Across the Corrupting Sea

Post-Braudelian Approaches to the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

Cavan Concannon, Lindsey A. Mazurek, Cavan Concannon, Lindsey A. Mazurek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317185796
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Across the Corrupting Sea: Post-Braudelian Approaches to the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean reframes current discussions of the Mediterranean world by rereading the past with new methodological approaches. The work asks readers to consider how future studies might write histories of the Mediterranean, moving from the larger pan-Mediterranean approaches of The Corrupting Sea towards locally-oriented case studies. Spanning from the Archaic period to the early Middle Ages, contributors engage the pioneering studies of the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel through the use of critical theory, GIS network analysis, and postcolonial cultural inquiries. Scholars from several time periods and disciplines rethink the Mediterranean as a geographic and cultural space shaped by human connectivity and follow the flow of ideas, ships, trade goods and pilgrims along the roads and seascapes that connected the Mediterranean across time and space. The volume thus interrogates key concepts like cabotage, seascapes, deep time, social networks, and connectivity in the light of contemporary archaeological and theoretical advances in order to create new ways of writing more diverse histories of the ancient world that bring together local contexts, literary materials, and archaeological analysis.

Chapter 1

Introduction: A New Connectivity for the Twenty-first Century

Cavan W. Concannon and Lindsey A. Mazurek

In his essay “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” Umberto Eco engages in a deliberately farcical attempt to draw a 1:1 scale map of a theoretical empire:

In any case, once the map has been drawn and spread out, either the subjects remain on the territory beneath it, or they climb on top of it. But if the subjects were to prepare the map while it is above their heads, not only would they be unable to move, because every movement would alter the positions of the subjects that the map describes (unless we have recourse, once again, to an impoverished map), but further, in moving, they would cause tangles in the very fine membrane above them, resulting in serious discomfort and once more making the map unfaithful; it would assume a different topological configuration, producing disaster areas not corresponding to the planimetry of the territory.¹

Eco’s map is meant to represent the empire in its truest sense, depicting not only the details of its physical topography but also its people and their cultural artifacts. Eco then proceeds to propose a variety of practical but inappropriate solutions to creating his map: raising a transparent map on poles above the represented area (no longer useful as a sign, since the map would be too close to its own referent) or a foldable map (once the map were folded up, the map would not represent itself in the represented territory). After rejecting these two premises as unworkable, Eco determines two corollaries about his mapping exercise: every 1:1 map always reproduces the territory unfaithfully, and that the moment the map is produced, the empire becomes “unreproducible.”²

In many ways, writing the history of the ancient Mediterranean is like making Eco’s map. How can we best and most accurately represent a massive expanse of geographic space, inhabited by myriads of cultures whose cultural artifacts traveled short and long distances? How do we model the ways that communities interacted with one another, exchanging goods and ideas? What did it mean for ancient peoples to cross a sea? In order to compose a comprehensive history of the Mediterranean, we need to find a new way of talking about these questions. The chapters in this collection engage these issues by thinking alongside the landscapes, cultures, societies, and objects that have lived along the Mediterranean’s shores, while paying particular attention to those scholars who have tried to make sense of the connections that knit them all together into “the Mediterranean.”

Part of thinking the Mediterranean requires grappling with the legacies of Fernand Braudel and those who have followed in his wake. Braudel argued in his seminal work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Philip II,³ that the Mediterranean is the sum of the ways its inhabitants constructed relationships across space and time. Braudel’s focus on what later scholars will call the Mediterranean’s “connectivity” is the jumping-off point for this volume, which considers the life and afterlife of Braudel’s historiographic methods, from the Annales school to recent edited volumes by W.V. Harris and Irad Malkin, as a way to model cross-cultural interaction. As scholars living in an age of constantly increasing connectivity, Braudel’s systemic and scaled approaches to time and space resonate with contemporary models of actor-network theory, postcolonial experiences, spatial theory, and globalization that inform humanistic discourse. While scholars, including the contributors to this volume, have rightly critiqued some of Braudel’s structuralist and orientalist frameworks, his work continues to shape the ways in which the Mediterranean is mapped as a connected space. Reconsidering Braudel and the scholars that followed in his footsteps will allow us to ask new questions not only about the Mediterranean, but also about how to write more diverse histories that weave together local contexts, literary materials, and archaeological analysis.

In sum, our goal is to consider what Braudel and those who have studied the Mediterranean after him might contribute to advancing a more theoretically oriented Mediterranean archaeology. By taking an eclectic approach to Braudel’s legacy in Mediterranean studies, we look for analytical tools that help us understand and map connectivity between communities through objects and landscapes. Braudel’s vantage point for viewing the Mediterranean was famously panoptic, a view that was geographically and temporally transcendent so as to find patterns and consistencies beyond the contingent moments of human history. Those who have followed after Braudel have often maintained this focus on the global, using local examples to confirm wider theories. In this volume we take a different approach that puts the local before the global. Starting from individual spaces, places, and networks, we put Braudelian concepts to work from the ground up to see if they might function differently and help us to see the Mediterranean otherwise. In so doing we hope to create new ways of looking at the complex speeds, tempos, and rhythms of the ancient Mediterranean, its landscapes, and its peoples. For us, Braudel is not a model or a theoretician, but a point of departure, a line of flight for thinking about what the future of a truly interdisciplinary approach to the Mediterranean might look like. By building up, expanding on, and pushing back against Braudel, we look to reshape the “corrupting sea,” finding new ways to model the ancient Mediterranean that incorporate the best of Braudel’s innovations into new humanistic paradigms of cultural change across time and space.

