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Mediterranean Historical Review


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Mediterraneanization
Ian Morris
Published online: 07 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Ian Morris (2003) Mediterraneanization, Mediterranean Historical Review, 18:2, 30-55, DOI:
10.1080/0951896032000230471

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Mediterraneanization
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IAN MORRIS

Since the 1980s historians and archaeologists have shifted from models
emphasizing the stability of bounded cultures to ones emphasizing
fluidity and connectedness. It is argued here that this is a response to
globalization. Criticizing current connectedness models for their
unfocused questions and methods, the argument emphasizes processes
of Mediterraneanization over timeless Mediterraneanism, the need for
more precise analytical categories, and recognition that increasing
connectedness created both winners and losers. It is illustrated with a
study of western Sicily, where Mediterraneanization benefited and
harmed different groups between 800 and 300 BCE.

Something has happened to the ancient Mediterranean. Just 20 years ago Keith
Hopkins prefaced a book on ancient trade by announcing that ‘a new
orthodoxy’ had formed which stressed the ‘cellular self-sufficiency’ of the
ancient Mediterranean world. According to this theory, simple technology and
the high costs of information, transport, and transactions broke the
Mediterranean into small, static regions. Neither people nor goods moved
far or often. The emperor Hadrian might tour from one end of the basin to the
other and have similar philosophical conversations, drink similar wines, and
eat off similar gold plates at every stop, but for 99 per cent of its people the
‘Mediterranean world’ was just a few hours’ walk across. It was stable, rigid,
full of fixed oppositions and deeply rooted structures.1
For Hopkins, Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy crystallized this
vision. Finley’s account owed much to Weber: The structures of citizen status
dominated Graeco-Roman society. Greeks and Romans replaced the range of
statuses found in most societies with polarized categories of free and slave,
which survived for a millennium (ca.700 BCE – CE 300). These structures
made Greece and Rome distinct from ancient Near Eastern and medieval
societies.2 Hopkins exaggerated when he called this an orthodoxy, but for the
minority of scholars interested in ideal types he was probably right to say:
It is by far the best model available. It provides a matrix of coherent
proposals about the structure, character and operation of the ancient
economy. It provides a theoretical framework within which individual

Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.18, No.2, December 2003, pp.30–55


ISSN 0951-8967 print
DOI: 10.1080/0951896032000230471 q 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 31

surviving fragments of evidence and individual case studies can be lodged.


Alternatively, individual case studies can test the limits of the model and its
applicability to different periods and regions of the classical world.3
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This remained true for more than a decade. Through the 1990s historians
carped at Finley’s argument, pronouncing various parts of it moribund, but
few proposed an alternative ‘matrix of coherent proposals about the structure,
character, and operation’ of Mediterranean society (Hopkins’ own work4 was
a notable exception). The static, cellular model was virtually the only properly
theorized game in town.
But now a new model is taking shape. Where the old model emphasized
static cells, rigid structures, and powerful institutions, the new one sees fluidity
and connectedness. This new model began to develop in the 1980s. Arguments
around Martin Bernal’s5 claim that Greek culture derived from Egypt and the
Near East played a large part in this. Sarah Morris’ Daidalos and the Origins
of Greek Art6 was particularly significant, but the most important statement
was Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of
Mediterranean History.7 The static cellular model drew lines through space
(Graeco-Roman versus Near Eastern) and time (ancient versus medieval).
The connectedness model links up the entire Mediterranean basin and, in its
strongest form, the whole period from later prehistory to the eighteenth,
nineteenth, or even twentieth century CE. Horden and Purcell ‘start from a
distinction of subject matter between, on the one hand, history in the region,
contingently Mediterranean or best conceived under some other heading, and,
on the other hand, history of it – history either of the whole Mediterranean
or of an aspect of it to which the whole is an indispensable framework’.8
An interconnected Mediterranean means history of: ‘The subject of this work
is the human history of the Mediterranean Sea and its coastlands over some
three millennia. Its immediate contention is that this history can profitably be
treated as material for a unified and distinct discipline’.9
This breaks so strongly with previous work that we might speak (as Irad
Malkin has) of a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense.10 Like Kuhn’s paradigms,
the static cellular model gave historians assumptions and methods that
worked, defining legitimate problems and acceptable ways to tackle them.
As Kuhn argued, ‘normal science’ uses established frameworks to make sense of
data and questions not initially considered by the pioneers who blazed the new
trail. Research clusters around unresolved questions that can be resolved,
producing cumulative progress. But no paradigm ever accommodates all of
reality, and each has anomalies which it cannot make sense of. So long as scholars
keep trying to extend the paradigm’s explanatory power, things will go smoothly.
But if enough scholars start thinking that the anomalies matter more than the mass
32 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

of data that can be ordered within the paradigm, growing unease encourages
different ways of thinking about things. Any new paradigm explains some things
less well than the one it replaces, but to succeed it has to provide a more
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coherent way to analyse what have come to be seen as the major problems in the
discipline.
In the physical sciences, new paradigms quickly put old ones out of business.
But in the humanities, new and old notions can coexist as schools of thought, not
paradigms.11 Brent D. Shaw is probably right to suggest that ‘Horden and Purcell’s
new Mediterranean panorama, which will take a generation of historians to
digest and implement, forms one of those manifest watersheds in the study of
antiquity’.12 It already stands at the head of a new school of thought, and if enough
historians decide that the connectedness model’s success in addressing the
anomalies in the static cellular model matters more than the old model’s ability to
answer questions that people cared about in the 1970s, we will come as close to a
paradigm shift as can happen in ancient history. The crystallization of the
connectedness model in The Corrupting Sea is an important event in ancient
historiography.
In this paper I ask two questions about the connectedness model. The first
is ‘Why now?’ and I answer it as follows:

1. Paradigm shifts happen when scholars converge on the same anomalies.


The connectedness model championed in The Corrupting Sea is not purely
Horden and Purcell’s vision or even purely a vision of ancient historians;
scholars in several disciplines have moved towards looking at the
Mediterranean as a unit since the 1980s.
2. Champions of connectedness insistently break down geographical,
chronological, and disciplinary barriers, imagining a Mediterranean of
such openness that any attempt to define it in a single formulation is
doomed to failure.
3. The discovery since the late 1980s of fluidity, interconnection, and
openness where others had seen rootedness, barriers, and tradition is a
response to the greatest social phenomenon of the past 20 years:
globalization. Historians are seeing in the ancient Mediterranean the same
kind of connectedness that is convulsing our own world. I am not aware
that any ancient historian has made such an explicitly presentist argument,
but I suggest that both the static cellular and the interconnected
Mediterranean model have been shaped by larger social trends.
4. Lévi-Strauss famously called myth ‘good to think with’; so too is the
Mediterranean. Like all the best history since Herodotus, the connected-
ness model uses the past as a metaphor for working through urgent issues
in our own age and also makes it relevant to a world that often seems to
have little use for it.
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 33

My second question is: ‘What does it mean?’ I suggest that the most
important thing about the connectedness model may be the questions that
it does not confront. We should push the globalization analogy harder,
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applying to the ancient Mediterranean the same tough questions that scholars
ask about connectedness in our own time. I answer this second question as
follows:

1. The globalization debate revolves around a single morally charged issue:


Is connectedness a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? The new Mediterranean-
ism has no similarly powerful question. We should begin by asking how
much ancient connectedness mattered and why.
2. To answer these questions we need to take another leaf from the
globalization theorists’ books and think of connectedness as a process
rather than a state, focusing on ‘Mediterraneanization’ rather than
‘Mediterraneanism’. This means foregrounding change through time,
different analytical scales, and tensions and conflicts. Globalization has
created winners and new losers; Mediterraneanization did the same.
3. These new questions require new data. Our texts are unevenly distributed,
and a full Mediterranean history must combine them with archaeological
data. But mixing different categories of evidence only exacerbates our
methodological problems. The horror of precise definitions and
quantification that characterizes the new Mediterraneanism is a barrier
to understanding. The larger and more complex the unit of analysis and the
more varied the data we draw on, the more we need clarity.
4. Horden and Purcell’s distinction between ‘history of’ and ‘history in’ is
too strong; a global ‘history of’ has to order a mass of local ‘histories in’.
Archaic Sicily, for example, generally seen as being at the heart of
connectedness, can only be made to fit the new Mediterraneanism’s terms
by ignoring struggles very like those that dominate the globalization
literature. Mediterraneanization created winners and losers, and we need a
more sociological framework to make sense of this.

