The UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Group presents the 2014 spring Emeriti Faculty Lecture “Models of Mediterranean Modernity: The Perspective From the Longue Duree”

Viewed from a global perspective, the Mediterranean region has enjoyed a common historical experience since 1500. Increasingly semi-peripheral with respect to the world capitalist system, and characterized by weak states, delayed or muffled class formation, agrarian backwardness and the persistence of pastoralism, the coming to modernity of the Mediterranean foreshadowed the historical experience of the Third World in its unity and diversity.

Edmund “Terry” Burke III is Research Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Burke is the author of The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam (forthcoming, California, 2014). He is the co-editor of The Environment and World History (UC Press, 2009) and Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East (Athens OH: Ohio University, 2011), and Genealogies of Orientalism (Nebraska, 2008).