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The Mediterranean and Ancient History 23
being so obviously deep-rooted in time, and it is often said to be
distinctively Mediterranean. 66 Which may suggest that a practice
can be distinctive but at the same time not defining.
What Horden and Purcell insist on as the peculiarity of
Mediterranean food production is that it was especially full of
risk. 67 The risks are clear enough: the difficulty is that risk is
also the chronic condition of pre-modern farmers (and not only
pre-modern ones), in plenty of other places, such as, purely for
the sake of example, China and tropical Africa. 68 ‘It is the
frequency of change from year to year, in both production and
distribution, that makes Mediterranean history distinctive’, it is
said. 69 That would be hard to establish. ‘In France, there were
sixteen nation-wide famines between 1700 and 1789’. 70
A stronger meaning of Mediterranean ecological unity
depends on whether local economies are solidly connected to
the wider Mediterranean (and disconnected from other parts
of the world?). If a great many people who lived on the Mediterranean’s
shores at any particular time were autarkic fishermen
or pastoralists or farmers, then the Mediterranean was not
in this sense a unit. And in that case we should rate the Mediterranean
less important at the date in question than other
realms of connectedness such as the micro-microregion (if
such a phrase is allowed) or a great river valley. But what in
any case constitutes a connection? Not only cabotage, longrange
trade, piracy and migration, but many other forms of
human and also non-human movement, including the spread
of plants and of diseases.
66 See for instance P. Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-
Roman World (Cambridge, 1988), 201.
67 CS 178, 287. The notion that it was environmental risk that led ancient
Mediterranean communities to communicate with one another seems particularly
unsupported.
68 In a survey of world pastoralism, the only region where risk management,
rather than profit maximization, is said to be the aim is as it happens the
Andes: D. L. Brownan, ‘High Altitude Camelid Pastoralism of the Andes’, in
J. G. Galaty and D. L. Johnson (eds.), The World of Pastoralism: Herding
Systems in Comparative Perspective (New York and London, 1990), 323–52:
325–6.
69 CS 74.
70 M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of
Britain 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995), 56.