brought the most fish and the winter was not one of them.
The broad desert to the south warms everything all summer long and keeps things more or less stable for shipping but this would bring out pirates. The broad and long land masses which reached down into the Sea -- Italy, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and Spain all had their own influence on the sea and took nourishment from it.
Each of these land masses had neighbors behind them who wanted access to the Sea and would get there by rivers or trails along mountain chains. Trails and trade routes that reached back centuries if not millenia. And each of these corridors were individual or had differing voices to bring to the market, different backgrounds, different traditions. Goods from the Black Sea could come from the Eastern European countries, while Germany and Austria emptied it's wares in Venice, while the Burgunds and French went to markets along the Rhine and the Rhone which received goods from Marseilles next to Italy, but also from Antwerp in Belgium upstream. This gets away from the topic but fed into it, so effected it.
author opera:
Because, after this Frenchman, Fernand Braudel, steering this huge task, asks more questions than could be answered, his title is more broad than even he could have anticipated. As a structuralist he builds up from the data (and with this later edition a university of students to research things), from the record, of what science could tell him. He tells the shape and the weather and the routes along this sea in the first volume. The second volume goes more into the players, the actors in this era. The third volume will describe the actions in the dividing up of the spoils at the end of the period c 1590 as the world was turning away at last to the new world.
I say he speaks as a structuralist and I mean by that someone who states what he will try to do from the outset, explain his choices, the models he will use, the assumptions he starts off with, explaining all the while what he is saying along with why it's important to the story, but often in the end finds there is not enough data to know. But the information comes from every area, in official records and trade and accounting records, to shipping records, church documents and so on.
______________________________
Spain , at the first was largely cut off from the rest except for their ties to Genoan financiers, in the earlier part of the 1500's, and they needed the Sea to go back and forth. Only the shepherds and pilgrims crossed over the Pyrenees to France and the rest of the Euro mainland. Spain itself over time grew more and more wheat for the world then, but also by the second half of the 1500's, everything else grown in addition to the wheat, all of which propelled her to become such a major player for the next several centuries. Because the capital she had from local goods and her Genoese financiers allowed her to build a navy which she used to go overseas and take the silver from the Americas, Spain could make an empire. But first she needed the capital; free from the neighbors taking it as middle men. At first. And that was possible only because of the peacefully secure foundation that Ferdinand and Isabella had established for the Aragonese/ Catalonian hybrid that despite all the odds would mature into true Spain.
One of the necessary processes I will look at more as this story goes along.
No comments:
Post a Comment