In their magnificent and immensely erudite survey of historyof,not in,
the Mediterranean, Horden and Purcell have rejected Rostovtzeff’ssocio-
economic construction as an obsolete relic of early twentieth-century
scholarship. Their argument relies partly on a perceived contrast between
his‘grandly interactionist’conception and an‘ecologizing’one. Whilst
their own approach is avowedly ecological, they reject the tendency of the
Annalisteschool of history, whose practitioners have so consistently
attempted to unite geographical with historical approaches, towards‘a
somewhat dogmatic substitution of analysis for narrative; statistics for
impressions; comparativism and methodological self-consciousness for
naïve positivism; and, above all, as befits a broadly sociological approach,
a concentration on the anonymous masses instead of conspicuous indi-
viduals, and on continuities and regularities instead of rapid changes.’^40
Rostovtzeff’s narrative consciously or unconsciously comprised a deter-
ministic tendency that merges, ironically perhaps, with the geographical
determinism that Horden and Purcell have criticized so trenchantly. The
Hellenistic world tended to decay in Rostovtzeff’s imagination, and the
city of Rome reshaped the inner forces of the eastern half of her Empire to
prevent decay and restore peace.^41 Whatever we think of the political
narrative encapsulated in this vision, it does not begin to describe the
economic relationships within the region, even for the latter end of the
five centuries under consideration in this book. An economic narrative
will not necessarily coincide with the kind of grand political narrative
espoused by Rostovtzeff. Ultimately, his single, overarching explanatory
theory meant that the historian downplayed the very components that
constituted the‘bourgeois’productivity that created material success for
the north Aegean.
Had he considered the productive technology that his footnotes and
figures illustrate so effectively in the context of more specific, time- and
space-limited parameters, later historians might well have paid more
serious attention to these material developments and to their irregular
distribution in space and time. As it is, the grand historical narrative of
political conquest and expansion in the eastern Mediterranean has more
often than not been retained, whether out of conviction, or in order to
counteract the tendencies towards impersonal patterns to which Horden
and Purcell allude, while the clues inherent in the material evidence have
been judged less relevant. Before considering the role and significance of
productive technologies, an even grander perspective should be con-
sidered than the one presented by Rostovtzeff, and on a longer time scale.
(^40) Horden and Purcell, 39. (^41) Archibald 2001, 380.
24 Introduction