Gipson: Plains, Hills and Mountains: The Balkan Peninsula in the Eighteenth Century with Professor Molly Greene

This talk is intended as a response to Faruk Tabak’s sweeping study of the Mediterranean, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550-1870: A Geohistorical Approach (2008). In the book Tabak argues that Mediterranean unity continued long past Braudel’s famous sixteenth century. The region continued to enjoy (or, in this case, suffer) a collective destiny with similar developments taking shape across the entire area. These developments, however, were entirely distinct from what went before. One of the most pronounced, according to Tabak, was the retreat of populations, for environmental reasons, from the plains to the hills and the mountains and it is this phenomenon which will be the focus of this talk. Tabak seems to have been unaware of an extensive Ottoman and Balkan literature on precisely this phenomenon, although it is framed very differently. Molly Greene, Princeton University, will lay out who was where in the eighteenth century Balkans, with a focus on Greece, and assess the persuasiveness of Tabak’s argument for the Balkan peninsula. Molly Greene studies the history of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek world. Her interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of Greeks under Ottoman rule and the early modern Mediterranean. After earning a B.A. in political science at Tufts University (1981), Professor Greene spent several years living in Greece and then completed a Ph.D. in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton (1993), where she studied Ottoman history. Upon graduating she joined the Princeton faculty with a joint appointment in the History Department and the Program in Hellenic Studies. Her first book, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2000), examines the transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule on the island of Crete, which the Ottomans conquered in 1669. Challenging the assumption of a radical rupture with the arrival of the Ottomans, Greene shows that the population of Crete had been drawn into the Ottoman world long before the conquest and that important continuities linked the Venetian and the Ottoman periods. Her second book, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of Mediterranean 1450-1700, was published in 2010 and was a co-winner of the Runciman Award for that year, given for the best book in English on any aspect of Hellenism. At the center of the book is the relationship between Catholic piracy and Greek commerce in the early modern Mediterranean. In 2015 she published The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453-1768: The Ottoman Empire, part of a multi-volume series on the history of the Greek people from antiquity until the present day. That book was shortlisted for the Runciman Award.