4 peregrine horden
not be limited to: globalization; “the clash of civilizations” debate (Bonney, 2008);
9/11 and the “war on terror”; post-colonialism with its de-centering, its inversion of
cores and peripheries; anti-nationalism and “anti-continentalism” in politics;
anti-essentialism about geographical areas generally; the growing vogue for cultural
studies; a related vogue for comparison in the humanistic disciplines, or better, for a
“trans-national” successor, in which everything is “entangled.” Which of these was
most important, it is, as Zhou Enlai would agree, too early to tell. The Mediterranean
has been literally a site on which so many global anxieties and controversies can focus.
In academic (and maritime) terms the wave has yet to crest.
None the less this is a good moment to take stock. Hence this Companion.
Mediterranean history may be a surprisingly popular discipline, but it is not an estab-
lished one, with clear parameters, agendas or methods. Any new scholarly initiative
that invokes the Mediterranean is an invitation—whether implicit or explicit—to
debate. What is “Mediterranean history”—if anything? How should it be pursued—if
at all? What definitions of the Mediterranean might appropriately animate it? What
should its scope be, in terms of both period and subject matter? On none of these
questions is there anything like consensus.
Even amongst those most committed to the Mediterranean project, diversity
reigns. Yet of the many ways in which Mediterranean history is being presented in the
early twenty-first century, four stand out.
Type 1: the Mediterranean may be a flag of convenience, a way of glamorizing a
subject or approach that is actually very traditional, or that makes little reference to
the geographical setting, or that is actually dealing only with a small part or aspect
of the region’s past. This usage benefits from the long tradition of romantic
Mediterraneanism, whose greatest exponent was Goethe and whose least distin-
guished is all around us, in touristic ephemera.^9
So, in a different way, does Type 2. There may be no agreed definitions of the
Mediterranean region, and the anti-Mediterraneanists would say that that is because
“it” does not exist except as a subject of various self-serving “discourses” (Herzfeld,
2005). But the Mediterranean Sea is out there as an unbroken, if subdivided, stretch
of water—big as it must have seemed to the mariners of “deep time,” small to Durrell—
and people cross it and live on its islands. It is that ensemble of island populations and
Mediterranean-wide crossings, by people, their goods and their cultures, that
makes Mediterranean history. The foremost exponent of this “hyper-maritime”
approach to Mediterranean history is David Abulafia, especially in his The Great Sea:
A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011).
Type 3 is environmental-cum-geographical history. Here, in this region, is a clash,
not so much of civilizations, as of tectonic plates. On top of that lies the world’s larg-
est inland sea, within a greater zone of topographical fragmentation that has few
analogues worldwide except perhaps in South-East Asia. There is a distinctive climatic
regime and a level of biodiversity that again has few counterparts elsewhere. The
Mediterranean region of the geographers and geologists is not unique but it is to the
highest degree unusual. That ought to count for something in the historical under-
standing of this part of the world—whether the model adopted be Braudel’s limited
environmental determinism or Horden and Purcell’s ecological approach.
Type 4 is the youngest within this still young discipline. It reintroduces the
Mediterranean as a culture area. Gone, though, are the old clichés of the supposed