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366 Four Years of Corruption
combined—in the nineteenth century(!)—precarious and involuted
behaviour with many classic traits of ‘the corrupting sea’,
above all those occasional and opportunistic engagements with
different kinds of redistribution. The area happens to be rich in
remains of a prosperous, surplus-producing agrosystem of the
Roman period, based on a network of large villages and thriving
cities. It would be much harder to read stories of Mediterranean
corruption solely from the archaeology of its late Ottoman
phase. In any case, as far as CS is concerned, just as some topics
lie ‘above’ the reach of our microregional conception (‘ultraviolet’),
so others are ‘infrared’. Those areas entirely cut off from
connectivity or unable to manage production in the ways that
we have taken as characteristic are indeed set apart from the
Mediterranean world: ‘in’ the region, but not ‘of’ it, perhaps. If
they are relatively few they tend to confirm our picture. If on
the other hand, the difficulties of interpreting the evidence of
connectivity and isolation could be overcome and their ubiquity
could be demonstrated, then they would naturally undermine
our project.
Finally, our Mediterranean world has frontiers, even if they
shift, are mostly ‘fuzzy’, and can be nearly imperceptible (as in
the Middle East). In a way, these frontiers provide a perpetual
falsification of our approach. If they reached too far, or too
often, into the region, we should be proved mistaken. We have
said little about frontiers in CS but promise to return to them in
LC in our discussion of the Mediterranean and a wider world. 33
In LC we shall also take the opportunity, under that same
heading, to juxtapose the Mediterranean and comparable regions.
The question has been raised: have we produced a universal
solvent (Shaw 2001: 452)? Could the same approach not
be applied to the Baltic world (Molho 2002: 489, Hodges 2001:
378, van Dommelen 2000: 231) or to the Indian Ocean? Is the
Thames Valley not a fragmented landscape held together by
waterborne communications (D’Hautcourt 2001: 223)? Yes,
33 For a preliminary statement, however, see Purcell, ‘Boundless Sea of
Unlikeness?’. We have sometimes been charged with deflecting criticism of
our omissions with the response that they will be repaired in LC. But apart
from explicitly allowing ourselves space there to respond to critics (as in the
opening quotation above) the contents of LC are outlined in the Introduction
to CS.