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358 Four Years of Corruption
CS was an attempt to provide a backdrop against which those
other kinds of history could be written. Many reviewers have
regretted that more extended attention was not given to social,
economic, and cultural forms held to have been characteristic of
the Mediterranean coastlands; and indeed, social and economic
change in the region can hardly be sensibly modelled without
including these culturally more specific elements. On the other
hand, the social variables have often seemed so very varied as to
make wide-ranging comparisons unhelpful, and our search was
for the common denominators that would promote comparison.
Doubtless we took that as an excuse to miss out too much.
One of the most arresting criticisms of our picture (as e.g. by
Shaw 2001: 441) is the absence from CS of the state—especially
by comparison with our project’s great inspiration and progenitor,
Braudel’s Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. 20
The implication is perhaps that our omission is both unjustifiable
and convenient: history can hardly do without such institutions,
and, had we attempted to say more about them, we
should have faced far greater difficulty in defending the comparability
of very different epochs. We confess, naturally, to a
degree of omission. The state is not in fact wholly absent from
our index and is more widely present than its entry there would
suggest because it is subsumed by our wider category of ‘managers’
of microecologies: the ‘powerful’ who direct production.
But on a Braudellian yardstick our treatment is of course brief
and unsystematic. Our aim was to seek precisely those structures
and continuities that are camouflaged by the glitter of
diversity in this most culturally complex and mouvementée of
regions. And our reluctance to pursue in detail, for a hundred
different societies, how this may be worked out is therefore the
product simply of the constraints of scale and available time. 21
Elsewhere in this volume, Purcell tries to show how the gap may
be bridged, through the study of a ‘middle-order’ historical
phenomenon, halfway between the ecological foundations and
the culturally specific structures.
20 Even though many critics of Braudel have noted that his political narrative
in vol. 2 is somewhat detached from his historical ecology in vol. 1: CS
41–2.
21 One striking example is offered by S. K. Cohn, Creating the Florentine
State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge, 1999).