The article focuses on the view of the Mediterranean in early geopolitical writings. Through this lens, it looks at the space metaphors and imaginative geographies that defined the core meanings of the Middle Sea over the last 200 years. The author discusses the role that the Enlightenment philosophy of history had in the shaping of classical geography. Moving on similar grounds, early geopolitical writers believed in the ‘force of history’ as a generator of spatial order. They used episodes of the Mediterranean past as a parable for the spatial articulation of contact, conflict and power in the overall ‘process of civilization’. In their writings recurs an idea, which resonates also in later key texts regarding the same maritime space. It is the idea of a ‘greater Mediterranean’ that after the fifteenth century was destined to gain worldwide importance thanks to transoceanic expansion. In doing so, geographers, historians and philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the Middle Sea into a metaphor for the universal mission of Europe and the West.

中文翻译：

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早期地缘政治著作中的地中海隐喻

这篇文章的重点是早期地缘政治著作中对地中海的看法。通过这个镜头，它着眼于过去 200 年来定义中海核心意义的空间隐喻和富有想象力的地理。作者讨论了启蒙历史哲学在塑造古典地理学方面的作用。基于类似的理由，早期地缘政治作家相信“历史的力量”是空间秩序的生成器。他们用地中海过去的情节作为整体“文明进程”中接触、冲突和权力的空间表达的比喻。在他们的著作中反复出现了一个想法，这在后来关于同一海域的关键文本中也产生了共鸣。由于跨洋扩张，“大地中海”的想法在 15 世纪之后注定在世界范围内具有重要意义。19 世纪和 20 世纪初的地理学家、历史学家和哲学家这样做时，将中海变成了欧洲和西方普遍使命的隐喻。