Re-cap
Readers of this blog will be all-too-wearily aware that I have been working on the changes that took place in western Europe between 550 and 650 for well over a decade, since I received a Leverhulme fellowship for a project called ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’ in 2009. What I thought the final outcome of that would be has been through many versions but I currently envisage it as a trilogy, whether formally as volumes 1, 2, and 3 or as three ‘companion volumes’ will depend upon the decisions of publishers (if any publisher will take it of course!). The volumes themselves are: The Fates of the Late Antique State (politics and government), The Transformations of the Year 600 (society and economics), and The End of the Roman World (ideas). I have about 90,000 words of The Fates of the Late Antique State written (in draft) and rather less of the other two. What I thought I would do on this near-dead blog is to write up some reflections on the subject matter: things that won’t necessarily make it into the book in any solid form – maybe the odd comment here and there but probably not a block of text and possibly nothing at all – in the hope that it might be of interest and as a spur to me to keep at it, which has not been easy. My never-exactly-robust mental health has taken a profound battering over the past three years (to cut a long story short I lost my mind) with the result that I am leaving the profession in November. In some regards, then, these blog posts are a message to myself that I possibly still have things to say and that it might yet be worth finishing this project. Believe me, many are the days when I don’t agree with either of those propositions. I am not sure that these reflections are going to be particularly profound or original but they seem to me to be of some significance.
The rupture of the Mediterranean’s ‘natural’ unity
One thing that keeps coming back in the course of thinking about this project (and about a possible second edition of Barbarian Migrations) is just how profoundly unusual the period between the late Roman Republic and the third century was. This was a period when:
- The whole Mediterranean littoral was under the control of the same polity.
- A coherent economic system united the western Mediterranean/western European world.
- Consequently, the north west of Europe was part of the same economic network as the Mediterranean world
What I find interesting is how at some point historians have come to regard all of these things as a norm. Thus we find people – from Pirenne onwards – discussing the end of Mediterranean unity or the separation of north-western Europe from the western Mediterranean as historical problems. Famously, Pirenne sought an explanation of the ‘rupture’ of the Mediterranean World and the ‘turning in on itself’ of North-Western Europe in the Arab Conquests. The Pirenne Thesis produced perhaps 60 years of debate, during which people questioned the chronology for the end of Mediterranean unity, or proposed new causes for its end. Indeed, another of the great historical works of the last century, Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II discussed the ‘Middle Sea’ and the regions that bounded it as forming a historical unit. This too set in train a long and important historiographical debate or set of debates and a much larger corpus of work on the Mediterranean.
Yet, in any sort of long-term perspective, the fundamental separation of the western and eastern Mediterranean worlds, or that of the north-west from the south, are really the normal state of affairs. Reading Cyprian Broodbank’s The Making of the Middle Sea brings home the point that the eastern and western Mediterranean were fundamentally very different theatres of social, political and economic activity. The Eastern Mediterranean acts as a link and thoroughfare connecting the north-east of Africa, the south-east of Europe and parts of western Asia (Asia Minor, the Levant). All of these links bound these regions to each other, for centuries, in a web of relationships far denser than those that connected the south-east of Europe with the regions to its west. That is important in itself when one thinks about the fluctuating and inchoate – but politically important – notion of ‘Europe’ (let alone The West). Indeed, the way in which Egypt (and the eastern parts of Libya) was a part of this world throws a similar light on this issue.
Before going further with that we should ask which of these issues really concerns the ‘Year 600’? The separation of the east from the west had been on-going since the third century, and the same is true, or even more so, of the separation of the north-west from the western Mediterranean littoral. Nonetheless something significant did happen in the 6th century, especially in its later half. Western Europe simply drops off the radar of writers in the East, and changes in trade and commerce emphasise the separation of the two halves of the Mediterranean (Pirenne was correct to notice that, even with the limited data at his disposal, but the chronology is too early for the Arab Conquests to be the cause).
Looking at these issues in the long term thus sheds a rather different light upon them and that does in some ways compel a rethink of what we might think of as the historian’s agenda. Are we looking at things the wrong way round? You could argue that it’s not the rupture of the Mediterranean that is the great historical problem requiring explanation – explanation frequently in terms of dramatic politico-military events – but the creation of Mediterranean unity, or of connections between the north-west of Europe and the regions to its south, in the first place.
What are the implications of that conclusion, though? Is it an argument in favour of the of ‘longue durée’ approach? People familiar with my work since 1995 will know I have serious reservations about the ‘longue durée’, but nevertheless the way viewing problems in the long term can recast what I just called the historian’s agenda does seem like a powerful argument in its favour. For that reason taking a long view ought to be a part of at least shaping the questions we think are important, and why. It can shed an important light on issues of causation, or causal factors. The problem, for me, is that if we are not careful about what we do with such a perspective it can imply a sort of determinism or inevitability about change through time. That, I remain profoundly opposed to. Things are much more random and unpredictable than that. Further, if such structural features can be overcome at particular points of history, then they can’t be assumed to be naturally determinant. On the other hand, though, if it can be argued that what happened between, say, c.250 and c.650 was just physical geography rearing its ugly head, then do we need to look for decisive politico-military actions to hang causation on?
Structural features are important. It is important to isolate what these were, specifically, and in context, rather than just assuming them to be natural, extrapolating them from long-term description, or just assuming them on ‘first principles’. What were the long-term structural issues with regard to the West’s separation from the East, or in north-west Europe’s separation from the western Mediterranean? I will try to put some thoughts together on this for the next instalment.