Exchange and Non-Exchange: Confronting Borders in the History of the Black Sea

This is an editorial introduction to a special issue of Euxeinos, which emerged from an international workshop organized by the editors at the University of Basel in December 2018 . Contributors to the special issue explore the themes of mobility and stasis in modern Black Sea history. In this introduction, we posit the degree of exchange or non-exchange as one of the main measures of "regionalness" in Black Sea history. The degree to which the geography and geopolitics of the Black Sea allowed - or hindered - exchange and mobility is one of the fundamental questions of today's scholarly interest in the Black Sea.