AEGEAN HISTORY

Research on Aegean history takes as its remit a wide-ranging effort to reconstruct political, military, economic and social aspects of the human past around the rocky shores of the Aegean sea, a roughly 215,000 km 2 body of water, punctuated throughout by thousands of islands, that is located between the mountainous Greek peninsula to the west and the sprawling landmass of Anatolia to the east.The expansive topical, spatial and chronological scope of research currently being undertaken by Aegean historians is reflected in the title of this profile, which once would probably have been called instead 'Greek history', a term that might sensibly be taken to signify research on the history of the ancient Greeks, defined broadly as a culturally coherent identity group that emerged over the course of the eighth to fifth centuries BCE (following J. Hall's still-classic treatment of the question in Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture [2002]).As thus defined, the field of Greek history has produced a great deal of compelling scholarship, including recent titles generative of new perspectives on topics that were already well-trodden about twenty years agofrom the political and military history of Greek city states to the rise and conquests of Macedonian monarchs.A few recent interventions that inject fresh energy into the kinds of political and military-historical topics that have long sat at the centre of Greek historical scholarship include M. Simonton's Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (2017; cf.CR 68 [2018], 468-70), Reassessing the Peloponnesian War (2025), edited by S. Gartland and R. Osborne, and C. Jordan's The Pioneer Kingdoms of Macedon and Qin: A Triumph of the Periphery (2025).Also new and notable is the (now nearly complete) Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World (2023-), a massive multi-authored initiative co-edited by P. Christesen and P. Cartledge that is like a handbook or companion volume on steroids: the five volumes published so far count a whopping 1,746 pages of content between them, not to mention copious accompanying illustrations and maps.While recognising the continued vitality of research on core topics in Greek history, my task for this Profile is to try to review something slightly different: Aegean history.Capturing a clear view of a field that might be described as such requires us to open up our aperture considerably, so that it brings into focus an expansive chronological and geospatial route of ground and delineates sharply the activities of groups and individuals who might not necessarily be identified as Greek.Doing so is in fact appropriate in a disciplinary context wherein people who consider themselves historians of Greece increasingly take an expansive view of their subject area.While it is challenging to articulate a coherent set of trends in a field that is increasingly so vast in scope, apparent in macro-view are a blurred series of vectors that may be grouped under three overarching themes.Together they describe an energetic and methodologically omnivorous field committed to critically re-evaluating traditional boundaries, experimenting with new methods and approaches, and redefining its purpose and position within the broader world of humanistic research.