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The View from the Customs House 231
But my principal provisional conclusion is of course that tax
morphology maps a historical congruity within the Mediterranean
that stretches from the late Bronze Age to the Renaissance,
and which—again—seems to distinguish a Mediterranean historical
object from its neighbours. The explanation lies in the
durability of a distinctive set of economic and social relations
deriving from the opportunities offered by high connectivity in
a fragmented, risky environment: in durability of a set of relations—but
not, let us be clear, in immemorial continuities. The
resemblances which we can trace in the morphology of levies on
interdependence are based on the regeneration and recreation of
fluid and responsive patterns of behaviour. 85 The opportunism
of the people who produced for redistribution, those who
moved what they produced, those who taxed what was moved,
and those who built their power on the proceeds of those taxes,
was founded on a highly developed capacity for adaptation.
Bewildering change in the patterns of population, production,
consumption, and hegemony, are not mere accidental hindrances
to making sense of Mediterranean history, but part of
its distinctiveness. 86
The study of this tax morphology, bridging the gap, as I have
argued it must, between the microregional foundations and the
organization of social and political systems on even a very large
scale, would, among other things, begin to offer a way of using
an economic anthropology alongside other aspects of anthropology
in the pursuit of a distinctively Mediterranean history.
It would also invite us to consider other structural comparanda
across the longer term in Mediterranean history—overseas
settlements, trading communities, allotment of land, and so
on. Indeed, the morphology of the exaction of indirect taxes is
likely to be one of the fields in which networks and phases of
overseas settlement have individual characteristics. 87 And none
of these can be understood without reference to the sea.
85
Cahen, ‘Douanes’, 226, on change; on the other hand, for the establishment
of regular rhythms, Briant and Descat, ‘Un registre’, 73.
86
The ‘differences that resemble each other’: Horden and Purcell, CS 52
and ch.III.
87
This point is developed further in Purcell, ‘Colonization and Mediterranean
History’.