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30 The Mediterranean and Ancient History
emphasis. 93 Towns, in the view of Horden and Purcell, are
simply microregions writ small (or large?), and there is no
‘urban variable’ that made town life ‘qualitatively . . . different
from that of other settlements’. 94 Now we see why Rostovtzeff,
Pirenne, Goitein, and Braudel were singled out at the beginning
of the book as the four historians to undermine. It was a slightly
odd line-up for the year 2000, for none of them, not even
Braudel, could be said to represent what scholars currently
think about the history of the ancient or medieval Mediterranean—a
subject that has inevitably passed into other hands; 95
but, as historians, they were all lovers of cities.
Here Horden and Purcell are almost symmetrically at odds
with the dominant trend in anthropology, and their approach
seems retardataire, since it echoes what De Pina-Cabral has
called ‘the ruralist emphasis of social anthropology’ 96 characteristic
of the 1950s—and still detectable in the 1990s. 97 Meanwhile,
the anthropology of consumption and a variety of other
interests have led anthropologists more and more to town.
In the end, I think that this ‘ruralization’ is misguided, but it
has an immediate attraction. Most ancient and medieval people
are widely believed to have lived in the countryside. What
proportion is of course unknown, and estimates will partly
depend on defining such terms as ‘town’ and ‘village’. Hopkins
has guessed that the urban population of the Mediterranean
provinces of the Roman Empire might have made up 10 to 20
per cent of the total. 98 Horden and Purcell conjecture, for the
pre-industrial Mediterranean, an urban population of ‘3, 5, 10
per cent: a figure of that order’. 99 It would make no sense,
93
CS 92.
94
CS 96. But they hold that ‘the Mediterranean has been the most durably
and densely urbanized region in world history. . . . The major cities have . . .
been the sites . . . in which the fortunes of its populations have principally been
determined’ (CS 90). The town drives the authors to a shameless display of
verbal bravura: incastellamento, densening, tentacular.
95
CS 91 says that these four ‘dominate modern thinking about the Mediterranean’.
It is the tense that is wrong.
96
De Pina-Cabral, ‘The Mediterranean’, 405.
97
See, for instance, Sant Cassia, ‘Authors in Search’, 10.
98
K. Hopkins, ‘Rome, Taxes, Rent and Trade’, Kodai 6/7 (1995/6), 41–75:
46.
99
CS 92.