The Mediterranean

The Mediterranean by Grant Allen is a popular geographical and historical study of the Mediterranean basin, published in the 1890s as part of his substantial output of nonfiction educational writing for general readers. Allen had spent winters on the Mediterranean coast for years for his health and had developed a serious interest in the geography, history, and natural setting of the great sea.

The book takes the standard nineteenth century approach to the subject, covering the basin as a whole through a sequence of geographical and historical chapters. There is an opening section on the geological history of the Mediterranean, drawing on the work of late Victorian geologists who had established that the basin had a complicated history of opening and closing across geological time. There are chapters on the major cultures that have surrounded the sea, from the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Levant through to the classical Greek and Roman world, the medieval Byzantine and Islamic empires, and the modern European states that had inherited the basin in the period of the great colonial expansions of the nineteenth century.

Allen was not a professional historian or geographer. He was a serious popularizer with a wide reading background and a clear writing style, and the book is best read as that kind of educational synthesis rather than as original scholarship. His method is to summarize what was known about each topic at the time of his writing, with examples and personal observation drawn from his own travels along the European Mediterranean coast. The chapters on natural history are the strongest in the book, because they draw on his serious interest in plant and animal evolution, but the historical sections are also clearly organised and reasonably accurate for the date.

The book runs about three hundred pages and reads as a substantial single sitting or two. For readers interested in Victorian popular geography and in the kind of educational nonfiction that filled the libraries of late nineteenth century households, this is a representative example. It pairs naturally with Allen’s other popular educational books, particularly Early Britain, and with the more substantial Mediterranean writings of his slightly later contemporary Norman Douglas.