The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History

Winner of the Choice 2001 Award for Outstanding Academic Title

‘In their book The Corrupting Sea, Horden and Purcell have engaged in one of the most relentless intellectual reassessments to have been undertaken in recent times of the history of the pre-industrial Mediterranean. One seldom emerges from a book as rich as this, having had so many firmly-held notions shaken out of one’s mind and having glimpsed so many enthralling new vistas on a once-familiar past.’

Professor Peter Brown, Princeton University

‘To bring together the economic and social history of so many periods and places within the great story of the Mediterranean is a remarkable achievement and Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell should be congratulated upon it.’

Professor Colin Renfrew, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge

‘Horden and Purcell’s new Mediterranean panorama, which will take a generation of historians to digest and implement, forms one of those manifest watersheds in the study of antiquity.’

Journal of Roman Archaeology

The Corrupting Sea is a history of the relationship between people and their environments in the Mediterranean region over some 3,000 years. It advocates a novel analysis of this relationship in terms of microecologies and the often extensive networks to which they belong. This is the first major work since Braudel’s The Mediterranean to address the problems of studying the area as a whole and on a long time-scale.

The authors emphasize the value of comparison between prehistory, Antiquity and the Middle Ages. They draw on an exceptionally wide range of evidence literary works, documents, archaeology, scientific reports and social anthropology.

The themes addressed include past conceptions of the Mediterranean, its historiography, the history of primary production, the rhythms of exchange and communication, the pace of environmental and technological change, the geography of religion, and the contribution of Mediterranean social anthropology to an assessment of the region’s unity.

The book offers a provocative and innovative approach to the history of the Mediterranean, explaining what has made Mediterranean history distinctive.