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Four Years of Corruption 367
indeed—and stated in very brief abstract terms our approach is
clearly applicable to many parts of the globe. But the difference
is in the details, in the particulars of risk regimes, forms of
connectivity or whatever, to which it is applied. Our approach
is not beyond falsification because it is adaptable. Moreover, we
expect some of the other ‘liquid continents’ found across the
world to be different from the Mediterranean, because of their
degree or type of connectivity, their level of fragmentation, or
the diversity of productive opportunities evident on their
shores. Even if analogous corrupting waters could be identified
in the Baltic or Black Seas, the Caribbean, or the Philippines (or
the Thames Valley), that would not falsify our approach to the
Mediterranean. It would not unmask it as a universal solvent
that, capturing anything or anywhere, explains nothing. Rather,
we propose, it would show its value as a heuristic tool for the
study of a set of environments that is still, in global terms, very
limited.
5. monstrous squid or calamari? 34
If our approach has been thought too generalized and adaptable
to be contradicted by the evidence, it has also been seen as too
nice: the ‘flexible friend’. First, our description of the geographically
all-round and chronologically all-year-round connectivity
of the sea itself has been seen as anachronistic projection of
contemporary frictionless communication onto the Mediterranean
past. We hope never to have underestimated the dangers
of Mediterranean seafaring represented both anecdotally and in
the shipwrecks that have been found. The dangers were at no
time an absolute deterrent, however; not even in the early
Middle Ages, as the researches of McCormick have shown
through numerous examples. 35 To our surprise, the Elephantine
palimpsest does reveal commercial shipping in the fifthcentury
bc eastern Mediterranean in all except two winter
34 See Squatriti 268 on the perceived danger to early medieval shipping of
monstrous squid, which for us, supposedly, are mere calamari.
35 McCormick, Origins. Even our pirates have been thought too nice because
we are taken to imply (something we never intended) that they, like
pastoralists, exist in symbiosis with those whose lives they disrupt (Fentress
and Fentress 214).