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The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland

Online ISBN:
9781503607538
Print ISBN:
9781503606678
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland

Sasha D. Pack
Sasha D. Pack
University at Buffalo, SUNY
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Published online:
23 May 2019
Published in print:
8 January 2019
Online ISBN:
9781503607538
Print ISBN:
9781503606678
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book presents the history of southern Iberia and the western Maghrib, and the Strait of Gibraltar between them, as a single bicontinental borderland, from roughly 1850 to 1970. Drawing on primary and secondary sources from several countries, it posits a long historical arc of transformation from a remote and hostile religious frontier into a multilaterally managed regional order. By the nineteenth century, the Strait of Gibraltar was becoming a dynamic focus of imperial positioning, migration, brigandage, and exchange. As a consequence, coastal outposts like Tangier, Gibraltar, and Melilla became centers of an emerging bicontinental society bringing together a kaleidoscope of ethno-religious groups. These developments produced conflict but also drew sovereign powers together to confront common challenges, such as controlling epidemic disease, defeating warlords, and managing borders. Thus, over the course of a century, despite periods of considerable violence, an international order gradually emerged in the western Mediterranean. As European empire withdrew in the late twentieth century, the region did not revert to the hostile frontier of earlier times but inherited the legacy of a relatively stable and resilient regional order. Conceptualizing the borderland in this way provides a single transnational framework to explore connections between Mediterranean geopolitics, colonialism, border formation, smuggling and brigandage, and the civil and international violence of the twentieth century. It also addresses the role of mobility in international relations, the dynamics of Muslim-Jewish relations in the context of European empire, and the ongoing controversies over Gibraltar, Ceuta, and Melilla.

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