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374 Four Years of Corruption
Third, a point repeatedly made—and well made—by Shaw: 46
over time and space, power and capital (both symbolic and
material) are concentrated and dispersed in various ways in
the Mediterranean, not least by the state. There is not, on this
score, the even continuum that we have (mistakenly) been held
to present. Therefore, of course, some analysis is needed of the
‘mechanism’ of concentration and dispersal beyond generic
references to greed and ‘intensification’. Moreover, whether
or not an explanatory theory is possible here, some overarching
account is required to link the major concentrations of power
together into a sequence that would show both their chronology
and their relative size.
Fourth and last, then, we need a master narrative. What could
such a narrative look like? It might, like Wittgenstein’s philosophy,
‘leave everything as it is’. That is, our ecological account
may, on the whole, reflect the micro-foundations of what is
already known about the rise and fall, the conflict and coexistence,
of polities, empires, and cultures in and around the Mediterranean.
But that ecological history does not necessitate any
‘surface’ change in what the textbooks say. Such an outcome is
conceivable. We now have a sophisticated and up-to-date instance
of such a political and economic narrative in David
Abulafia’s edited volume, The Mediterranean in History,
which perhaps dispenses us from going over the same ‘ground’
in LC. 47
The alternative—a narrative written on our own primarily
ecological terms—is hard to envisage. Clearly it would not be
simple and linear. We have been correctly diagnosed as ‘resolutely
anti-historicist’ (Fentress and Fentress 2001: 213). We
share Braudel’s ‘vision . . . résolument non téléologique’. 48
There is plenty of room in our Mediterranean for événements,
well beyond what most would call humming and buzzing—but
there is no evolution (Fentress and Fentress 2001: 217). A
master narrative can, of course, have themes and turning points
without being teleological. To isolate them at the political,
46 Esp. 434, 345, 349, 441–2, 443, 447.
47 See also J. Carpentier and F. Lebrun (eds.), Histoire de la Méditerranée
(Paris, 1998), which we were not able to cite in CS.
48 A. Molho and D. Ramada Curto, ‘Les réseaux marchands à l’époque
moderne’, Annales 58 (2003), 569–79 at 571.