WHY NOW?

The New Mediterraneanism


The greatest history of the Mediterranean, Braudel’s La Méditerranée et la monde
méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, came out a half-century ago. Braudel saw
the Mediterranean as a unit: ‘The Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with
the same rhythms as the Christian . . . the whole sea shared a common destiny, a
heavy one indeed, with identical problems and general trends if not identical
consequences.’13 Horden and Purcell suggest that ‘Braudel’s work can also be
34 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

seen as bringing to summation and close an entire epoch in Mediterranean


scholarship . . . the Mediterranean region as a whole has apparently ceased, at least
for the time being, to attract the attention of historians and geographers; major
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synoptic works are rare’.14 There have been some synoptic works,15 but they are
fewer than those on the Atlantic and Indian maritime zones.16 Horden and Purcell
are right that theirs is the first major work on the Mediterranean since Braudel.
This makes it tempting to see them as mavericks, producing a masterpiece in
isolation. But they found interested audiences in Oxford, and classicists were
simultaneously debating the connectedness of the eastern Mediterrranean.17
The Corrupting Sea is part of a broad academic trend.
To examine this, I searched Stanford’s Green Library for humanities and
social sciences periodicals with titles including the word ‘Mediterranean’
or its equivalents in French, Italian, Spanish, and German. There were
21 hits for the 1970s to the 1990s (Table 1), ranging from international
relations (e.g., Mediterranean Politics) through culture and literature (e.g., Civiltà
del Mediterraneo) to political commentary and creative writing (e.g.,
Mediterraneans). A surge in new journals in the late 1980s and early 1990s
was followed by slower growth. However, the population is small; we can reject
the null hypothesis only at a significance level of 0.10 (i.e., there is a ten per cent
likelihood that the pattern is random). Casting the net more widely and looking at
all humanities and social sciences books, we get a slightly different pattern, with a
spike in the late 1970s and then an upward trend. The peak came in 2000, at 49
new books. The larger sample lets us reject the null hypothesis at .05, the standard
significance level in the social sciences.
Table 1 suggests that more scholars were interested in the
Mediterranean as an analytical unit in the late 1980s and 1990s than in
the 1970s and early 1980s, but, since books and journals multiplied during
this period, we need to control for the different rates of purchase from

TABLE 1
STANFORD’S PURCHASES OF NEW PERIODICALS AND BOOKS
WITH ‘MEDITERRANEAN’ TITLES

Period Number of New


Journals Books

1970–74 1 56
1975–79 1 96
1980–84 2 85
1985–89 6 138
1990–94 7 137
1995–99 4 212
Source: Stanford University Libraries Socrates on-line catalogue.
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 35

TABLE 2
NEW PERIODICALS AND BOOKS WITH ‘MEDITERRANEAN’
TITLES PER 100,000 PURCHASES
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Period Number of New


Journals Books

1975– 79 2.1 20.4


1980– 84 4.2 17.0
1985– 89 11.6 18.5
1990– 94 15.1 25.9
1995– 99 9.0 26.5
Source: Association of Research Libraries Statistics annual reports, 1975– 76 through 1999–2000.
The ‘Current Serials’ figures appeared as Table 4 between 1975– 76 and 1984–85 and as Table 3
from 1985– 86 through 1999–2000. The figures for books come from Table 2, ‘Volumes Added
(Gross)’, minus the periodicals figures. Stanford does not supply data for Table 10, ‘Monographs
Added’. The reports classify the data by academic years, whereas publication dates use calendar
years. I clustered the ARL data 1975–76 through 1979–80, 1980–81 through 1984–85, etc.

1975 – 99.18 Table 2 shows ‘Mediterranean’ titles per 100,000 new


periodicals and books, and the pattern is similar to that in Table 1: strong
growth in periodicals between 1985 and 1995, followed by a decline in the
late 1990s (though the level remained more than twice as high as in the
early 1980s) and, after a spike in book purchases in the late 1970s and a
decline in the early 1980s, continuing growth through the 1990s. This is a
very crude quantification and has obvious problems. Its main strength is
that the criteria for inclusion are clear, reducing subjectivity; its main
weaknesses are that Stanford’s libraries may not be typical,19 and having
‘Mediterranean’ in a title might mean many things. My category probably
conflates other distinctions that may matter more. To interpret these crude
statistics, we have to define ‘Mediterranean’ better.

What is ‘Mediterranean’?
Braudel felt the need for definitions keenly:
It will be no easy task to discover exactly what the historical character of
the Mediterranean has been. . . . Nothing could be clearer than the
Mediterranean defined by oceanographer, geologist, or even
geographer. Its boundaries have been charted, classified, and labelled.
But what of the Mediterranean of the historian? There is no lack of
authoritative statements as to what it is not. It is not an autonomous
world; nor is it the preserve of any one power. Woe betide the historian
who thinks that this preliminary investigation is unnecessary, that
36 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

the Mediterranean as an entity needs no definition because it


has long been clearly defined, is instantly recognizable and can be
described by dividing general history along the lines of its geographical
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contours.20

But Braudel’s own definitions were notoriously slippery. At times he included


France, Portugal, the Balkans, Anatolia, and even Antwerp21 in his
‘Mediterranean’, going far beyond the areas defined by semi-aridity and
vegetation.22 Braudel insisted that no one-size-fits-all definition worked, since
what the Mediterranean was depended on the level of historical time at which
one approached it.23 Areas that lack Braudel’s plain-hill-mountain topography
or Mediterranean weather patterns might still be ‘Mediterranean’ in being
incorporated into the same network of roads and sea lanes. We cannot
understand the Mediterranean economy in the sixteenth century without
the markets in Antwerp. Equally, while the Danube is not part of the
Mediterranean in the longue durée, Turkish power still joined it to
Mediterranean conjonctures and histoire événementielle. Similarly, the
Maghreb is geographically part of the Mediterranean, but for much of its
ancient history its inhabitants did not really live and breathe the same air as
those of Italy or the Levant (see Shaw, in this volume). Definitions will be
difficult, but the ‘Antwerp problem’24 makes clarity more necessary, not less.
We cannot answer questions about the unity of the Mediterranean unless we
know what we mean by ‘unity’ and ‘Mediterranean’.
It is remarkable how rare explicit definitions are in historians’ work on
the Mediterranean in the 1990s. Contemporary work on international relations
provides a sharp contrast. On the face of things, international relations theorists
might worry less about definitions than historians because they so often respond
to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership proclaimed at Barcelona in November
1995. The European Union defined the geographical scope of the planned
partnership, making explicit its focus on free trade, political-cultural dialogue,
anti-terrorism, the environment, migration, and the movement of drugs within
all nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea.25 But far from taking the Barcelona
Process’s definitions for granted, the literature debates what the most appropriate
analytical units should be. Some specialists challenge the Barcelona
terminology,26 while others insist that no meaningful ‘Mediterranean approach’
can unite southern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa.27 Heated argument
over competing definitions is central to international relations scholarship.
In contrast, ancient historians and archaeologists, despite lacking baseline
definitions like those formulated at Barcelona, rarely discuss what terms
should mean. The best analysis I have encountered is Bernard Knapp’s
‘Editorial Statement’ in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology.
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 37

He sketches the geological history of the basin and largely follows Braudel in
characterizing it as a geographical unit. He is also clear on how the Journal of
Mediterranean Archaeology differs from other periodicals in bringing the
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eastern and the western Mediterranean together.28 But the first volume of the
Journal of Mediterranean Studies, focusing on social and cultural
anthropology, is more typical. Here Paul Sant Cassia insists that ‘a definition
of what constitutes “the Mediterranean” is probably not appropriate here’
because ‘definitions do not necessarily convey the essence of the immensely
complex set of realities, illusions, memories and hopes both among the
peoples we study and among ourselves as scholars’.29 Horden and Purcell take
a similar line: ‘To borrow an evocative concept from mathematics, the
Mediterranean is a “fuzzy set”. A certain vagueness should be of the essence
in the way it is conceived’.30 This studied imprecision makes it hard to advance
beyond Tables 1 and 2.

