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15
Four Years of Corruption:
A Response to Critics
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell
‘A second instalment will . . . allow us an opportunity to respond
to criticisms of the first, in the interests of the debate that we
should like to promote.’ When we wrote those words, in the
Introduction to The Corrupting Sea (p. 4), the second instalment
that we had in mind was volume 2 of the project, now provisionally
entitled Liquid Continents (LC). Since that volume is still ‘in
progress’, however, we are grateful for the opportunity to offer
here some interim discussion of reactions to CS, mainly as
expressed in the more substantial reviews, but also, occasionally,
as conveyed at symposia and in private correspondence and
conversation. 1 We have tried to resist the temptation to engage
simply in tit-for-tat rejoinder. This is, rather, a contribution to
what we hope will be a continuing debate, and it covers only a
selection of what strike us as the main issues. The notion of the
‘essentially contested concept’, invoked in the final paragraph of
CS (p. 523), may be old-fashioned philosophy, but shows no
sign of losing its applicability to Mediterranean studies.
1. quid eis cum pelago?
the response by discipline
Before we continue the ‘contest’ we should first like to look at it
from the outside and ask, not how, but where CS has been
1 We consider only some of the reviews that we have come across, cited
hereafter by author’s name: D. Abulafia, Times Literary Supplement 14 April
2000, 9–10; G. Astill, Landscape History 23 (2001), 100–1; A. D’Hautcourt,
Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 79 (2001), 219–23; H. Driessen, American
Anthropologist 103 (2001), 528–31; E. Fentress and J. Fentress, ‘The Hole