English historian
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia
CBE
FSA
FRHistS
FBA
(born 12 December 1949) is an English historian with a particular interest in Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He spent most of his career at the
University of Cambridge
, rising to become a professor at the age of 50.
[1]
He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History. He is a Fellow of
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
.
[2]
He was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, 2003-5, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He is visiting Beacon Professor at the new University of Gibraltar, where he also serves on the Academic Board. He is a visiting professor at the
College of Europe
(Natolin branch, Poland).
He is a Fellow of the
British Academy
and a member of the
Academia Europaea
. In 2013 he was awarded one of three inaugural
British Academy Medals
for his work on Mediterranean history. In 2020, he was awarded the Wolfson History Prize for
The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans.
[3]
Early life and education
[
edit
]
Abulafia was born in
Twickenham
,
Middlesex
, into a
Sephardic Jewish
family. He was educated at
St. Paul's School
and
King's College, Cambridge
.
Academic career
[
edit
]
Abulafia has published several books on
Mediterranean
history, beginning with his book
The Two Italies
in 1977. In this work, he argued that as far back as the twelfth century northern Italy exploited the agricultural resources of the Italian south, and that this provided the essential basis for the further expansion of trade and industry in Tuscany, Genoa and Venice. He edited volume 5 of the
New Cambridge Medieval History
and the volume on Italy in the central Middle Ages in the Oxford Short History of Italy; he also edited an important collection of studies of the French invasion of Italy in 1494-5 as well as a book on
The Mediterranean in History
which has appeared in six languages. He has given lectures in many countries including
Italy
,
Spain
,
Portugal
,
France
,
Germany
,
Finland
,
Norway
, the
United States
,
Dominican Republic
,
Japan
,
China
,
Israel
,
the UAE
,
Jordan
, and
Egypt
.
[
citation needed
]
One of his most influential books is
Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor
, first published in England in 1988 and reprinted many times in several Italian editions. Here he looks at an iconic figure from the Middle Ages from a new perspective, criticizing the views of the famous German historian
Ernst Kantorowicz
concerning
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen
, whom Abulafia sees as a conservative figure rather than as a genius born out of his time.
He has been appointed
Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity
by the President of Italy in recognition of his writing on Italian history, especially Sicilian history, and he has also written about Spain, particularly the
Balearic islands
. He has shown an interest in the economic history of the Mediterranean, and in the meeting of the three
Abrahamic faiths
in the Mediterranean. Not confining himself to the Mediterranean, he has also written a much-praised book on the first encounters between western Europeans and the native societies of the Atlantic (the Canary islands, the Caribbean and Brazil) around 1492; this book is
The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus
(2008).
In 2011,
Penguin Books
(and
Oxford University Press
in New York) published his
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
, a substantial volume that sets out a different approach to Mediterranean history to that propounded by the French historian
Fernand Braudel
, and ranges in time from 22,000 BC to AD 2010. The book, which received the
Mountbatten Literary Award
from the
Maritime Foundation
,
[4]
[5]
became a bestseller in UK non-fiction and was widely acclaimed. It has been translated into Dutch, French, Greek, Turkish, Spanish, German, Arabic, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Romanian and Portuguese, with further translations under contract.
Abulafia wrote
The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
, published by Penguin in the UK and by Oxford University Press in the US in October 2019. This book applies a similar method to his history of the Mediterranean, looking at the people who moved across the open sea, and emphasizing the role of maritime trade in the political, cultural and economic history of humanity. It won the 2020
Wolfson History Prize
.
[3]
He was the chairman of Historians for Britain, an organisation that lobbies to
leave
the
European Union
. According to Abulafia, the process of
European Integration
is "a myth used to silence other visions of European community". He has written opinion pieces criticising the UK's membership in the European Union, accusing the idea of European unity of being based upon "historical determinism".
[6]
He recently wrote a article in the
Daily Telegraph
titled "It would be uncivilised to give Greece the Elgin Marbles", where he wrote that they belong "in London, in a great universal museum, not in the narrow confines of
Athens's Acropolis
".
[7]
Abulafia was appointed
Commander of the Order of the British Empire
(CBE) in the
2023 Birthday Honours
for services to scholarship.
[8]
Personal life
[
edit
]
In 1979, Abulafia married
Anna Brechta Sapir
.
[9]
The couple have two adult daughters.
[10]
Interviews
[
edit
]
Main works
[
edit
]
- The Two Italies: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes
, Cambridge 1977
- Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor
, London 1988
- A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca
, Cambridge 1994
- The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 1200?1500: The Struggle for Dominion
, London 1997
- The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus
, New Haven, CT 2008
- The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
, Oxford 2011
- The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
, London 2019
Notes
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
|
---|
International
| |
---|
National
| |
---|
Academics
| |
---|
People
| |
---|
Other
| |
---|