The Appeal of a Connected Mediterranean


Social scientists generally agree on the reason they now treat the
Mediterranean as a unit: globalization has broken down national barriers,
and states bordering the Mediterranean cannot avoid becoming more
entangled with one another.31 Globalization dictated the agenda for both the
Barcelona Process and the social-scientific literature that has followed in
its wake.
I see less concern in the humanities literature about why the Mediterranean
has become so interesting since the mid-1980s. Eugenio Mazzarella, editor of
a journal that ranges from linguistics, history, and house design to economics,
suggests that one of the most pressing issues is how the Mediterranean will fit
into the ‘villaggio globale’, but such comments are rare.32
Is it just a coincidence that more humanists started thinking about the
Mediterranean as a whole at just the same time as social scientists and
the European Union? I do not know of any published evidence on the issue,
but a plausible case can be made that a single force propelled all these groups.
The three concepts of mobility, connectivity, and decentring are at the heart
of recent historical/anthropological treatments of the Mediterranean,
especially Horden and Purcell’s. As I have noted, this sets them apart from
many 1970s and 1980s accounts of ancient Mediterranean history, which
generally drew firm lines between regions and periods, emphasizing
the rootedness of the population in the local soil. In Finley’s eyes, neither
goods nor people travelled far or often. Information was expensive
and transport – particularly overland – even more so. Markets were shallow
and discontinuous and transaction costs so high that most individuals and
organizations bypassed markets altogether. Hence Weber’s characterization of
38 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

ancient cities as ‘consumer cities’: it was easier for cities to grow by extracting
wealth from the countryside through taxes and rent than by exchanging goods
and services through markets. Similarly, most people were farmers, the
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primary producers themselves consuming the bulk of the produce rather than
exchanging it. The state was often the most important economic actor,
particularly in the Roman world. Greeks and Romans were trapped in rigid
status systems that drew strong distinctions between the local, free population
and serfs or imported slaves. Graeco-Roman civilization formed a bloc
fundamentally different from Egypt and the Near East and from both the
Bronze and Middle Ages. This world did not hold the seeds of modern
economic growth: only the near-total collapse of ancient society and the
emergence of a new medieval world made that possible.
Horden and Purcell question virtually everything about this model. Where
Finley emphasized fixedness and Braudel stressed routes, they see people moving
around in ‘patterns of interaction too various and detailed to be called routes’.33
They assume low transport costs. Travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the
other was perfectly feasible, but the most important connection was through
cabotage – small-scale, individual movements of petty traders and travellers
uncontrolled by states or other institutions. Caboteurs tied the Mediterranean
together ‘under the heading of the aggregates of “short distances” that correspond
to the definite places’.34 Horden and Purcell see a constantly shifting,
kaleidoscopic diaspora: ‘we cannot unpick the weave of this tangled mass
of ethnic origins’.35 Their pre-modern Mediterranean was decentralized.
The institutional nodes of power that historians conventionally focus on – cities,
states, empires – are little help. They argue at length against setting up urban/rural
distinctions36 and more briefly against focusing on states. Empires and imperialism
do not even appear in the index. The logic of what they call ‘inescapable
redistribution’37 sidelined these clumsy institutions, the uncoordinated actions of
caboteurs and migrants responding more effectively to the ‘matrix’ of diverse
microecologies linked by the sea. This mobility perhaps created widely shared
attitudes and values.38 Above all, this was a world of fluidity:
As we have argued throughout, the region is only loosely unified,
distinguishable from its neighbours to degrees that vary with time,
geographical direction and topic. Its boundaries are not of the sort to be
drawn easily on a map. Its continuities are best thought of as continuities
of form or pattern, within which all is mutability.39
The trade tariffs, environmental degradation, and terrorism that triggered the
Barcelona Process have few links with the pre-modern Mediterranean.
Yet Horden and Purcell talk about this vanished world in strikingly similar
terms to those employed by scholars of globalization.40 Since the late 1980s
technological changes have connected people as never before, revolutionizing
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 39

finance and slashing the costs of moving goods, people, capital, and ideas
around the world. The Internet, at once the most visible symptom and cause of
recent changes, is diffuse; no one controls it. In his influential account, the
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journalist Thomas Friedman sums up the situation by imagining what then-US


Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin might have said in September 1997 in reply
to Mahathir Mohamad, then prime minister of Malaysia, when Mohamad
denounced global markets following the collapse of the Malaysian currency:
‘The most basic truth about globalization is this: No one is in charge – not
George Soros, not “Great Powers” and not I. . . . there’s no one on the other end
of the phone!’41
Everything seems to be in flux. Globalization theorists regularly assert that
postmodernism is merely an intellectual and aesthetic response to the new
economy.42 The loss of a sense of place, the breakdown of spatially bounded
cultures, and the expansion of transnational diasporas have become central
to anthropology.43 Borrowing from an earlier epoch of globalization,
we might say that ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts
into air’.44
One of the commonest ways that globalization theorists explain what has
happened since the 1980s is to contrast their vision of the way we live now
with a model of cold war relations: the cold war international landscape
dominated by division, the new order by integration; the cold war symbolized
by the Wall, the new order by the World Wide Web; the cold war
characterized by fixed rules and confrontation, the global world by fluidity and
shapelessness. Institutions like the state and the firm that dominated Western
life during the cold war have changed profoundly. In a classic paper, Ronald
Coase argued that firms exist because under certain circumstances a top-down
command structure is cheaper than Smithian freebooting entrepreneurs, and
other analysts (particularly Douglass North) extend this model to the state.45
Through much of the twentieth century, technology and institutions made
concentrating capital and labour in massive, hierarchical, Fordist enterprises
the most efficient way to create wealth (in both capitalist and socialist
economies). Similar forces favoured strong states with welfare programmes
and great armies policing their economic and political frontiers. But the new
technology and connectedness of the past quarter-century challenged this
arrangement. Most businesses need to outsource activities and decentralize
decision-making to survive. So too do states, and cities are metamorphosing
into something new.46 To harness the power of the new economy, they
relentlessly deregulate, lower tariffs, and submit political power to the
discipline of global markets. The astonishing mobility of labour and capital
has spelled disaster for those that refused, and sometimes greater disaster for
those who agreed. The new world order, like Horden and Purcell’s
40 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

Mediterranean of caboteurs, has few actual routes to dominate. Politicians find


that much of what they had thought was their national economy is beyond their
control and that tanks, airplanes, and missiles no longer guarantee security
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from previously unimagined threats.


Not surprisingly, globalization has changed the way academics think.
Finley took certain things for granted about the way the ancient world worked,
and these were things that made a great deal of sense in the cold war world.
Horden and Purcell take other things for granted, and these are things that
make a great deal of sense in the globalizing world.
Historians of the pre-modern Mediterranean are seeing in their sources the
same kinds of phenomena that they experience in their daily lives. Many
anthropologists and archaeologists are intensely aware of what globalization
means for their fields.47 But so far as I know, Jan Paul Crielaard is the only
classicist to have hinted at such a connection, calling an essay on long-distance
contacts in the Early Iron Age ‘Surfing on the Mediterranean Web’.48

