introduction 3
sea and an ensemble of hinterlands—the Mediterranean of the eponymous diet, of the
history that Pope John Paul knew—is an invention of the nineteenth century. It does
not emerge earlier (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 532–533). In his defining work, The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972–3), Braudel
is in one sense a descendant of those Enlightenment and romantic Mediterraneanists
for whom “the Mediterranean” was really a metonym for “Italy.”^7 More importantly,
perhaps, he can be seen as falling into a “scientific” tradition that begins in a German
systematic geography that was not much more than a century old when he first plot-
ted and drafted his book—in a German prisoner of war camp (Paris, 1999).
In the current plethora of themes and images of the region, it is hard to appreciate
how novel that attempt to capture the “rhythms of life” of the whole Mediterranean
was then, the 1940s. It was still novel when Braudel published his second edition in
1966 (the French original of his 1972–3). And so to a considerable extent it remained.
One of the, in retrospect, less clairvoyant dicta in Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting
Sea is its prediction of “the end of the Mediterranean” (2000: 39). But that really was
how it seemed in the early 1990s when the book was being drafted. The Mediterranean
Action Plan of 1975 had produced no real academic impact and the political econo-
mists, sociologists, ecologists, and anthropologists whom Purcell and I had been
reading since the late 1980s did not seem to think that “the Mediterranean” had any
great future as a distinct field of study (2000: 19–21). The Barcelona Process, 1995,
similarly had little intellectual impact. Indeed, all the relevant disciplines seemed to
have ignored or skirted round “the Mediterranean” as a category. Historians were
reading, or at least citing, Foucault. Microhistories were preferred to grand regional
syntheses. In social anthropology, “area studies” and “culture areas” had rightly fallen
into disrepute, as products of a Cold-War mentality. John Davis’ 1977 survey of “peo-
ple of the Mediterranean,” based on field work in Libya as well as southern Italy and
also on wide reading, had, for all its learning and its avoidance of easy generalization,
given way to the “anti-Mediterraneanism” of Michael Herzfeld and others, for whom
“the Mediterranean” was a category as crude, self-serving and politically odious as
“the Orient” (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 486–487).^8 Meanwhile, the linguistic/
cultural “turn” militated against the materialism seen to be inherent in regional work
of the kind we were pursuing. If one really wanted geographical history of the
Mediterranean, none the less, then Braudel had surely said it all.
How the whole outlook has changed, and how rapidly. We need look no further
than the proliferation of journal or periodical titles with the word “Mediterranean” in
them. The first part of the story of this growth of “serial cultivation” has been told by
Alcock (2005) and Morris (2009). The growth in numbers began in the 1970s, after
Braudel’s work appeared in French, but the real “take off” did not come until the
1990s. In the 2000s, searching in a major library catalogue for “Mediterranean” as a
word in periodical titles will yield 130 or so entries—not all of them historical or
scholarly of course, but part of a far wider phenomenon that has both reflected and
stimulated the growth of academic preoccupations: the Mediterraneanization, as we
could call it, echoing Morris’ (2009) article, of titles of books, websites, list servers,
study centers, research projects, and undergraduate courses, as well as journals.
Why this explosion of interest? The headings for a proper, wide-ranging historical
answer—about historiography, about the social sciences more widely, and about the
wider cultural history that gives rise to the “Mediterranean diet”—would include, but