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Four Years of Corruption 363
despite its obvious vulnerability, distinguished scholars have
often used this form of argument. We await a more solidly
founded restatement of the ineluctable differences between the
ancient and medieval Mediterraneans, and we are heartened by
the fact that the only reviewer known to us to have doubts about
our chronological ‘levelling’ (Shaw again, p. 446) has to reach
into the early modern period before Mediterranean conditions
that look different from our presentation begin to be readily
documented. Pending further assaults of that type but using
earlier (i.e. medieval) evidence, we take it that our approach to
Antiquity and the Middle Ages has gained broad assent; and we
interpret that in turn as an absence (so far) of major falsification.
Far from seeing the time-span that we cover as too long, as
smoothing out divisions between periods, and as thus calling
our approach into question, some have thought it not long
enough. Our reluctant obituary of ‘the corrupting sea’, killed
off by the political reconfigurations of the second half of the last
century, by economic globalization, etc., has sometimes been
read as too cautious. We are heartened that our approach might
after all have something to offer the student of the modern, even
the contemporary, Mediterranean as it is (re?)unified by its
reaction to tourism and its reinventions of tradition (cf. Driessen
2001: 530). 26 Meanwhile, at the other chronological extreme,
Broodbank has suggested 27 that we were too timid in
our incursions back into prehistory and that we should have
extended our coverage more thoroughly into the second millennium
bc. Indeed, some prefiguring of the Mediterranean patterns
that we identify and treat as central can be discerned still
earlier than that. 28
26 We acknowledge here most warmly the informal (unpublished) welcome
extended to our anthropology by Thomas Hauschild. See also D. Abulafia
(ed.), The Mediterranean in History, 283–312, concluding that the two later
twentieth-century agents of transformation in the region have been the aeroplane
and the bikini.
27 Broodbank, ‘Before Corruption’. See also M. Suano, ‘The First Trading
Empires’, in Abulafia, The Mediterranean in History, 67–93.
28 If A.T. Grove and O. Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe:
An Ecological History (New Haven and London, 2001), 150, are correct,
however, the climatic element in the distinctive regime of risk that we find
in the Mediterranean has been present only since the aridization of (broadly)
the fourth millennium bc.