The concluding chapter contextualizes the study of ancient Doric architecture against the backdrop of European colonialism and modern globalization. The evolutionary explanation of the Doric temple can be seen as part of a broader tendency in the West of naturalizing and normalizing Greek/Western culture as world culture by tracing it back to universal principles. The critique of the evolutionary narrative makes it possible to appreciate the disruptive and innovative character of the Doric order as part of a historical shift in the wielding of religious and political power and in the relation between Greek communities and the landscapes they inhabited. Population growth, social change, and political innovation led to urbanization, colonization, and land reclamation on an unprecedented scale. These processes challenged the traditional religious system, which was based on an intrinsic relation between the divinities and the natural features of the landscape. The Doric temple can be seen as a response to this situation: by redefining the sacred space, “inhabited” by the gods, it also redefined what was outside the sacred precinct, the “profane” land that was subject to new forms of exploitation, land distribution, and colonization.

This chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous chapter and frames the book’s arguments up to this point in very broad terms, looking back to corruption in the ancient Roman Empire and forward to the Sicilian mafia and other modern, nonstate actors. It argues that advocates’ corrupt practices of protection and justice ought to be understood as encompassing two main strategies: either extracting as much income as possible from regions that were peripheral to their own territorial interests or – in contrast – attempting to win the hearts and minds of churches’ dependents in order to convince them to abandon their allegiance to their landlords. Both of these strategies are commonplace ones across human history and highlight more general challenges tied to protection and justice. This chapter also contends that, precisely because these corrupt practices were so common, scholars’ arguments about the decline of advocatial abuses from the thirteenth century onward are misleading.