Diversity Rules: Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's<i>The Corrupting Sea</i>

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] For a model review, see Shaw Shaw, Brent D. 2001. Challenging Braudel: A New Vision of the Mediterranean. Journal of Roman Archaeology, 14: 419–53. [Google Scholar], ‘Challenging Braudel’; see also Malkin Malkin, Irad, ed. 2005. Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity, London: Routledge. Originally published as a special issue of Mediterranean Historical Review 18, no. 2 (2003) [Google Scholar], Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity, and the authors' ‘Four Years of Corruption’. [2] See http://www.btselem.org/English/Publications/Summaries/200507_South_Hebron.asp; http://www.cpt.org/hebron/documents/Tuwani_media_packet.htm; http://taayush.tripod.com/new/south-hebron-sumud-vulgar.html. [3] ‘The supply of eighteenth-century Melos ought to be envisaged as an Athenian imperial carrying trade in miniature, the economy of Etruscan Veii as an illustration of the type of contact with other places that, on an incomparably larger scale, formed the horizons of Renaissance Venice. As with the various kinds of pastoralism, the grander systems are — perhaps unexpectedly — indicative of the nature of the rest’ (122). [4] Kuchenbuch Kuchenbuch, Ludolf. 2003. “Porcus donativus: Language Use and Gifting in Seigneurial Records between the Eighth and the Twelfth Centuries”. In Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange, Edited by: Algazi, Gadi, Groebner, Valentin and Jussen, Bernhard. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. [Google Scholar], ‘Porcus donativus’. [5] Similarly, it is argued that it is ‘theoretically impossible to talk of the “population of a city” — such as Rome in antiquity, for example — because at any given moment so many of its inhabitants would be on the move, or would leave by the end of the year’ (382). Recognizing the ubiquity of movement does not absolve us of the task of finding better, more sophisticated and dynamic ways of assessing populations (what about defining them in terms of where people's strategic entitlements lie?). [6] Consider the following passage: ‘If the dynamics of extended hinterlands that supported an Athens or a Genoa could be considered in detail, rather than by overview, what at first appeared a grand system, operating as if by some careful plan, would be revealed as a huge accumulation of very local phenomena. The often tiny communities within the Athenian empire did not have to function in a wholly novel way when they became part of “the power that rules the sea”. The larger entity was simply a direction, or impetus, given to the previously less formed, less patterned, ecological interaction of several hundred settlements, several thousand microregions. The routes that supplied medieval Genoa comprised dozens of possible way-stations. Each of these functioned in its own fashion as a local environmental system, the product of which was given an altered function, a new set of relations, by its inclusion on the sea route that led to the northern Tyrrhenian’ (121, emphasis added). To speak of ‘simply a direction’ or ‘an impetus’ given to an existing ‘ecological interaction’ by an imperial power is to belittle the imprint on local production and exchange discussed so eloquently elsewhere in the volume (e.g., 205–9, 213, 236–37). Note also both the daring generalization, to the effect that hinterlands are the result of the ‘accumulation of very local phenomena’ and the familiar built-in provisos of academic prose that make an argument safe, indeed, almost unassailable (the tiny communities ‘did not have to function in a wholly novel way’: they never do, and if they actually did they did not have to). [7] It is significant that in introducing the main themes of the chapter, the broad definition of ‘redistribution’ actually gives way to exchange and market involvement as elements in a repertoire of responses to risk (178). One searches in vain for taxation or violent extraction, pirates, and landlords in this context. [8] The ‘social variables have often seemed so very varied as to make wide-ranging comparisons unhelpful, and our search was for the common denominator that would promote comparison’ (Horden and Purcell Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas, Purcell. 2005. “Four Years of Corruption: A Response to Critics”. In Rethinking the Mediterranean, Edited by: Harris, W. V. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], ‘Four Years of Corruption’, 358). [9] Schneider Schneider, Jane. 1971. Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame, and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies. Ethnology, 10: 1–24. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], ‘Of Vigilance and Virgins’. [10] ‘The use of such undifferentiating concepts is no doubt functional in an attempt to avoid “classifying economies chronologically.” Instead, 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’ (147). It is not explained why the goal of comparative history should be ‘seeking common denominators’, as if teasing out differences were not its other side. Describing the alternative approach in terms of ‘asserting … splits of historical experience’ (instead of identifying structural changes) and as necessarily ‘teleoscopic’ is, of course, unwarranted. [11] Consider the following passage: ‘Historically, the most important strategy for coping with risks of all kinds to the provision of food and the maintenance of production, and especially for coping with the unpredictability of the weather, has probably been redistribution. Redistribution from one part of a microenvironment to another … is one of the normal and obvious ways of responding to risk. Larger-scale networks of distribution offer proportionally more thoroughgoing remedies. In nutritional terms, swapping my peas for your barley is a relatively egalitarian manoeuvre. But if I can sell my peas to the city, with the cash I may perhaps be able to invest in more barley than would have been available to me from local exchange. The strategy of entering a market may thus be seen as an ingredient in the repertoire of responses to risk. We suggest that the degree of participation of a microregion in the networks of exchange and supplementary supply — its redistributive engagement — constitutes another helpful scale of variation on which to assess the agrarian history of that place’ (178). Here the example adduced is not about redistribution in the general sense given by the authors to the term, but about exchange; surely piracy or exactions — which they are determined to include under redistribution — do not fall under exchange as a way of coping with risk. On the contrary, they are a source of additional risk for prime producers. But the view of the market presented here is equally questionable, for the question whether entering a market is a viable response to risk or a source of risk depends, among other things, on the structure of the market, the producer's position, and the type of involvement: Is it a local market or a supra-local one? Who establishes prices in that market? Can small producers effectively face powerful actors? To what extent do they depend on the market for their living? Without considering all these variables, describing market involvement — and, even more broadly, ‘redistributive engagement’ — as a strategy for responding to risk does not make much sense. Some chains of exchange and particular modes of market involvement serve to reduce the risk of famine; others can bring it about. [12] For the sake of brevity, this formulation presents the difference in temporal terms, based on the evolutionistic trope of social differentiation, but it need not have done so.