Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

362 Four Years of Corruption
Let us try to put our response to these criticisms at its most
general by asking ourselves the Popperian question: is our view
of the Mediterranean susceptible to falsification?
First, we should stress again that what we offer is only a
perspective on the subject, a synthesis of analytical tools—it is
hardly amenable to quantification. That is, no one (least of all
ourselves) can, for example, specify how much variability or
discontinuity is outside what we conceive as the normal range
and could therefore invalidate our picture of the broad Mediterranean
continuum. Our perspective either carries conviction
as a way of relating diverse aspects of Mediterranean history or
it does not.
Of course, the model can be rejected outright, but only by
denying its major parameters. Of these the most important,
fragmentation and connectivity, seem to us to be fairly robust
and to have been accepted by virtually all reviewers. But they
are not so obvious as to be commonplaces. Many archaeologists
and anthropologists of the Mediterranean have found it necessary
to elaborate the microregional structure of their areas of
study; and new and constructive research on the precise nature
of interdependence in all periods of Mediterranean history is
being published every year.
In this context, a further significant aspect of CS is that our
approach has been accepted as yielding results across many
different chronological periods, from the Bronze Age to the
Renaissance. This is surely a long enough span to establish
what has broadly been normal. Our approach could be falsified
by showing for instance that the nexus of connectivity and
fragmentation in the Middle Ages radically differed from that
of (say) the Roman Empire. Yet, as we suggested above, while
medievalists have not, in reviews, engaged with CS as fully as we
had hoped, they do not seem to have denied the fundamental
applicability of its approach. At the ancient end of our period,
downplaying of the interconnectedness of Roman economies has
often relied on what one might call the missing wheelbarrow
argument: the ancient world had no windmills, double-entry
bookkeeping, whatever. Shaw suggests (2001: 431) that, in
attacking arguments of this kind, and thereby asserting the
closer comparability of Roman and medieval, we are actually
tilting at windmills rather than denying their relevance. Yet,