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The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History.
By PEREGRINE HORDEN AND NICHOLAS PURCELL. London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Pp. xiv + 761. $74.95 (cloth).
Toward the beginning of this huge, exceptionally well-written and consistently interesting, but occasionally frustrating book, the authors have a section (pp. 39-43) entitled "The end of the Mediterranean." They explain that with this arresting expression they refer to the apparent waning of the influence of Fernand Braudel's Mediterranee, and to the decline of interest, on the part of historians and geographers, for the region which was the focus of "the most famous piece of modern historical writing" (p. 43). There is perhaps no better evidence of their exaggerated pessimism that their very own weighty book: 523 densely printed pages of text, 112 even more densely printed pages devoted to a series of impressive bibliographic essays, 94 pages of a consolidated bibliography comprising hundreds of items, 44 triple-columned pages of an index which some readers might find difficult to get through without a magnifying glass, and 34 pages of maps interspersed through the book. Their modesty (or sense of irony) notwithstanding, it is difficult to accept their claim that what they have written is "essay-like" (p. 4). At the level of erudition-of the sheer mass of scholarship the authors critically reflect on in constructing their text-their book is an imposing achievement; one suspects that long after their central ideas have been forgotten, those interested in the history of the Mediterranean will repeatedly refer to this book's scholarly apparatus, especially to its bibliographic essays, which are likely to become starting points for their studies. But, caveat emptor. This, we are alerted, is only the first of a projected two-volume work! If the second reaches the dimensions of the first, this treatise is likely to exceed not only Braudel's classic book, but also the two-volume studies devoted to the Mediterranean by Piero Pieri and Emil Ludwig (La Mediterranee: Destinies d'une mer, 1943, and Piero Silva, 11 ni mediterraneo dall'unita di Roma all'impero italiano, 1941).
Inevitably, it is impossible to imagine that Horden and Purcell could have conceived of their enterprise without Braudel, whose ghost looms large over every section and argument they advance. They acknowledge as much on the book's first page. The work,...