This edited collection presents an economic history of Catalonia and its economic crises, from Roman times to the political difficulties of the present day. It considers how the strong identity of the Catalan people has been reinforced in critical episodes such as the commercial revolution of the Late Medieval Age, the 1640 rebellion, the Succession War of 1705-1714, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the strong repression during early Francoism. The book also explores how historical parallels from Catalonia’s past might shed light on the long-term consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-9 and recovery in the EU, showing how the typical Mediterranean approach of adjusting to crises by depreciating currencies and expanding public deficits has been less straightforward during the most recent financial crisis. A particularly deep slump has contributed to fostering the claim for independence of Catalonia in recent times, echoing larger dissatisfaction with EU monetary policy. With a comprehensive overview of major events in Catalonian economic history and their broader implications to European political economy and development, this book will be of interest to students and academics in economic history, social history, and monetary economics.

This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

This book introduces a new approach to understanding security in the Mediterranean and explores current challenges at the European Union (EU) Mediterranean borders. It investigates the intertwined area at the South of the EU that we call the Mediterranean Global South where common actions and strategies are required to face common security challenges. The book critically addresses the EU's capacity to manage its expanding borders and analyses the actors involved in providing security in the Mediterranean Global South. Specific attention is devoted to South to North migration, one of the most critical security issues of current times, deploying its effects well beyond states borders. Stefania Panebianco is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Catania and Visiting Professor at LUISS-Rome. She holds Jean Monnet Chair EUMedEA (EU Mediterranean Border Crises and European External Action).

This book examines clandestine migrant journeys across the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe. It combines ethnographic focus with macro-level analyses of EU and national migration policies and practices. It draws on the case study of Malta, and pushes the boundaries of our knowledge of the global politics of migration, asylum, and border security.

This book examines the recent evolution of the Mediterranean Welfare regime, and how the economic crisis may be contributing to redefine its basic traits. Moving from the macro comparative analysis of long-term socio-demographic trends to the study of specific welfare programs, the chapters included in this book employ a variety of methods and approaches to review the specificities of the Mediterranean Welfare model. All chapters aim to analyze the role that the recent transformations experienced by Southern European societies (ageing, increasing women labour market participation, decreasing expectations for care within the family, immigration) have had over this model. The basic characteristics of this regime type are supposed to be strongly grounded in the values shared by these societies (familistic tendencies, clientelism, lack of generalized trust), but the modernization which these countries experienced in recent years have contributed, with a different speed and to a different degree, to a significant transformation in their axiological foundations. The impact of the current fiscal and economic crisis on the Mediterranean Welfare regimes may be contributing to the growing de-legitimatisation of political systems of these countries, something particularly important in a region that established democratic regimes only (relatively) recently. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Societies.

As a 'Medieval Warm Period' prevailed in Western Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the eastern Mediterranean region, from the Nile to the Oxus, was suffering from a series of climatic disasters which led to the decline of some of the most important civilizations and cultural centres of the time. This provocative study argues that many well-documented but apparently disparate events - such as recurrent drought and famine in Egypt, mass migrations in the steppes of central Asia, and the decline in population in urban centres such as Baghdad and Constantinople - are connected and should be understood within the broad context of climate change. Drawing on a wealth of textual and archaeological evidence, Ronnie Ellenblum explores the impact of climatic and ecological change across the eastern Mediterranean in this period, to offer a new perspective on why this was a turning point in the history of the Islamic world.