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The View from the Customs House 203
the inhabitants of the Mediterranean on the part of the powerful
was related to the other factors affecting human choices, and it
is naturally in this area that we should seek some of the closest
ties between the conditions of production, in a Mediterranean
world of high fragmentation and risk but relatively easy redistribution,
and the social, political and cultural systems found
there. In this chapter, therefore, my aim is to look precisely at
an instance of ‘tax morphology’ to explore how these ties might
be presented. By investigating a prominent, and, I want to
argue, very individual, aspect of the tax morphology of several
different periods of Mediterranean history in widely scattered
places, I hope to show—against expectations!—just how interesting
and useful differentiation using this tool may actually be;
and to suggest how certain basic conditions of human life in the
pre-modern Mediterranean do underlie not just the day-to-day
realities of life terre-à-terre, or the experience of caboteurs, but
major features of the organization of entire societies. It has
rightly been said that ‘l’espace insaisissable des économies antiques’
is only accessible through the study of social forms. 7
2. taxation and mobility
State exactions and their morphology are naturally closely
adapted to the productive activities which yield the substance
which they seek to procure. If those activities are distinctive to a
place or time, we may expect tax morphology to follow suit. If
the Mediterranean can claim to have a distinctive regime of
production, it will be worth looking to see if it has pari passu a
distinctive set of parameters of extraction.
Mediterranean primary production does have a number of
distinctive features, and we shall return to some of them by an
indirect route later in this chapter. But one of the characteristics
best suited to identifying the Mediterranean as a distinctive
object of reflection is provided by the sea itself as the medium
and focus of a network of communications which renders the
mobility of people and things relatively easy. It is important
7 J. Andreau and A. Schnapp, ‘Ettore Lepore, la colonisation et l’écriture
de l’histoire ancienne’, in E. Lepore, La Grande Grèce: Aspects et problèmes
d’une colonisation ancienne (Naples, 2000), 7–15 at 8.