Braudel’s Mediterranean: An Intellectual History and Its Afterlife

Braudel was famously a member of the Annales school, a movement of French historians that clustered around Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Founded in 1929 as the Annales d’histoire économique et sociate, the group became one of the most important force in French historiography in the twentieth century. As the anchors for the early Annalistes, Febvre and Bloch set forth a framework for Annaliste history that Braudel would later follow. In her study of the history of historiography, Elizabeth Clark lays out the key goals of the early Annales program: “to attempt a ‘total’ history undertaken in an interdisciplinary manner; to refuse both ‘rhetorical historiography and one of an erudition without limit’; to champion a history based on the precise questions framed by the historian; to attend to both concrete reality and ‘deeper’ phenomena.”⁴ In many respects, Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean would take up Febvre and Bloch’s call for a “total” history that attended to concrete realities and “deeper” phenomena.

Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Philip II remains a foundational component of Mediterranean studies. As the title suggests, The Mediterranean surveys the sixteenth-century Mediterranean in an attempt to understand how geography and cultural persistence affected Philip II’s diplomatic policies. Braudel’s approach to the topic, however, attracted extensive scrutiny. Rather than focusing on the main events or great men (what he would call histoire événementielle) that shaped Philip II’s reign, or even advancing a specific thesis as to how he thought Philip II’s diplomatic history should be viewed, Braudel considered Philip II and his empire as the natural outgrowth of geography, climate, and the cultural consistencies that developed in response to the human experience of the natural world. Braudel thus offered a history in three tempos: the geologic and geographic history of the region, the cultural and social history that moved slowly over time, and the history of people and events, each of which needed to be braided together. Braudel’s history is necessarily an economic one, focused on questions of how farmers, laborers, and merchants moved natural resources around the Mediterranean world. This attitude shaped his massive tome, allowing Braudel to write a history of the physical landscape of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than on its shores and in its cities.⁵

The Mediterranean organizes a vast amount of geographic knowledge in service of history, in many places eschewing traditional historical narrative in favor of microhistories of small areas of land.⁶ Braudel was particularly interested in understanding how geographic factors, such as deserts, mountains, availability of resources, and navigability, affect the development of human culture. By privileging the irresistible force of large-scale geologic and geographic conditions, which he calls the longue durée, Braudel sets his historiographic method against more traditional models of event-driven history (histoire événementielle).⁷ Braudel’s history, then, is a history of landscape and seascape that reconstructs the daily lives of many people that traditional history misses: small-scale farmers, sailors on small boats, rural villagers. In Braudel’s model, not much about the basic functions of these people’s lives might have changed between Antiquity and the modern era.

Because of Braudel’s focus on environmentally determined vignettes of the Mediterranean experience, his sea and its surrounding lands became a unified space. The shores and islands of the Mediterranean, along with their inhabitants, were connected by their relationship to the sea. The sea in turn acted as a vector for communication and connection across vast distances, connecting the world in an economic and social network. This thesis of a fundamental unity stands upon two major arguments. First was the idea that the geography and climate of the Mediterranean shared essential qualities that produced similar lifeways throughout the Mediterranean. Braudel’s Mediterranean possesses an essentially unified cultural character created by the constant interchanges of small-scale transport, or “cabotage.” Second, Braudel asserted the idea of a Mediterranean exceptionalism: that the sea has a distinctive and unique character that scholarly inquiry can find consistently throughout the Mediterranean’s landscape and history.⁸ Of course, if the Mediterranean is exceptional, it is necessary to understand where that unity started and ended. Despite his recognition of the importance of defining the Mediterranean as a conceptual unit, Braudel himself was purposefully vague in his definition, preferring to view the Mediterranean in the broadest sense. The Braudelian Mediterranean thus includes the Sahara desert, the Apennine mountains, the Black Sea, Germany and Poland, and in a way, the Atlantic Ocean.⁹

In addition to questions of physical and conceptual landscapes, Braudel’s work also reconsidered the historical sense of time and space. Rather than impose a retrospective sense of absolute chronology and distance, Braudel instead reconsidered how far items could travel, how long local memories could last, and what either experience would have meant to his merchants and farmers. The result is a hierarchy of scale. Braudel himself was least interested in the short-term history of human events, finding them of little use for illuminating questions of political economy and change over time.¹⁰ For Braudel, a particular war or diplomatic development cannot be understood without considering the ways that long-standing exploitation of natural resources contributed to the tensions that produced it. Instead, he prefers to consider the longue durée or the consistency of human experiences as a whole, over long periods of time, and in specific geographic spaces. Treating time and space in this scaled way allowed Braudel to reconsider the Mediterranean not as a large seascape, but as a network made up of hundreds of smaller nodes, each of which had a microhistory that shaped its reactions to the histoire événementielle. It is this aspect of scale and networked landscapes that we find particularly useful as we reconsider what a Mediterranean should be for the twenty-first-century scholar.

Post-Braudelian Histories

Braudel’s work was simultaneously paradigm-shifting and a dead-end for Mediterranean studies.¹¹ Braudel’s insights and extensive research radically changed the way that future scholars would see the Mediterranean and interact with it as a space and a concept. And yet, the very scale of The Mediterranean, with its multiple temporalities, its panoptic vision, and its massive size (over 1,400 pages in two English volumes), made it a difficult act to follow. In some ways, the very scale of the project and the intellectual demands it made upon future historians meant that one could either assent to its vision or ignore it completely. As we will see, until recently this is exactly what many scholars have done.

While hugely influential in its day, Braudel’s historical work fell out of favor both with the humaniti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: A New Connectivity for the Twenty-first Century
• Part I: Cabotage and Seascapes in the Eastern Mediterranean
• Part II: Markets, Connectivity, and the Movement of Religious Texts
• Part III: Contesting the Longue Durée
• Bibliography
• Index