Alexis Wick is Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Beirut.

"Scholars will appreciate the richness of the argument..." -- J.C. Perry Choice "Valuable... an enlightening read." Mada Masr "...a rich and erudite work..." -- Akram Belkaid Le Monde Diplomatique "A substantial and relatively groundbreaking piece of work with a sharp understanding of how geography is anchored in History with a capital H, and vice versa. Wick's determined appeal for his readers to see both the Red Sea as a product of European design as well as space more generally as a host of discursively constituted and lived places and landscapes, each with a poetics, a history, and a sense of its own is absolutely refreshing, to say nothing of its necessity." AAG Review of Books "Sophisticated and erudite...a very important work." New Perspectives on Turkey

• List of Illustrations AcknowledgmentsNote on Translation and TransliterationIntroduction. History at Sea: Space and the Other1 • The Place in the Middle: A Geohistory of the Red Sea2 • Thalassology alla Turca: Six Theses on the Philosophy of History3 • Self-Portrait of the Ottoman Red Sea, June 21, 17774 • The Scientific Invention of the Red Sea5 • Thalassomania: Modernity and the SeaConclusion. Rigging the Historian’s Craft: For an Epistemology of CompositionNotesBibliographyIndex