introduction 5
commonalities of Mediterranean life—as John Davis caricatured it, “a certain kind of
agriculture, a certain respect for towns, a climate, a type of plough and a couple of
syndromes” (1977: 12–13). Instead we encounter a region with suitable post- modern
credentials—a region of cultural fluidity, even perhaps hybridity, and of the move-
ments in space that promote such mixing. In this historiography, the categories of
national traditions (in the arts, in literature, in material culture) or the polarities of
East and West, Christianity and Islam, Europe and the Middle East can be produc-
tively transcended by Mediterranean-wide trail-finding.
Apart from the “flag of convenience” and, we hope, the “romantic,” all those
approaches—the maritime, the environmental, the cultural—are represented in the
following 29 chapters of this Companion. Mediterranean historical writing is, at least
for the moment, always in some way writing against established categories. Therefore
the last thing that would have been imposed on contributors was some stipulative
definition of what the Mediterranean has been and how to view it. It was for each
writer, independently, to articulate and defend—or critique—a conception of the
region, and to show whether or not a Mediterranean paradigm can be heuristically
valuable. Put another way: each chapter is a historia in the ancient sense, an enquiry.
It is an enquiry into the “Mediterranean-ness” of its topic.
The only ground rules for contributors were these. First, there could be no distinc-
tion between “prehistory” and “history”—prehistory is certainly not off limits in a
companion to Mediterranean history. On the contrary, it is indispensable—as it was to
Braudel (2001). Secondly, a chronological approach, though obviously useful at
times, was not essential. We have an excellent and comprehensive narrative, from
“prehistory” onwards, in Abulafia’s Great Sea. There was no need to reproduce or
condense it here. As is clear from the Contents, above, we do have a chronological
section to the book, running from the earliest hominins to post-modernity. But the
point of each chapter in that section is not to retell a story but to re-examine the
periodization that underlies it, and, where necessary, to question the agreed narratives
of growth and decline, continuity and crisis, unity and fragmentation.
Elsewhere, outside the section on “Turning Points and Phases,” all is thematic.
Contributors were urged to pick examples from several different periods, and above
all, to compare, not only within the Mediterranean (however defined) but between
Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean so as to clarify such distinctiveness as the
region may have possessed.
Comparison across presumed boundaries is even more prominent in the final
section, “The Mediterranean and a Wider World.” Mediterranean history is nothing
if it is not also, to some extent, global history, alive to the wider entanglements that
may explain or reflect Mediterranean phenomena. The Mediterranean may or may
not be different from other “inland seas,” whether maritime or, by analogy, terrestrial
(the Steppes, for example).^10 Either way it cannot be considered in isolation from
them, to bring out its peculiarities or to show that it is impossible to delimit.
The editors hope that this book encourages those new to the field to explore its
manifold possibilities, and those already immersed in one part of it to find congenial
company elsewhere. We want skeptics about the Mediterranean to be brought up
short and passionate devotees to re-examine their assumptions. We want to show the
exciting work that has been and is being done and to suggest new paths for the future.
In its breadth and complexity, the subject deserves no less.