The history of Greek colonization found itself at the junction between two processes that defined early modern Europe. One was the revival of antiquity; the other was the violent “discovery” of the New World. In Faelli’s impressive excavation, the ancient repertoire of texts exemplifies other significant processes, too: the legitimization of absolutist monarchies and the development of source-based historiography, for example. Allusions to ancient texts expressed approval, incited dissent, or served to expand the ways metropole-colony and colonizer-indigenous relations could be understood. Faelli limits his investigation to French and English works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that focused on the colonization of North America (with the occasional exception).
The first chapter justifies these choices. The focus on Greece creates a less explored textual map than comparisons to Rome. It also highlights different dynamics. The Athenian thalassocracy offered a more capacious model for establishing imperialist hegemony, better suited to the rising mercantilist empires than Roman expansion. Moreover, Greece’s history was far less well reconstructed than Rome’s—creating a more manageable corpus for Faelli, which becomes ever narrower given the author’s decision to omit Portugal and France. The choice to end before the nineteenth century seems logical. Faelli accounts for it, too: it ends the narrative before the British shift their focus to India and German scholars modernize historiography. These are all good reasons. Many overlap with Alexander Batson’s recent dissertation, which starts and ends one century earlier.[1]
The second chapter summarizes the historiography of colonization. It is a primer for both the canonical sources in Greek, such as Thucydides and Xenophon, and later historiography from Moses Finley to Iran Malkin. While all excerpts are printed in French translation, key terms remain in untransliterated Greek (ἀποικία, etc.), certainly to the detriment of non-Hellenists. However, the uninitiated will benefit from the systematic approach interspersed with signposts and bullet-pointed conclusions. The ample signposting proves crucial for following accruing uncertainties, ambiguities, and imprecisions. The ἐμπόριον was not always a colony, nor necessarily Greek, only rarely a polis (a term Faelli does print in transliteration), but almost always dependent on an external authority—and so on. Readers will appreciate the complexity of studying ancient Greek history.
But is the state of the art needed to understand how the early moderns utilized it? The overview creates a common ground for readers not trained in ancient history. This may also apply to the two shorter sub-chapters that follow. The first outlines early modern knowledge of Greek colonization. The second is a selective introduction to Spanish, French, and British imperialism. More precisely, it focuses on the development of terminology defining the conquered areas. The juxtaposition of the developing Greek historiography and colonial terminology in early modern Europe helps Faelli make his first argument. For the early moderns, Greek imperialism was an economic enterprise. They were less concerned with the precise definition of a colony, which they used rather loosely. It is difficult to assess (and Faelli rightly does not attempt to)——how the focus of early modern scholars on economic imperialism in their own time interacted with the partial knowledge they garnered from the available sources. We can only establish the overlap: Greek and early modern imperialism had an economic aspect. Its prominence in the ancient texts available to the early moderns rendered the former useful for conceptualizing the latter.
The bulk of the book is divided into two chapters, one per century. The subchapters mostly flow from author to author. Faelli’s discussion of François Eudes de Mézeray exemplifies how this author of one of France’s first “national histories” alluded to Greek colonization to justify the consolidation of state power and incursions against the Habsburgs in his own time. His view of Greek colonization was negative. In contrast, Pierre Bayle offered a more positive evaluation of colonization that conformed to his standing as a Huguenot and served as a corrective to Catholic scholarship. Faelli is particularly interested in how a trio of authors—Antonius Van Dale, Bernard de Fontenelle, and François de La Mothe Le Vayer—interpreted the oracle’s role in establishing colonies. While their accounts also intervened in their religious polemics, they also drew on and contributed to the burgeoning scholarly interest in ancient Greece. This leads to the final pair of authors discussed in the first half of the chapter on the seventeenth century, Bernard de Fontenelle and Francesco Bianchini. The Italian Bianchini was the first to develop the concept of thalassocracy, whereas de Fontenelle used it to elaborate the affinity he recognized between the ancient Mediterranean and early modern Europe.
The second half of the chapter focuses on the notion of the “commonwealth.” What made Greek colonization so appealing to seventeenth-century English writers was their conceptual progression—seen from the ancient perspective, regression!—from empire as military conquest alla romana to empire of free trade. The Moderns read the Ancients seriously, Faelli implies, because they believed in continuity: whatever virtues and vices ancient Greek colonization had would be mirrored in their contemporary efforts, making these virtues and vices worth investigating. Their readings, therefore, became more sophisticated. Beyond rhetorical adoration, appeals to antiquity were earnest attempts to make sense of the past. If these readings would only grow in depth and breadth in the eighteenth century, it is not least thanks to the discovery of more ancient texts to process.
The final chapter, covering the eighteenth century, is unevenly structured. It begins with two short discussions, about the same length as each subsection in the previous chapter, of Charles Rollin and Temple Stanyan and then Joseph-François Lafitau. Faelli credits Rollin and Stanyan with laying the first in-depth history of ancient Greece, one grounded in original sources and the relevant languages: the material on which other scholars, with more contemporaneous interest, would build. Lafitau used such works to compare the ancient Greeks to the indigenous peoples of New France. The similarity allowed Lafitau to craft a generalizable model of human development, in which colonization, too, marked a certain level of progress. Yet the lion’s share of the chapter, seventy-five pages compared to just eight, is dedicated to the use of Greek history during the American Revolution. Despite all the differences between ancient and modern colonialism expounded in the second chapter, contemporary authors pursued such comparisons, making Athens’ Delian League a predecessor of Britain’s colonial empire.
Indeed, the American Revolution turned ancient colonization into policy lessons. It could serve as a warning, reminding Britain of the follies of its Athenian ancestors. However, it also gave the Founding Fathers and others some material to discuss when debating the trade-off between prosperity and independence. Reconstructing classical Greece as the colonies’ Golden Age, a time in which they were both prosperous and free, led them to what Faelli condemns as distorting the past. Thus, if it took time to accrue all the complexities contemporary scholarship identifies in ancient colonization (as Faelli details in the second chapter of this book), it is not only because of recent discoveries—but also because of the shifting political commitments invested in early modern writings about antiquity. Perhaps, though, applying the same scrutiny to later historiography would reveal that changing interpretations owe, too, to later historians’ developing views about colonialism, imperialism, and diasporas…
La Méditerranée et l’Atlantique is a highly readable volume. The narrative progresses systematically, marching from one author to another. Whenever the readability is compromised, it is due to lengthy block quotes. The other disadvantage of this approach is its over-reliance on primary sources. The contextualization could have been more thorough. This is felt, for example, in the author’s discussion of early modern terminology in the second chapter, where his choice of literature appears less systematic. It would have been helpful to discuss other uses of the words for colony, which did not necessarily refer to dependent territories overseas. See, for example, Jonas Hübner, “Neither colonies nor colonialism? The early modern semantics of European expansion in German political economics (1700–1800),” in The Discourse of British and German Colonialism, ed. Felicity Rash and Geraldine Horan (New York: Routledge, 2020), 26–44. Likewise, it would have been helpful to thicken the discussion of the “commonwealth” as a concept—one missing reference is the Early Modern Research Group, “Commonwealth: The Social, Cultural, and Conceptual Contexts of an Early Modern Keyword.” The Historical Journal 54, no. 3 (2011): 659–87. These minor reservations notwithstanding, this volume will benefit intellectual historians interested in imperialism, classical reception, and historiography.
Notes
[1] Alexander Batson, “Classical Greece in the European Imperial Imagination, 1500-1700” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2024).