This volume is composed of a collection of 12 chapters made up of 11 papers previously published and one not published elsewhere, written from the early 2000s to 2016 by the authors of one of the most influential books on Mediterranean history, The Corrupting Sea (here abbreviated, as in the volume, as CS). These papers follow on from the original publication (London 2000), which was a paradigm-shifting book that addressed the concept of a Mediterranean history. The papers here are collected to address what the authors call in their introduction ‘omissions’ from the original book that broadly focus on the ‘ecological history’ of the Mediterranean. The intention of the volume is to connect ecologies and the political while seeking to place the Mediterranean into the global context. It is also a volume that engages with and assesses the significant publications on the topic of the Mediterranean and its world up to 2016, and in this it is a valuable collection.
These are papers of wide-ranging subject matter. Each is distinct yet at the same time connected to the others and to the motherships of both CS and the foundational text on the study of Mediterranean history, Ferdinand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris 1949), itself very much beholden to Henri Pirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris 1937). Key themes discussed in the current volume include an assessment of the direction that Mediterranean studies as a discipline has taken since the publication of CS. There is, then, in the first chapter an overview of key publications, reactions for and against the original publication of CS and the range of approaches these reactions have inspired. This is followed by a chapter that responds to the critics of CS and is both specific in response to said criticisms and more broadly theoretical in analysis. The aim of the original publication, to look at how things happened in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean as a unifying and not distinctively phased series of events, in order to move away from periodization and tie humans to the land and sea, was only ever one of many interpretations. Specific reference is made to concepts that have been both criticized and developed over subsequent decades. Of particular relevance are the ways in which we should view urbanism and monotheisms in this broader environment. The result of this chapter then seems to settle CS more firmly into its theoretical underpinnings and while the paper was originally published in 2005, serves as a useful reminder of the ways in which the study was received early in the twenty-first century.
The authors acknowledge the fundamental problem of trying to study and understand a concept that, by the very act of being studied, removes the ephemeral nature of the connections and interactions. Our need to define contact and connectivity, to capture and enshrine the ways in which humans interact with their environments and how ecologies shape humans serve to reify the very abstractions that these pathways of history created. Addressing this issue of how to understand something while not ‘corrupting’ its past significance, especially when looking back through thousands of years of history, is a frustratingly elusive concept. Many of the papers in this volume address the ways in which the original publication has been criticized for doing just that, and they seek to clarify approaches in the variety of disciplines that have been influenced by CS. This again only serves to emphasize how relevant the original book remains and what a valuable contribution to the study of the Mediterranean this recent volume represents. Here in one place are a series of discussions that outline many of the key arguments and frameworks that have been assessed and created in the past 20 years.
The unpublished material, in a chapter entitled ‘The Mediterranean and the European Economy in the Early Middle Ages’ (chapter 8), is largely focussed on assessing the theories of CS along with other contemporary publications that have shaped our understanding of economic theory and shifting nodes of prosperity from the ancient to the medieval. The debates in all the chapters are, by and large, Europe- and Mediterranean-focussed and, with some exceptions, they are also almost exclusively driven by male scholarship. The authors would be the first to acknowledge that the volume reflects the debates and understanding that have risen from across the Mediterranean north but it also outlines a lacuna in the diversity of voices that need to be added to this discussion. It promises to be an exciting next step when the whole circle of the Mediterranean is joined and scholarship from all directions is added to these debates.