Thinking through the Mediterranean


Globalizing pre-modern history does three things. First, it makes ancient and
medieval history good to think with: they can serve as metaphors for
thinking through, celebrating, or criticizing what is going on around us.
Second, it may make the distant past interesting to audiences that otherwise
see little point to it: if the ancients faced issues like ours, perhaps we can
learn from them. This has been one of the major attractions of classical
studies since the Renaissance. And, third, it may offer a way out of some
anxieties in the classical profession. Confidence in the eighteenth-century
idea that Greece was the origin of Western culture has declined,
undermining classicists’ claims to valuable knowledge. There have been
sharp, politicized exchanges over the field’s value.49 Stopping being
classicists and becoming instead ancient Mediterraneanists – multicultural,
theoretical, and comparative – strikes some as an escape route. These
arguments may sound cynical, but if one of the main reasons for studying
the past is to understand the present and future, they are perfectly good
reasons to welcome the new Mediterraneanism.
I am not suggesting that there is something wrong with Mediterraneanism
because it is tainted by presentist concerns that introduce bias into our neutral
studies. All history engages with presentism, and that is usually what makes it
interesting. Michel Foucault drew a useful distinction between the ‘negative’
and the ‘positive’ unconscious of science, defining the former as
the influences that affected [knowledge], the implicit philosophies that
were subjacent to it, the unformulated thematics, the unseen obstacles.
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 41

. . . This unconscious is always the negative side of science – that which


resists it, disturbs it or deflects it. What I would like to do, however, is to
reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the
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consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of the scientific discourse,


instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific
nature.50

I want to trace Foucault’s ‘positive unconscious’. Once we understand where


this new vision of the pre-modern Mediterranean comes from, we can ask how
good a metaphor it is and compare Mediterraneanist studies of antiquity with
work on contemporary globalization. I suggest below that this brings new
questions to the fore.
Further, I am not reducing either the static cellular or the connectedness
model to the ‘negative unconscious’. Finley’s model owed much to Weber,
whose theories long predated the cold war. But ancient historians ignored
Weber before World War II, and Polanyi’s neo-Weberian substantivism51
became an explicit political engagement with cold war thought. Finley had
most impact in the 1970s – 1980s. There is no way to prove how much
ideological climates mattered, but the chronological coincidences are striking,
and Finley himself recognized the cold war’s impact on histories of slavery.52
The Corrupting Sea has equally deep roots: it was 20 years in the making,
growing out of encounters with Braudel that long predate 1989. But the final
stages of its writing and its initial reception took place against public debates
on globalization.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

If cold war historians exaggerated the rigidities of the ancient Mediterranean


and if we would do better to focus on connectedness, then we might learn
something from what globalization theorists say about similar issues in our
own time. Here I will examine themes that dominate the globalization
literature but play little or no part in ancient Mediterraneanism.

The Question
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, a great debate between bourgeois societies
and statist regimes (both left- and right-wing) dominated much of the globe.
This generated revolutions and wars and polarized intellectuals. Between
1989 and 1991, however, this debate abruptly ceased to mean much.
Globalization became the centre of a new debate. Proponents of globalization
argue that the collapse of frontiers and the unleashing of market forces
increases the world’s wealth, creates transparent and cheap communication
42 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

among divided cultures, raises living standards, breaks down oppressive


family structures, opens dictatorships to democracy, and lets us deal with
environmental and other problems that are too large for any nation-state to
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confront. Critics respond that globalization increases inequality within and


between states, speeds up environmental degradation, hurts workers in the
richer nations, creates economic instability, and destroys cultures. The new
debate dominates politics, journalism, and much of the academy. The critics
sometimes turn to street protests, fundamentalism, and violence.
Although so much of the new Mediterraneanist model parallels
contemporary trends, the shattering changes in ecology, class, gender, living
standards, and identity that the globalization literature foregrounds are largely
missing from Mediterraneanism. In their main statement on why their
approach is needed, Horden and Purcell focus on academic structures:
The [Mediterranean] sea, its islands, and the countries that surround it,
communicate across it, and share its climate, still seem to many
historians to be far less worth studying as a collectivity than is Europe or
the Middle East, Christendom or Islam. These, not the Mediterranean,
form the major units of enquiry and determine the characteristic
orientation of more specialized research – with damaging consequences
for intra-Mediterranean comparisons. For all the frequency with which it
is referred to (or simply invoked on title pages), Mediterranean history is
a division of the subject of history as a whole that has yet to achieve full
articulacy and recognition.53
Their Mediterraneanism obscures the human costs of connectedness that
feature so prominently in the globalization literature. Conflict, inequality, and
social dislocations are scarcely mentioned; class and gender do not even
appear in The Corrupting Sea’s index. This sociological blindness is a major
shortcoming. I attribute it to a second feature of recent Mediterraneanism: its
timelessness. The first wave of studies, showing links between Greek and Near
Eastern cultures, often threw together evidence scattered across centuries,
disregarding traditional chronologies.54 Horden and Purcell represent short-
term change as a constant and assert that ‘against interpretations that
emphasize radical change and violent discontinuity in the Mediterranean past,
our approach sustains the hope that valuable comparisons can be drawn, and
certain continuities inferred, across extremes of time’.55 Whereas
globalization theorists stress the traumas of the process of connection,
Horden and Purcell’s pre-modern Mediterranean was always (at least since
some point in later prehistory) already integrated. As Shaw notes, ‘a history of
the Mediterranean that rejects fixed types and privileges motion and
development . . . means that the big problem that will logically bedevil it,
paradoxically, is that of change’.56
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 43

The Process of Mediterraneanization


The globalization debate, by contrast, foregrounds process. Most often,
historians suggest that the increasing connectedness of the past 30 years rests
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on another period of space/time compression a century ago. As Friedman puts


it, ‘if the first era of globalization [before 1914] shrank the world from a size
“large” to a size “medium”, this era of globalization [since the 1980s] is
shrinking the world from a size “medium” to a size “small”’.57
The globalization literature also looks at processes from multiple
perspectives (individuals, markets, cities, states, etc.), and it is more aware
that history has winners and losers. Globalization is a schizophrenic process.
Friedman’s title The Lexus and the Olive Tree captures this nicely: the new
world combines robot-run factories assembling high-tech cars with people
who will die for a stand of trees that, they believe, has always been theirs.
Integration has generated fundamentalisms that did not exist 50 years ago.
Friedman does not claim that globalization has dissolved older institutions,
leaving a smoothly uniform space. Rather, he suggests, the bipolar opposition
of capitalism and communism fragmented into something more complicated
in the 1990s.
Most commentators identify three new relationships. The first is between
nation-states. The second is between states and global markets. ‘Super-
markets’ like Wall Street, Hong Kong, and London can undermine
governments by withdrawing funds, as happened in Indonesia in 1998. The
third is between individuals and nation-states. Individual investors can move
their funds out of countries at the click of a mouse; others can organize
worldwide terrorist networks. Instead of imagining away the state, the city,
and military power in antiquity, we might follow the globalists’ lead, looking
at the balances between institutions, markets, and individuals.
In the first globalizing age (1870s –1914) as in the second, Western
technological advances lowered transport and communication costs,
accelerating transnational flows of capital, labour, and ideas. Champions of
free trade pushed their agendas aggressively, breaching older barriers.
Both phases saw restructured production, new economic centres, and
far-reaching intellectual and aesthetic transformations: in the first phase
modernism, in the second postmodernism. World War I interrupted long-term
globalization, ushering in two generations of statism. The technological
advances of the 1970s and 1980s broke this up, and 1989’s revolutions
confirmed its demise.58
Mobility, connectivity, and decentring have histories. For the mercenaries
of archaic Greece or the merchants of medieval Cairo, the Mediterranean may
have been very open, but in other times and places large institutions and stable
structures mattered more. Horden and Purcell insist that they are not writing
44 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

