The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2024)

I resolved to read this book after I read David Abulafia's book "The Great Sea". I really liked that book but I lacked a baseline for how to evaluate a history of the Mediterranean Sea. Abulafia mentioned this as a good book, so I wanted to see what that meant.

This is a deeply thoughtful and well executed book. I literally lost count of the number of times I had to stop and recognize that they were treating topics I thought I had some familiarity with in ways I had never considered. In addition, this is also an important book among professional historians. This is not to say that everyone agrees with Horden and Purcell - I suspect that is not the case. Rather, this is a book that is written to an audience of peers to present a very different perspective to the established ones -- and this is in an area dominated by Braudel, Pirenne, and other notables. By most accounts, they have succeeded. This is a real accomplishment for an academic - to change the ways that your peers think about your topic.

General readers should note that this is not an easy read. The arguments are involved and written to be convincing to peers rather than flowing for the general reader. The book is very well researched with bibliographic essays that stretch for over a hundred pages and a consolidated bibliography that is itself nearly a hundred pages long. The authors do appear to have read nearly everything written on their topics.

The overall intent of the book is to provide a view of the Mediterranean from antiquity through the Middle Ages that is useful for researchers but not subject to a variety of biases that have plagued prior work, which looks backward from a technologically sophisticated, militarily dominant, and economically successful Europe to fit the prior history of the Mediterranean into the dominant story as a set of clear and causal factors contributing to modern Europe's position. Geography has played a role in these studies but rather than suggest a geographical determinism the author focus strongly on the interaction of people and their local environments. In these interactions, people in their local communities face a variety of problems in constructing lives that permit them to survive and prosper. Key to accomplishing this is not just managing the local environment but also in becoming well connected to the broader environment. This leads to complex local economies that combine different types of farming, herding, and trading, depending on circ*mstances. Simple contrasts, such as between farmers and herders, seldom reflect the complexity of the Mediterranean region. Since conditions and risks can vary over time as well as over space, people also fashion strategies for diversifying their activities, storing their surpluses, and trading to redistribute and their surpluses and addresses shortages that occur. All of this, of course, is subject to further change due to political conditions and technological innovation.

I would suggest that general readers should read the Abulafia book first. It tells a very good story and is filled with details and references for those who wish to dig deeper. Horder and Purcell have written a variety of articles summarizing their work and its motivation. These can provide further details for those lacking the inclination to plunge into the book right away.

This is the key book right now in Mediterranean studies. It goes to great lengths to justify the field and provide methodological arguments. I'm not sure it was all that successful. There is a ton of good information in this book, but the parts did not seem to fit together all that well. The book was collaboratively authored, and I got the impression that the authors didn't mesh well.

The quest for Mediterranean unity leaves something to be desired.

Despite containing tons of fascinating new (at the time of publication, I am guessing) insights about Mediterranean history, my overall impression of this book is that it was written in a deliberately complicated way. I'm not talking about the specialist language - of which there is loads - but also the syntax the authors use and the ways that they refer back to previous arguments or documents throughout the book.

Just one example - on page 486 of my edition, the authors state that "...on being provoked, a Greek Cypriot, a Bedouin and a Berber may answer 'I also have a moustache.'" Then, on the next page they refer to this previous quote as a way to introduce the topic they discuss for the REMAINDER of the book. They do this by saying "Of these topics - gender relations, the evil eye, class conflict, patronage, and so forth - we shall, for the remainder of the chapter, consider THE ONE [my caps] that prompted the remark about provocation and moustaches quoted above. We select IT [my caps] because IT [my caps] has been seen as an example of Mediterraneanism at its worst..."

OK - so you've introduced the topic that you're going to spend the rest of the chapter (and really, the rest of the book, barring the bibliographic essays) talking about. So... what is this momentous topic that you'll spend the rest of the chapter discussing? I had to wait two more pages for the authors to explicitly state they were going to focus on "honour and shame" for the remainder of the chapter. I just don't understand why they had to introduce the topic in this way - it was really confusing to me as a reader, and forced to keep turning back and forth between the pages to figure out what the authors were actually planning to discuss. On page 487, why could they not have just called out that they were going to discuss "honour and shame" for the remainder of the chapter? Unfortunately, the book is chock full of these types of instances - the authors will vaguely refer to what they're going to talk about in the following pages, and never explicitly call it out until much later. They are also deliberately obscure about other things - for instance, they talk about the installation of toilets in a village from Levi's book Christ stopped at Eboli, and refer to the toilets several times as "amenities." I would have never known what they were talking about if I wasn't already familiar with the book/film (and to my knowledge, "amenities" is not some peculiarly British-English way of referring to toilets).

All this, however, is coming out of a place of love. This book was fascinating to me, and it made me rethink a lot of my own assumptions about Mediterranean history and history in general. Their unifying framework of microecologies worked really well in their rethinking of a lot of aspects of Mediterranean history. I'm not a specialist (just a high school history teacher), but I can see myself adapting some of their ideas to my own classroom. I just can't understand, however, how professional writers (because that is ultimately part of their job) can be so awful at writing. If ideas like this were a bit more accessible to a more general audience (or even just non-specialists like myself), I feel that they'd make a much bigger impact (and not just on that non-specialist audience, but in academia as well).

I don't believe there is a book more dire and frustrating as The Corrupting Sea. This work while hailed as a masterpiece basically just repeats the same point about the interconnectedness of the med and micro climates. There is absolutely no need in anyway shape or form that this book should be so long or written in an almost archaic way limiting its accessibility even to seasoned historians. The book gets one star as academic institutions love for this over-written doorstop to be cited in essays. You have heard the term "meetings that should have been emails?" well this is a book that should have been an article. I really hate this book.

This book is good for specialists, but even for them it has some drawbacks. At times it feels a bit like a set of conference proceedings, rather than a book with a progression. I also have the distinct impression of different styles of writing, as one person takes over responsibility for a section. Still useful. Just not particularly fun to read, which is something I value more and more these days, even for "scholarly" books.

I just skimmed it in two days, but liked it. I will return to it for deeper reading later.

The massive discussion of bibliography (each chapter has its own bibliographic essay in the appendices, plus there is an absolutely massive standard alphabetical bibliography) makes this volume worth it. The chapters themselves are of varying quality, but all of them demonstrate an incredibly high level of erudition and critical thinking. It definitely makes you think.

If you are interested in humanistic geography, this is an exemplary volume for the method as applied to Mediterranean history.

Skip this one and read Braudel.

Seemed heavily focused on farming rather than the maritime expectations I had. For that, I'd have to recommend Abulafua's The Great Sea.