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36 The Mediterranean and Ancient History
Empire as a whole managed its timber resources sensibly is not
realistic.
The primary analytic choice of Horden and Purcell is to
dissolve or dispense with a number of seldom-questioned categories.
They claim that their argument is directed against
typologies, 121 but the attack goes much further than that. It is
never unmotivated, but seldom if ever does it succeed (so it
seems to me). Towns we have already considered. More fundamentally
still, the authors wish away periods, and in particular
any divide between ancient and medieval. Lines of ‘connectivity’
were never truly broken, they say. They speak instead of ‘a
complex tangle of abatements’. 122 Now, no historian doubts
that major changes of period are complex affairs—hence all
those interminable arguments, more beloved of continental
scholars than of Anglo-Saxons, about continuity and discontinuity.
But the Mediterranean world underwent vast economic
and social as well as political and religious changes in late
antiquity. What appears to be the key section of The Corrupting
Sea simply does not face the evidence for major changes,
let alone explain them. 123
It is perhaps less clear what The Corrupting Sea wants to do to
the distinction between private enterprise and the state: the
authors simply say they want to ‘by-pass’ it. 124 That is to be
Vegetation’, in F. di Castri, D. W. Goodall, and R. L. Specht (eds.), Mediterranean-type
Shrublands (Amsterdam and Oxford, 1981), 479–521: 514) for the
1980 consumption by 50 million people living in developing Mediterranean
countries—27 million tons a year; but even this estimate is quite likely, for
reasons (climactic among others) that cannot be entered into here, to be too low.
121 122
CS 101. CS 154–5.
123
CS 263–70. But see Fentress and Fentress, review, Past and Present,
214–17: 215: ‘the fact that we cannot pin down a moment when the change
takes place does not prove that it never happened. . . . Between the third and
the end of the seventh century many Roman landscapes disappeared for ever
[details follow].’ Compare the overview of the late-antique/early mediaeval
city in G. P. Brogiolo and B. Ward-Perkins (eds.), The Idea and Ideal of the
Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 1999), pp.
xv–xvi: there was no mere transformation, ‘the changes that occurred in urban
life generally look more like the dissolution of a sophisticated and impressive
experiment in how to order society . . . ’.
124
CS 338. For the ‘systemic linking of state and private enterprise’ in the
ancient Mediterranean world see Shaw, review (n. 28), 441–2 (Roman republican
publicani, etc.), and cf. Van De Mieroop, below p. 136.