empires and fixed routes out of the story,59 yet one of the longest empirical
sections of The Corrupting Sea does in fact try to show that traditional models
of an early medieval decline in connectedness are flawed.60
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The new model addresses some of the old one’s anomalies, but this
formulation gives up too much. It was already obvious to Polybius (1.3) that some
periods of Mediterranean history were more Mediterraneanized than others, and
we should preserve this insight. We might begin a fuller account of
Mediterraneanization with the slow expansion of palace/temple-type civiliza-
tions of Early Dynastic Sumer and Old Kingdom Egypt around 3000 BCE.
Around their fringes similar social formations developed, either through
emulation or through attempts to resist expansion. Similar processes began in
other parts of the Mediterranean, particularly Malta and southeastern Spain, but
always faltered. Had these independent moves towards complexity succeeded,
the second-millennium Mediterranean might have looked very different, but for
local ecological and cultural reasons they did not. By 2000, Bronze Age states
with many similarities had spread as far as Syria, Crete, and Elam, and Ur had
united most of Mesopotamia. The fall of Ur did not disrupt the larger process, and
by 1500 states of this type were firmly planted in Anatolia and the Aegean.
Aegean goods reached the Adriatic, the western Mediterranean, and even central
Europe. There was, perhaps, an inexorable expansionist logic in this Bronze Age
social formation. Given time, it might have spread around the entire
Mediterranean. But instead destructions about 1200 brought contraction and
ended Near Eastern-style palatial civilization in Anatolia and the Aegean. When
expansion began again shortly before 900, things were very different. The
Assyrians started a trend towards larger and more militaristic empires in the Near
East, while the city-states of the Aegean generally rejected monarchy and
religiously based authority. Phoenicians and Greeks accelerated commercial
contact between the eastern and the western Mediterranean and by 750 were
creating permanent settlements in the west. This archaic Mediterraneanization
was another turning point, tying the basin together as never before. Meanwhile, a
succession of Near Eastern empires took over the eastern Mediterranean
coastline, and Persia became a major power on the Sea. Alexander destroyed this
empire, and this led to partial Graeco-Macedonian élite replacement and
substantial emigration from the Aegean. While this was going on, city-states
similar to the Greek and perhaps the Phoenician model flourished in Italy,
southern France, and Spain. Rome carved out its own empire, and Carthage, a
Phoenician colony, grew rich on trade. Integration was steady and strong between
700 and 300, perhaps unstoppable barring a shock to the system as profound as the
one around 1200. Absent such a shock, Rome overcame all rivals, uniting
the basin politically in the second and first centuries BCE. By 200 CE Rome
provided a security system that affected economics, society, and culture in the
Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe.61
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 45

This simple narrative will raise specialists’ hackles. We could debate the
coherence of my categories (e.g., what is a ‘Near Eastern palace/temple-type
civilization’? Is there a ‘Greek model’ of the city-state? Were Iron Age
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societies really so different from Bronze Age ones?). We could also question
the evolutionary logic that it rests on or define ‘Mediterraneanization’
differently. I emphasize growing integration up till the third century CE at the
levels of events and conjunctures. Horden and Purcell reject out of hand ‘the
strategy of classifying economies chronologically. The search for common
denominators using the comparative approach across wide spans of space and
time seems to us more promising than asserting schizophrenic splits of
historical experience created around “turning-point” events on the teleoscopic
scale’.62 They can do this only by ignoring massive changes and long-term
trends. Finally, we could question the boundaries. A ‘Mediterranean’ that
includes Sumer and the Danube is a strange one indeed, and yet these places
play vital roles in the story I have sketched. Is such a larger world necessary to
understand the processes? If it is, ‘the Mediterranean’ may not be the best
scale to adopt (see Woolf, in this volume).

Methods and Sources


All history involves mobility, connectivity, and dispersed power. If these
were defining characteristics of the pre-modern Mediterranean, we need ways to
measure them. So far, Mediterraneanists have amassed what evidence there is
but have not explained how to gauge its significance. This is partly by
choice: humanists are typically wary of social scientists’ abstractions and
typologies, preferring to see meaning as constructed and constantly shifting
and definitions as emerging at the end of study rather than imposing a straitjacket
at the beginning.63 Horden and Purcell exemplify this, commenting in a section
challenging urban–rural contrasts that ‘since this chapter is “against villes”, the
gist of our argument at this point might be described as “against typologies”’.64
But there are also empirical reasons that ancient historians have not
worked like social scientists: the evidence we have rarely allows us to test
propositions. For example, cabotage is central to Horden and Purcell’s thesis,
but our evidence is illustrative rather than probative. The remarkable Ahiqar
Scroll from Elephantine65 exemplifies the problem. This palimpsest records
customs duties in the Nile delta, and probably dates to 475 BCE. It lists 36
Greek and six Phoenician ships importing wine, oil, wood, wool, and jars and
exporting mineral soda. Horden and Purcell suggest that ‘the sophistication of
the commercial relationships that are revealed . . . corrects the prevailing
picture of primitivism in archaic Greek commerce’.66 This could be true, but
we have no context. We cannot know whether this was normal activity for this
(unknown) harbour or how typical the harbour was, and therefore cannot
46 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

assess its relevance to arguments about primitivism. The ships were probably
small,67 and Horden and Purcell see this as evidence of low-level cabotage.
Yet Finley would surely have seen here evidence that trade was small-scale.
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Without clear typologies, quantitative cut-off points, and enough data to put
individual documents in context, we are condemned to assertion and
counterassertion.
Archaeology is the obvious place to turn. Sarah Morris used it to challenge
classical Athenian claims about Greek-Near Eastern interactions, and
prehistorians have developed world-systems models of Mediterranean
connectivity.68 Archaeology’s strengths are that it provides access to periods
and places with no texts, it is quantifiable, and it can yield new evidence
through fieldwork. Its weaknesses are that its data are even more ambiguous
than texts, are usually only proxy data, and that publication lags behind
research. These problems are serious but not insuperable, particularly when
things and words can be used together.69

Winners and Losers: Western Sicily, 800 – 300 BCE


I close with some brief remarks on Sicily – ‘both a gateway and crossroads, on
the one hand dividing the eastern and the western Mediterranean, on the other
linking Europe and Africa as a stepping stone’, as Finley put it.70 In literature
as well as in scholarly discourse, Sicily has been seen as the point where all the
economic and cultural flows of the Mediterranean meet, for good or ill. It is an
ideal place to examine connectedness and my claim that dynamic
Mediterraneanization is more powerful than static Mediterraneanism.
With these issues in mind, I began excavating in 2000 on the acropolis of
Monte Polizzo (Figure 1)71 as part of a larger project begun in 1996 by
Sebastiano Tusa, superintendent of archaeology for the Trapani region, and
Kristian Kristiansen of Gothenburg University. Monte Polizzo was a
substantial town of 10– 20 hectares (perhaps 2,000 people) at its height
between 550 and 500 BCE. The site lies a day’s walk inland from Phoenician
Motya and Greek Selinous, in the area that Thucydides (6.2) says was
inhabited by Elymians. My primary goals were to measure changes in the pace
of Mediterraneanization and to assess their impact. The work is at a very early
stage but has some relevance to the topic at hand.
Around 800 BCE, western Sicily scored low on all indices of
Mediterraneanization. If its coastal dwellers engaged in cabotage, they
added few ideas or goods to the local repertoire,72 but by 300 the region was
economically, politically, and culturally part of a larger world. Its material
culture combined Greek and Punic elements, and few indigenous Iron Age
traditions survived.73 This process of Mediterraneanization had consequences
just as traumatic and uneven as contemporary globalization.
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M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON

