are subsumed under‘small world’networks.^34 ‘Interaction’does not just
apply to human communities. We also need a more systematic approach
to human interactions with landscapes,flora and fauna. The value that
Horden and Purcell ascribe to those aspects of Mediterranean ecologies
that most ancient histories have eschewed—the role of marginal
resources; of wetland environment, tree crops, textiles, and sedimentary
history—is among the more significant and original contributions of
their encyclopaedic study.^35
EMERGING MARKETS
Markets, however, get modest recognition as vectors of exchange in
Horden and Purcell’s ecological history of the Mediterranean.‘The
“market”is among those features of modernity whose presence or
absence in the past is principally of interest from the progressivist
point of view’.^36 Perhaps markets seemed to the authors an unattractively
formal element, which disrupts their morefluid notion of‘redistribu-
tion’, incorporating as it does commercial and non-market exchanges.
Yet it is impossible to consider economic behaviour without clarifying
the role of markets, which presuppose a set of important juridical
concepts—concepts that participants in a market need to share for any
exchanges, however modest, however informal, to take place. Not only
must there be some mechanism for protecting the goods or commodities
offered for sale (and of ensuring the quality of what was for sale), but
there must also be recognition that property rights have been transferred
from the seller to the purchaser. A widespread conviction by economists
in the universality of‘the market’has meant that there has been surpris-
ingly little investigation of how markets evolved and how they differ in
historical and cultural terms.^37 If‘progressivism’is a fault, then the
(^34) Horden and Purcell 2000, 115–22 (dispersed hinterlands); 123–72 (connectivity); cf.
Watts 2003, 19–42, 159–61, 239–41, 299–301; Shaw 2001, 447; Archibald 2005a, 7–8;
Malkin 2011, 15–64.
(^35) Horden and Purcell 2000, 178–230 (margins and wetlands); 237–63 (the irrigated
landscape); 298–341 (Mediterranean catastrophes).‘Here is where an ecological approach
comes into its own, as accounts of culinary repertoires and agrosystems merge almost
seamlessly into discussions of the socialized landscape and its transformations.’(Algazi
2005, 234). 36
Horden and Purcell 2000, 149; see Algazi 2005, 243 for a spirited critique. Purcell has
responded in the subject matter of the Sather Lectures, delivered in 2011. 37
Granovetter 1985, 499–503 (critique of Oliver Williamson’sMarkets and Hierarchies,
1975); Hodgson 2001, 248–57, 249, 256, on the neglect of markets as institutions by
98 Societies and economies