Can We Talk Mediterranean? by Brian A. Catlos & Sharon Kinoshita

Author:Brian A. Catlos & Sharon Kinoshita
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Ecologies

To introduce the next type, number three, the Horden–Purcell ecological approach, against which Abulafia reacts, some geographical basics are in order. But to introduce them in turn, a quote from Lawrence Durrell—to which my attention was drawn by Cyprian Broodbank , at work on a “before Corruption” (as he styles it) monographic account of the “prehistoric” Mediterranean. Durrell: “The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.” 9 To pre-modern seafarers this was, of course, no paddling pool. It has been seen as fearfully dangerous precisely because it has so often been crossed—starting at least 130,000 years ago, if we are not being misled by Lower Palaeolithic stone stools found in large numbers on Crete, two hundred miles from the African mainland. 10 None the less, the Mediterranean, the world’s largest inland sea, takes up less than 1% of the global marine space. Its hinterland wears its geological history “on its face”: a western remnant of the Tethys ocean, witness to the clash of plates (African and Eurasian) more than the clash of civilizations—the smoother-edged African plate made that way through being forced under the volcanic, mountainous, fractal, island-studded North. It is an area of extreme topographical fragmentation and diversity—to which only some parts of Southeast Asia may be fully comparable. Its climatic regime and its biodiversity are likewise replicated in few other parts of the globe, all of them on similar latitudes, and most notably in the much smaller area of the Californian coast and its channel islands.

Physically, then, the Mediterranean region (leaving aside for a moment the problem of delimiting the terrestrial environment) really is small, and probably unique. And it carries a great deal—a disproportionate amount—of historical baggage. Durrell was not so wrong.

The task is to preserve a sense of this unique environment in historical work without succumbing to even a weak version of environmental determinism. CS tried to do that by adopting something like a systems approach.

Now the ultra-executive summary of CS is:

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