FIGURE 1
47

WESTERN SICILY: SITES MENTIONED IN THE TEXT


48 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

The arrival in the late eighth century of Phoenician settlers at Motya,


Soloeis, and Panormos74 and Greeks in eastern Sicily coincided with an
elaboration of material culture. Incised-and-stamped and matt-painted pottery
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appeared alongside traditional plain burnished wares,75 and the first known
round ‘hut shrine’ was built at Montagnoli, replacing archaeologically
invisible Iron Age ways of worshipping the gods.76 The natives probably also
adopted wine from the settlers in the eighth century.
The arrival of Greek colonies in the west (Himera in 648, Selinous
probably in 628, Akragas in 580) changed things. By 500 the Greeks had
occupied the fertile plains, driving the natives back into the hills. Franco De
Angelis estimates the combined territories of Himera, Selinous, and Akragas
at 5,260 square kilometres, with 4,410 square kilometres arable – five or six
times the arable territory of Attica and enough to feed over half a million
people.77 Even spread over four generations, this was a gigantic land-grab.
Despite this transfer of resources, native society flourished in the sixth
century. Whereas barely a dozen sites are known west of the Salso and Imera
Rivers from the tenth and ninth centuries, there are more than 50 from the
sixth.78 Although Monte Polizzo was one of the larger sites, Segesta, Eryx,
Entella, and Halikyai were probably bigger still. All have an abundance of
decorated material culture, and Vassallo speaks of ‘una generale richezza a
livello non solo di cultura materiale, ma anche di sviluppo demografico’ in the
sixth-century interior.79
Sixth-century Sicilians imported Greek pottery, and this has led many
archaeologists to speak of ‘Hellenization’, but without defining the term.
At Monte Polizzo we find only a narrow range of Greek drinking vessels,
comprising ten per cent or less of the fine wares. Alongside these there were
many incised-and-stamped and matt-painted pots in more elaborate forms than
earlier. Greek vessels made up 20– 40 per cent of a sixth-/fifth-century deposit
at Entella, perhaps from a feasting area in a cemetery,80 and 20 –30 per cent of
domestic assemblages dating 550 – 475 at Monte Maranfusa.81 At both sites
matt-painted wares dominate, while at Monte Polizzo incised wares are
commoner. These variations may indicate diverse responses to contact with
the larger Mediterranean world or different uses of imports in different
contexts. But either way, Greek and imitation-Greek material was in the
minority and Phoenician imports were almost unknown.
Sixth-century western Sicilians simultaneously elaborated indigenous
traditions and drew on foreign ideas. I limit myself here to comments on
religion. Large hut-shrines were common by 550, with burned animal
sacrifices. However, the bones of the sacrifices suggest very un-Greek rituals:
at Monte Polizzo deer, particularly antlers, dominate the dumps. In the
autumn, hunting parties travelled to distant forests82 and killed deer, bringing
the carcasses back to be burned whole on the altars and butchered. The burned
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 49

toes and skulls were dumped outside the sanctuary while the long bones and
meat were taken away to be eaten. Grooves and holes were cut in many of the
antlers.83 Deer are also represented among the bones found inside a hut-shrine
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at Colle Madore, and the brief report on Polizzello hut-shrine B mentions two
antlers.84 Leighton suggests that some Iron Age pots evoke horned human
heads.85 Perhaps we can see here rites blurring the lines between animals,
humans, and gods. Even if Greek customs inspired Sicilians to give their
rituals more material form, the hut-shrines, deer, and aversion to votives are
very local.
But just as these rites reached their most developed form after 550,
rectangular stone temples were built in Greek styles at a few larger sites.
Segesta is the most important, with a huge Doric temple dating to before 450
BCE.86 At 56 by 28 metres, it is about the same size as Selinous temples C-F,
the temple of Hera at Akragas, that of Nike at Himera, and those of Athena and
Zeus at Syracuse. Snodgrass has shown how the Greek cities on Sicily made
temple-building a competition for status,87 and it is hard to avoid concluding
that the Elymian élite at Segesta was attempting to play in the same league as
the Greek nobility. Greek culture around 500 BCE was obviously a very
different phenomenon from American culture around CE 2000, but
Mediterraneanization created effects somewhat similar to those of globali-
zation. Some people embraced cultural novelties brought by rich,
technologically advanced, and aggressive intruders; others elaborated local
traditions. The chance find of a dump at Segesta has yielded more Elymian
inscriptions (mostly single words, inscribed in Greek letters on potsherds) than
all other sites combined.88
The remarkable Elymian florescence ended abruptly around 475. More than
60 per cent of the settlements were apparently abandoned. Vassallo suggests that
the natives owed their sixth-century success to being middlemen between Greeks
and Phoenicians and that the Greek victory at Himera in 480 shattered
the equilibrium, precipitating a general decline.89 In view of the number of
abandonments and Segesta’s continuing vitality, we have argued that Segesta
emerged as the dominant native power at this point by acting like the Sicel leader
Douketios in the 450s and the Deinomenids in the 480s and 470s, forcibly
relocating populations to the primary centre.90 Excavation in the settlement at
Segesta might resolve the issue, but whatever the cause, the fifth-century
contraction was a turning point in western Sicilian Mediterraneanization.
The Elymians, Sicans, and Sicels could not turn off Mediterraneanization
any more than the Indonesians could turn off globalization in 1998.
Demography, economics, and adventure brought the Greeks to western Sicily.
Around 580 and 510 the locals may have defeated Pentathlos and Dorieus, but
the Greeks kept coming anyway. They took the best land, but in the sixth
century everyone won: natives as well as Greeks and Phoenicians multiplied,
50 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

built better, and had more material goods. In the fifth century, global forces
shifted in the Greeks’ favour, with the élites of Selinous and Akragas attaining
legendary wealth. The Phoenicians probably did not suffer such a sharp
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setback as was once thought,91 although their role was much diminished, while
in the interior most sites disappeared and Segesta became the kind of power
that could manipulate Athens and Carthage. Rural settlement revived only
around 350, and by then the native traditions that had flourished since the
eighth century had almost entirely disappeared.
Horden and Purcell take a complicated position on the archaic Greek
expansion across the Mediterranean, calling it ‘one of the most complex
manifestations ever of the interactive potential that has been central to
Mediterranean maritime history’.92 They see the Greek case as special, arguing
that ‘the establishment of cash-crop production in the landscape of the
Hellenic overseas settlement is one of the more radical and intrusive
dislocations in Mediterranean agrarian history’,93 but also insist that ‘many of
the characteristic episodes of Mediterranean colonial history can be
illuminated by applying the simple formula which we perceive in
Mediterranean history as a whole: fragmentation by land plus connectivity
by sea’.94 If I understand them correctly, they see the archaic expansion as
a variation on a recurring theme:
The Mediterranean colony . . . is always part of a seaborne network, a
bridgehead of the easily navigable world in a different social medium.
. . . What is constant is the nature of the meeting between two different
communities, one associated with control of the sea, one which manages
the cluster of terrestrial microregions.95

These are important insights, but they flatten the flow of history into a static
Mediterraneanism. This is where recognizing the globalization analogy that
underlies the Mediterraneanist paradigm and pushing it harder pays the
greatest dividends. No one would dream of writing an account of modern
global connectedness that treated it as a given rather than as a process, or that
focused on either the explosion of wealth created by free trade or the disasters
that open markets brought to many countries to the exclusion of the other.
I cannot see why ancient Mediterranean history should be any different.

CONCLUSIONS

A new way of looking at ancient history formed in the 1990s that emphasizes
the connectedness of the Mediterranean basin and the fluidity of the movement
of people, goods, and ideas. The new Mediterraneanism is part of a
larger movement in the humanities and social sciences towards treating
the Mediterranean as an analytic unit. This movement is a response to
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 51

contemporary globalization. Mediterraneanist ancient history explains


some things better than static, cellular theories, but we need to make
the globalization analogy explicit and work through its implications.
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In particular:

1. We should think about processes of Mediterraneanization rather than a


static Mediterraneanism.
2. Interconnection did not make institutions, states, and empires cease to
matter.
3. There is nothing sacred about the (ill-defined) concept of the
Mediterranean; we should vary geographical scale to fit the problem.
4. Just like globalization, Mediterraneanization created winners and losers.
5. As we study larger and larger units, we must be more precise, not less,
with definitions, typologies, criteria for falsification, and quantitative
tools.

The connectedness model is here to stay: it reveals new dimensions of


antiquity and gives antiquity new significance for understanding the world
around us. I have argued that the current versions presented have certain blind
spots, but normal science will correct these as we argue, as I have done here,
about the best way to implement the new framework. Some of the
problems will linger as troubling anomalies, but only eccentrics will worry
about them – until the world shifts under our feet again.

N OT E S

I thank Irad Malkin for inviting me to the Tel Aviv conference and for his patience.
Roger Bagnall, William Harris, Michael Herzfeld, Bruce Hitchner, Lynn Meskell, Richard Saller,
and audiences in Tel Aviv and New York commented helpfully on earlier versions, Emma
Blake shared her knowledge of Sicilian Iron Age pottery, and Tara Hnatiuk provided a report on
the bones. However, none of them should be held accountable for what I have done with their
advice.

