CONCLUSION
For a book that appeared in 1993, the choice of the title The Mediterranean World
in Late Antiquity did not seem to need justification. Given the many publica-
tions that have subsequently appeared with the word ‘Mediterranean’ in their
titles, it now indeed seems prescient.^1 It has been traditional to see the fall of
the Roman empire, or at least ‘the end of the ancient world’, as marking a criti-
cal break in historical continuity in the history of the Mediterranean world.
However, in their book, The Corrupting Sea,^2 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas
Purcell present the history of the Mediterranean in terms of continuities,
abiding structures and the longue durée. In this vision, geography and deeply
ingrained social patterns matter more than events, and link all parts of the
Mediterranean in commonality. Rather than emphasizing long-distance trad-
ing patterns and ruptures, Purcell and Horden lay stress on the continuation
at all periods of small-scale connectivity. The ancient Mediterranean world
belongs therefore to a system which links it to the Mediterranean worlds of
later periods and even of today. Others have taken up this way of thinking and
applied the term ‘Mediterranean’ to other seas (‘other Mediterraneans’),^3 but
the Purcell and Horden model explicitly disrupts the dominant emphasis on
long-distance exchange as the marker of Mediterranean unity in late antiquity.
The view of the Mediterranean world in the late Roman period as a more or
less unified economic system is still to be found in other works; for instance,
in Brent Shaw’s comments on Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages,
a book with the sub-title Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. Shaw sees
‘the Roman Mediterranean world-system’ or ‘Mediterranean world-system
(MWS)’ as a unified system that was being reconfigured, or indeed was frag-
menting, before the end of Wickham’s chosen period, i.e. by AD 800.^4 Michael
McCormick’s book, Origins of the European Economy, also takes a Mediterranean-
wide view and focuses on long-distance trade and travel;^5 his findings point
to a general downturn in cross-Mediterranean activity in the seventh century
followed by an upturn by c. 900. This emphasis on long-distance shipping as
an indicator of Mediterranean unity has been a powerful theme in the intense
study of ceramics as evidence of trade and economic activity during the last
generation, and while the study of amphorae in this sense dates only from
the 1970s, the importance attached to cross-Mediterranean travel has been