ABSTRACT
Fernand Braudel’s classic book of 1949, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , opens with a long discussion of the physical geography of the Mediterranean region and gradually introduces the human dimension. With the same idea in mind I might have called this book Europe and the European Region in the Age of the European Union. Here region replaces world , to avoid the suggestion that the contemporary world is shaped by Europe, even to the extent it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European colonies covered much of the world map. The name of a monarch (1527-98), King of Spain, Portugal and (briefly) England, is replaced by the name of a political entity whose nature remains quite unclear.