1. Keith Hopkins, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Garnsey, Keith Hopkins, and C.R. Whittaker (eds.),
Trade in the Ancient Economy (Cambridge, 1983), p.xi.
2. Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, 1973).
3. Hopkins, ‘Introduction’, p.xiv.
4. Particularly Hopkins, ‘Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies, 70
(1980), pp.101– 25; ‘Models, Ships, and Staples’, in Peter Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (eds.),
Trade and Famine in Classical Antiquity (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
supp.8, 1983), pp.84–109; and ‘Rome, Taxes, Rents, and Trade’, Kodai, 6/7 (1995/96),
pp.41–75, reprinted in Walter Scheidel and Sitta von Reden (eds.), The Ancient Economy
(Edinburgh, 2002), pp.190–230.
5. Martin Bernal, Black Athena I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785 – 1985
(New Brunswick, NJ, 1987).
6. Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
52 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

7. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study in Mediterranean
History (Oxford, 2000).
8. Ibid., p.2.
9. Ibid., p.9.
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10. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1970).
11. Ibid., p.209.
12. Brent D. Shaw, ‘Challenging Braudel: A New Vision of the Mediterranean’, Journal of
Roman Archaeology, 14 (2001), p.453.
13. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
trans. Siân Reynolds, Vol.1 (New York, 1972 [1949]), p.14.
14. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.39.
15. Baltasar Porcel, Mediterráneo: Tumultos de Oleaie (Barcelona, 1996); Jean Carpentier and
François Lebrun, Histoire de la Méditerranée (Paris, 1998).
16. P. Chaunu and H. Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504–1650, 12 vols. (Paris, 1955– 59);
K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 1986), and Asia
before Europe (Cambridge, 1990).
17. Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution, trans. Margaret Pinder and Walter Burkert
(Cambridge, 1992 [1984]); Bernal, Black Athena; Christopher Faraone, Talismans and
Trojan Horses (Stanford, 1991); Morris, Daidalos; Martin L. West, The East Face of Helicon
(Oxford, 1997).
18. My source for library purchases, the Association of Research Libraries Statistics annual
reports, begins only in 1974.
19. Stanford’s libraries are consistently in the top ten US research libraries for total purchases but
tend to be stronger in the natural sciences than in the humanities and the social sciences. They
also went through budget cuts in the early 1990s, with the number of purchases falling from
an average slightly over 200,000 in 1985–89 to just over 150,000 in 1990–94, before
recovering to over 200,000 in the later 1990s (the later 1980s score is distorted by an intake of
320,601 volumes in 1988–89; the median for each five-year period may be more useful,
falling from 167,055 in 1985–89 to 153,562 in 1990–94 and rising to 212,558 in 1995–99).
20. Braudel, The Mediterranean, pp.17–18.
21. Ibid., pp.394–6.
22. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, pp.12–18.
23. Braudel, The Mediterranean, pp.21–2.
24. I owe this term to Marc van de Mieroop.
25. For the text see Paul Balta, Méditerranée: Defies et enjeux (Paris, 2000), pp.163–75.
26. E.g., Richard Gillespie and George Joffé, ‘Editor’s Note’, Mediterranean Politics, 1 (1996),
pp.v–vi.
27. S.C. Calleya, Navigating Regional Dynamics in the Post-Cold War World: Patterns of
Relations in the Mediterranean Area (Dartmouth, UK, 1997), pp.89–140.
28. A. Bernard Knapp, ‘Editorial Statement’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 1 (1988),
pp.3–10.
29. Paul Sant Cassia, ‘Editorial Foreword’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 1 (1991), pp.v–vi.
30. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.45.
31. See, e.g., Dimitris Xenakis and Dimitris Chrsyochoou, The Emerging Euro-Mediterranean
System (Manchester, 2001), pp.81–2.
32. Eugenio Mazzarella, ‘L’universo linguistico’, Civiltà del Mediterraneo, 1 (1992), pp.5–6.
33. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.172.
34. Ibid., p.143.
35. Ibid., p.400.
36. Ibid., pp.91–122.
37. Ibid., pp.342–4.
38. Ibid., pp.485–523.
39. Ibid., p.523.
40. The globalization literature is vast and polemical. I have found the following works
particularly interesting: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989);
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 53
Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity (Stanford, CA, 1996);
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis,
MN, 1996); Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Globalization (Durham, NC, 2001); Manuel Castells,
The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1996–98); Douglas
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Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, NJ, 1997); Debraj
Ray, Development Economics (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Anthony Giddens, Runaway World:
How Globalism is Changing Our Lives (London, 1999); Amartya Sen, Development
as Freedom (Oxford, 1999); Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislaw, and Daniel Tergin,
The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace that is
Remaking the Modern World (New York, 1999); Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital:
Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London, 2000); Thomas
Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York, 2000);
Robert Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century
(Princeton, NJ, 2000); George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society
Endangered (New York, 1998); Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity (New York, 2000);
Richard Kugler and Ellen Frost, The Global Century: Globalization and National Security,
2 vols. (Washington, DC, 2001); Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the
Modern World 1700–2000 (New York, 2001); Gilbert Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
(New York, 2001); Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and
Society (Oxford, 2001); Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York, 2002),
and The Roaring Nineties (New York, 2003).
41. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, pp.112–13.
42. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.
43. Appadurai, Modernity at Large and Globalization; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds.),
Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC, 1997); Sherry
Ortner (ed.), The Fate of ‘Cultures’ (Berkeley, CA, 1999); Herzfeld, Anthropology.
44. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto’, in David McCullagh (ed.),
Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, 1977), pp.221– 47.
45. Ronald Coase, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica, 4 (1937), pp.386–405; Douglass North,
Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990).
46. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Studies of Cities and
Regions (Oxford, 2000); Emma Blake, ‘Spatiality Past and Present’, Journal of Social
Archaeology, 2 (2002), pp.139–58.
47. E.g., Ian Hodder, Archaeology and Globalism (Bloomington, IN, 2000); Christopher Gosden,
Archaeology and Anthropology (London, 2000); Appadurai, Globalization; Arjun
Appadurai, Ashish Chadha, Ian Hodder, Trinity Jackman, and Chris Witmore, ‘The
Globalization of Archaeology and Heritage’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 1 (2001),
pp.35–49.
48. Jan Paul Crielaard, ‘Surfing on the Mediterranean Web: Cypriot Long-Distance
Communications during the Eleventh and Tenth Centuries B.C.’, in Vassos Karageorghis
and Nikolaos Stampolidis (eds.), Eastern Mediterranean: Cyprus-Dodecanese-Crete, 16th–
6th Cent. B.C. (Athens, 1998), pp.187–206.
49. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa (New York, 1996); Victor Hanson and John Heath, Who
Killed Homer? (New York, 1998); Page duBois, Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from
Conservatives (New York, 2001).
50. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1970 [1966]), p.xi.
51. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944); Karl Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg,
and Harry Pearson (eds.), Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (Glencoe, IL, 1957).
52. Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1980), pp.58– 64.
53. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.15.
54. Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses; Morris, Daidalos; West, East Face of Helicon.
55. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.5.
56. Shaw, ‘Challenging Braudel’, p.427.
57. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, p.xix.
54 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W

58. See the studies listed in n.40 above and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space
1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875– 1914
(New York, 1987).
59. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, pp.151, 152 and 172.
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60. Ibid., pp.153–72; cf. pp.275–6 on Early Iron Age Greece.


