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Mediterranean story of plants and power, the greatest shift of all does not fit in: it was
not sponsored by any empire. The Stone Age spread of most important Mediterranean
food and textile plants from southwest Asia westward was probably the decisive botan-
ical transfer in the Mediterranean past, but was painfully slow when measured against
the mere centuries of Islamic or Roman imperial dissemination: wheat, for instance,
domesticated around 8000 bce in the Fertile Crescent, marched through Anatolia
and the eastern Mediterranean at a rate of 1.2 km per year, reaching the western
shores of the sea around 5000 (Naveh and Vernet, 1991: 27). Paleobotanists estimate
that it took almost 1500 years for grains and legumes to move from Apulia to
Lombardy, a distance of some 800 km that a Roman army could traverse in a matter
of days and a Roman merchantman even more rapidly (Hopf, 1991: 243). It appears
that the “Neolithic package” of plants and techniques moved westward somewhat
faster along the maritime portions of the journey, within the Mediterranean, than
overland in Anatolia, or central and northern Europe: measured in historical time,
however, the movement was sluggish (Cunliffe, 2008: 123).
The snail-like speed of transmission should not distract from the achievement.
Small bands of scattered cultivators, and maybe some bold individuals, hived off
from their tiny settlements and, carrying with them seeds and a few tools, convinced
gatherers to try something new, thereby spreading similar cultivated plants from one
end to the other of the Inner Sea. They rendered possible more complex, stratified
societies and bigger communities, if not higher standards of living. Indeed, viewed
within the enormously long durations of prehistory, the really exciting age of
Mediterranean plant introductions came to a close in the Iron Age, 1000 or more
years before the rise of Islam or Rome (Zohary, 1998: 127; Flahaut, 1937: 157–158).
This undermines one presupposition of Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange:” namely,
that strong, invasive cultivars brought by organized, imperialistic people swiftly over-
whelm simpler natives, a precondition to domination. The Neolithic transfer of grains
and legumes (and later of fruit trees) from the east Mediterranean basin to the other
end took place outside the logic of empire, yet characterized the distribution of the
region’s cultivated plants more than the coordinated efforts of sultans, caliphs, and
semi-divine emperors. Not an empire, but a prolonged muddling-through, a series of
tentative experiments by anonymous subsistence farmers, created the triad of grain,
olives, and grapes that became enduringly “Mediterranean” (Cunliffe, 2008: 26, 123).
Empires of plants I: RomeFrom the second century bce to the fifth ce, the Roman empire held together the
inhabitants of all circum-Mediterranean lands, and some from beyond that area too.
During this first (and, so far, last) unification of the sea, sophisticated land- and
sea-networks eased communications within and beyond the limes. Romanization,
however modulated by provincial agency, brought similar expectations to the empire’s
elites, and a more homogenous material culture to all. A curious botanical illustration
of Romanization is the meadow, a novel plant assemblage in several provinces that
Roman metallurgy and long iron blades made possible: before the scythe, making hay
was inconceivable in still meadowless Gaul (Foxhall, Jones, and Forbes, 2007: 110).
Romanization also introduced scores of Mediterranean agricultural plants far beyond
the sea’s shores: in Britain archeobotanists have catalogued about 50, and, if many of