David Samuel Harvard Abulafia CBE 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.

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 has given lectures in many countries including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Finland, Norway, the United States, Dominican Republic, Japan, China, Israel, the UAE, Jordan, and Egypt.

[citation needed] One of his most influential books is Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, first published in England in 1988 and reprinted many times in several Italian editions.

In 2011, Penguin Books (and Oxford University Press in New York) published his The 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 historian Fernand Braudel, and ranges in time from 22,000 BC to AD 2010.

The book, which received the Mountbatten Literary Award from the Maritime Foundation,[4][5] became a bestseller in UK non-fiction and was widely acclaimed.

Abulafia wrote The 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.