61. Bruce Hitchner, ‘The First Globalization: The Roman Empire and Its Legacy in the 21st
Century’, MS.
62. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.147.
63. Ian Morris, ‘Hard Surfaces’, in Paul Cartledge, Ed Cohen, and Lin Foxhall (eds.), Money,
Labour, and Land: Approaches to the Economics of Ancient Greece (London, 2001),
pp.8–43; Ian Morris and J.G. Manning, ‘Introduction’, in J.G. Manning and Ian Morris
(eds.), The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford, CA, 2004).
64. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.101. In an important earlier paper, Purcell emphasized
the need for ‘hypothetical quantification’, but he seems to have moved away from this
position. Nicholas Purcell, ‘Mobility and the Polis’, in Oswyn Murray and Simon Price
(eds.), The Greek City (Oxford, 1990), pp.29– 58.
65. B. Porten and A. Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, Vol.3,
Literature, Accounts, Lists (Jerusalem, 1993), pp.82–195; A. Yardeni, ‘Maritime Trade and
Royal Accountancy in an Erased Customs Account from 475 B.C. on the Ahiqar Scroll from
Elephantine’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 293 (1994), pp.67–87.
66. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.149.
67. Pierre Briant and Raymond Descat, ‘Un register douanier de la satrapie d’Egypte à l’époque
achéménide (TAD C3, 7)’, in Nicolas Grimal and Bernadette Menu (eds.), Le commerce en
Egypte ancienne (Cairo, 1998), pp.66–9.
68. Morris, Daidalos; Patrice Brun, Princes et princesses de la celtique: La premier Age du Fer
(850–450 avant J.C.) (Paris, 1987); Andrew Sherratt and Susan Sherratt, ‘The Growth of the
Mediterranean Economy in the Early First Millennium B.C.’, World Archaeology, 24 (1993),
pp.361–78; Kristian Kristiansen, Europe before History (Cambridge, 1998); cf. Gregory
Woolf, ‘World-Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire’, Journal of Roman Archaeology,
3 (1990), pp.44– 58.
69. Ian Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History (Oxford, 2000), pp.3–33, and ‘Archaeology,
Standards of Living, and Greek Economic History’, in Manning and Morris (eds.),
The Ancient Economy.
70. Moses I. Finley, Ancient Sicily (New York, 1968), p.3.
71. Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, and Sebastiano Tusa, ‘Stanford University
Excavations on the Acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, 1: Preliminary Report on the 2000
Season’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 46 (2001), pp.253–71, and ‘Stanford
University Excavations on the Acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, 2: Preliminary Report on
the 2001 Season’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 47 (2002), pp.153–98;
Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, Brien Garnand, and Sebastiano Tusa, ‘Stanford
University Excavations on the Acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, 3: Preliminary Report on
the 2002 Season’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 48 (2003) pp.343–415.
72. Sebastiano Tusa, La Sicilia nella preistoria (Palermo, 1992), pp.547–663; Robert Leighton,
Sicily before History (London, 1999), pp.187–268.
73. D. Lauro, ‘Cozzo Sannita: Un insediamento indigeno e punico-ellenisticio lungo il corse del
fiume San Leonardo’, in Carmela Di Stefano (ed.), Archeologia e territorio (Palermo, 1997),
pp.349–60; Maria Adelaide Vaggioli, ‘Il territorio di Entella nell’ età dell’ epicrazia punica:
Dati preliminary’, Sicilia Archeologica, 34 (2001), pp.51–66, with references.
74. Di Stefano (ed.), Archeologia e territorio, pp.25–110; Carmela Di Stefano (ed.), Palermo punica
(Palermo, 1998); Marisa Famà, Mozia – gli scavi nella ‘Zona A’ dell’ abitato (Bari, 2002).
75. Francesca Spatafora, ‘La ceramica indigena a decorazione impressa e incisa nella Sicilia
centro-meridionale’, Sicilia Archeologica, 29 (1996), pp.91 – 110; Caterina Trombi,
‘La ceramica indigena dipinta della Sicilia dalla seconda metà del IX sec. a.C. al V sec.
a.C.’, in M. Barra Bagnasco, Ernesto De Miro, and A. Pinzone (eds.), Magna Grecia e
Sicilia: Stato degli studi e prospettive di ricerca (Messina, 1999), pp.275–93.
M E D I T E R R A N E A NI Z A T I ON 55
76. Giuseppe Castellana, ‘L’insediamento di Montagnoli nei pressi di Selinunte’, in Sebastiano
Tusa, Giuseppe Nenci, and Vincenzo Tusa (eds.), Gli elimi e l’area Elima (Palermo,
1988/89), pp.326–31; idem, ‘Note sulla ceramica indigena impressa proviente da scavi nella
valle del Belice e nel bacino finale del Platani’, in Giornate internazionali di studi sull’ area
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Elima, Atti, Vol.1 (Pisa and Gibellina, 1992), pp.191–202; and idem, ‘Nuovi dati sull’
insediamento di Montagnoli presso Menfi’, in Terze giornate internazionali di studi sull’
area Elima, Atti, Vol.1 (Pisa and Gibellina, 2000), pp.263–71.
77. Franco De Angelis, ‘Estimating the Agricultural Base of Greek Sicily’, Papers of the British
School at Rome, 68 (2000), pp.111–48.
78. Vassallo, ‘Abitati indigeni ellenizati della Sicilia centro-occidentale dalla vitalità tardo-
arcaica alla crisi del V sec. a.C.’, in Terze giornate internazionali di studi sull’ area Elima,
Atti, Vol.2 (Pisa and Gibellina, 2000), pp.985–1008.
79. Ibid., p.994.
80. Giuseppe Nenci, ‘Entella’, in C. Marotta, C. Greco, Francesca Spatafora, and Stefano
Vassallo (eds.), Di terra in terra: Nuove scoperto archeologiche nella Provincia di Palermo
(Palermo, 1991), p.36; Riccardo Guglielmino, ‘Materiali arcaici e problemi di ellenizzazione
a Entella’, in Seconde giornate internazionali di studi sull’ area Elima, Atti, Vol.2 (Pisa and
Gibellina, 1997), pp.923–56.
81. Francesca Spatafora, ‘Monte Maranfusa (scavi 1986– 87)’, in Tusa et al. (eds.), Gli elimi e
l’area Elima, p.298. See also Francesca Spatafora (ed.), Monte Maranfusa (Palermo, 2003).
82. Jeremy Johns believes that most lowland forests were cleared by 900, and preliminary pollen
results from Monte Polizzo suggest that the area was open grassland. Jeremy Johns,
‘Monreale survey: L’insediamento umano nell’ alto Belice dall’età paleolitica al 1250 d.C.’,
in Giornate internazionali di studi sull’ area Elima, Atti, Vol.1 (Pisa and Gibellina, 1992),
pp.407–20; Kari Hjelle, ‘Pollen Analytical Investigations in the Scandinavian-Sicilian
Archaeological Project (SSAP) 1999–2000’, MS.
83. Morris et al., ‘Stanford University Excavations, 3’, pp.280–85 and 294 –97.
84. Ernesto De Miro, ‘Gli “indigeni” della Sicilia centro-meridionale’, Kokalos, 34–35 (1988–
89), pp.24–34.
85. Leighton, Sicily before History, p.264.
86. Vincenzo Tusa, ‘Il santuario arcaico di contrada Mango’, in Atti del VIII. Congresso
Internazionale di archeologic classica, Vol.2 (Rome, 1961), pp.31–40; Vincenzo Tusa,
Raimondo Catalano, Giuseppe Maniaci, and Adriana La Porta, ‘Il santuario in contrada
Mango (Segesta)’, in Giornate internazionali di studi sull’ area Elima, Atti, Vol.2 (Pisa and
Gibellina, 1992), pp.617–45. An enormous stone enclosure dates to the sixth century; only
cuttings for the temple walls and architectural fragments have been found, but must date
ca. 550 –450 BCE.
87. A. Snodgrass, ‘Interaction by Design: The Greek City-State’, in Colin Renfrew and John
Cherry (eds.), Peer Polity Interaction and the Development of Socio-Cultural Complexity
(Cambridge, 1986), pp.47–58.
88. Vincenzo Tusa, ‘Frammenti di ceramica con graffiti da Segesta’, Kokalos, 21 (1970),
pp.214–25; Juliette de la Genière and Vincenzo Tusa, ‘Saggio a Segesta: Grotta Venella
(ottobre 1978)’, Sicilia Archeologica, 37 (1978), pp.11–29.
89. Vassallo, ‘Abitati indigeni ellenizati’.
90. Morris et al., ‘Stanford University Excavations, 3’, pp.287–90.
91. Sandro Bondı̀, ‘Carthage, Italy, and the “Vth Century Problem”’, in G. Pisano (ed.),
Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the Western Mediterranean (Rome, 1999), pp.39– 48.
92. Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p.134.
93. Ibid., p.286.
94. Ibid., p.396.
95. Ibid.

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