 | Thisbiography of a living personneeds additionalcitations forverification. Please help by addingreliable sources.Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced orpoorly sourcedmust be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentiallylibelous. Find sources: "David Abulafia" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(November 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
David Abulafia | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Abulafia in 2010 | |
| Born | David Samuel Harvard Abulafia (1949-12-12)12 December 1949 (age 75) Twickenham, England |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | R. C. Smail |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Institutions | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
| Notable works |
|
David Samuel Harvard AbulafiaCBE FSA FRHistS FBA (born 12 December 1949) is an English historian with a particular interest in Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He spent most of his career at theUniversity of Cambridge, rising to become a professor at the age of 50.[1] He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History. He is a Fellow ofGonville and Caius College, Cambridge.[2] He was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, 2003-5, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He is visiting Beacon Professor at the new University of Gibraltar, where he also serves on the Academic Board. He is a visiting professor at theCollege of Europe (Natolin branch, Poland).
He is a Fellow of theBritish Academy and a member of theAcademia Europaea. In 2013 he was awarded one of three inauguralBritish Academy Medals for his work on Mediterranean history. In 2020, he was awarded the Wolfson History Prize forThe Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans.[3]
Abulafia was born inTwickenham,Middlesex, into aSephardic Jewish family. He was educated atSt. Paul's School andKing's College, Cambridge.
Abulafia has published several books onMediterranean history, beginning with his bookThe Two Italies in 1977. In this work, he argued that as far back as the twelfth century northern Italy exploited the agricultural resources of the Italian south, and that this provided the essential basis for the further expansion of trade and industry in Tuscany, Genoa and Venice. He edited volume 5 of theNew Cambridge Medieval History and the volume on Italy in the central Middle Ages in the Oxford Short History of Italy; he also edited an important collection of studies of the French invasion of Italy in 1494-5 as well as a book onThe Mediterranean in History which has appeared in six languages. He has given lectures in many countries includingItaly,Spain,Portugal,France,Germany,Finland,Norway, theUnited States,Dominican Republic,Japan,China,Israel,the UAE,Jordan, andEgypt.[citation needed]
One of his most influential books isFrederick II: A Medieval Emperor, first published in England in 1988 and reprinted many times in several Italian editions. Here he looks at an iconic figure from the Middle Ages from a new perspective, criticizing the views of the famous German historianErnst Kantorowicz concerningFrederick II of Hohenstaufen, whom Abulafia sees as a conservative figure rather than as a genius born out of his time.
He has been appointedOrder of the Star of Italian Solidarity by the President of Italy in recognition of his writing on Italian history, especially Sicilian history, and he has also written about Spain, particularly theBalearic islands. He has shown an interest in the economic history of the Mediterranean, and in the meeting of the threeAbrahamic faiths in the Mediterranean. Not confining himself to the Mediterranean, he has also written a much-praised book on the first encounters between western Europeans and the native societies of the Atlantic (the Canary islands, the Caribbean and Brazil) around 1492; this book isThe Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (2008).
In 2011,Penguin Books (andOxford University Press in New York) published hisThe Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, a substantial volume that sets out a different approach to Mediterranean history to that propounded by the French historianFernand Braudel, and ranges in time from 22,000 BC to AD 2010. The book, which received theMountbatten Literary Award from theMaritime Foundation,[4][5] became a bestseller in UK non-fiction and was widely acclaimed. It has been translated into Dutch, French, Greek, Turkish, Spanish, German, Arabic, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Romanian and Portuguese, with further translations under contract.
Abulafia wroteThe Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, published by Penguin in the UK and by Oxford University Press in the US in October 2019. This book applies a similar method to his history of the Mediterranean, looking at the people who moved across the open sea, and emphasizing the role of maritime trade in the political, cultural and economic history of humanity. It won theWolfson History Prize and theMountbatten Award in 2020.[3][6]
He was the chairman of Historians for Britain, an organisation that lobbies toleave theEuropean Union. According to Abulafia, the process ofEuropean Integration is "a myth used to silence other visions of European community". He has written opinion pieces criticising the UK's membership in the European Union, accusing the idea of European unity of being based upon "historical determinism".[7] In 2023 he wrote a article in theDaily Telegraph titled "It would be uncivilised to give Greece theElgin Marbles", where he wrote that they belong "in London, in a great universal museum, not in the narrow confines ofAthens's Acropolis".[8]
Abulafia was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the2023 Birthday Honours for services to scholarship.[9]
In 1979, Abulafia marriedAnna Brechta Sapir.[10] The couple have two adult daughters.[11]
