Ottoman Exit, 1900–1918

The history of the Mediterranean has been presented in this book as a series of phases in which the sea was, to a greater or lesser degree, integrated into a single economic and even political area. With the coming of the Fifth Mediterranean the whole character of this process changed. The Mediterranean became the great artery through which goods, warships, migrants and other travellers reached the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. The falling productivity of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and the opening of high-volume trade in grain from Canada or tobacco from the United States (to cite two examples), rendered the Mediterranean less interesting to businessmen. Even the revived cotton trade of Egypt faced competition from India and the southern United States. Steamship lines out of Genoa headed across the western Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, bearing to the New World hundreds of thousands of migrants, who settled in New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and other booming cities of North and South America in the years around 1900. Italian emigration was dominated by southerners, for the inhabitants of the southern villages saw none of the improvement in the standard of living that was beginning to transform Milan and other northern centres. For the French, on the other hand, opportunities to create a new life elsewhere could be found within the Mediterranean: Algeria became the focus of French emigration, for the ideal was to create a new France on the shores of North Africa, while keeping the wilder interior under colonial rule. Two manifestations of this policy were the rebuilding of large areas of Algiers as a European city, and the collective extension of French citizenship to 35,000 Algerian Jews, in 1870. The Algerian Jews were seen as évolé, ‘civilized’, for they had embraced the opportunities provided by French rule, opening modern schools under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded to promote Jewish education on the European model, and transforming themselves into a new professional class.