Under the Ottomans, who ruled the eastern Mediterranean for 500 years, cosmopolitan life in Istanbul took a particularly vigorous and productive form, creating a web of connection and identity that is conspicuously absent in our own era.

This omnibus edition brings together Nicholas Woodsworth’s critically acclaimed Mediterranean trilogy into a single volume for the first time, allowing readers to fully appreciate the scope of Woodsworth’s search for a distinctively Mediterranean “cosmopolitanism.” Combining travel narrative, history, and reflection on contemporary lives and cultures, Woodsworth finds an intimacy, a garrulous warmth, and an extraordinary sociability as he travels from Alexandria through Venice and finally installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery in Istanbul overlooking the Golden Horn. Responding to this experience, he argues that the sea should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia, and Africa, but rather as a single entity, a place from whose coastlines people look inwards over the water to each other—for it has its own cities, its own life, its own way of being.

Istanbul has long been a place where stories and histories collide, where perception is as potent as fact. From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names--Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul -- resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City," but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city, but a global story. In this epic new biography, Hughes takes us on a dazzling historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, through the many incarnations of one of the world's greatest cities--exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. Hughes investigates what it takes to make a city and tells the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the poor and the voiceless, of the women and men whose aspirations and dreams have continuously reinvented Istanbul. Written with energy and animation, award-winning historian Bettany Hughes deftly guides readers through Istanbul's rich layers of history. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, this captivating portrait of the momentous life of Istanbul is visceral, immediate, and authoritative -- narrative history at its finest.

Of all the great powers of the Mediterranean past, Venice was the most commercially ambitious. Her great wealth and sophisticated culture were products of a commercial empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the ports of the Levant, and her long history is studded with sea dramas of war, crusade and intrigue.

The movement of people and objects has always stood at the heart of attempts to understand the course and processes of human history. The history of the Mediterranean is particularly abundant when it comes to issues of migration, colonisation, and trade, initiating thus archaeological, historical, linguistic and cultural discussions. This collection highlights the richness and depth of the multifaceted cultural exchanges of the region and focuses on underrepresented aspects of cultural exchanges in the Mediterranean, with Cyprus having a central role as a crossroads. It responds to the challenge of linking the study of everyday life at the micro-level to macro-scale narratives based on trans-regional engagement.

The identity of any nation-state is inextricably linked with its borders and frontiers. Borders connect nations and sustain notions of social cohesion. Yet they are also the sites of division, fragmentation and political conflict. This ambitious study encompasses North Africa, the Middle East, and South and South East Europe to examine the emergence of state borders and polarised identities in the Mediterranean. The authors look at the impact of political boundaries upon the region, along with pressures from European and economic integration, the resurgence of nationalism, and refugee and security concerns. The authors explore the politics of memory, and ask whether echoes from the imperial past - Ottoman and colonial - could provide the basis for conflict resolution, region-building and economic integration.

The Liquid Continent, whose three volumes can be read independently, combines travel narrative, history and reflection on the contemporary Mediterranean. Beginning in Alexandria, the author travels overland around the eastern rim of the sea.