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84 three Tide, Beach, and Backwash: The Place of Maritime Histories Nicholas Purcell “haec medium terris circumdat linea pontum atque his undarum tractum constringit harenis.”1 The aim of this chapter is precisely that of the gathering at which its oral precursor was read—to investigate the nature and potential of “the new thalassography” as a scholarly initiative, while it is indeed still relatively new. Thalassography has hitherto been a maritime mirroring of geography, in that word’s more literal meaning of the description of the land—a more local subdivision of oceanography. That more technical usage has become a little more familiar over the last years as a keyword in a geographically deterministic Grand Theory.2 Rather, just as geography long ago escaped from disciplinary boundaries and became notable for being a hard-to-classify crossover zone of methods from many parts of the sciences and the humanities, so thalassography too has recently come to seem a suitable vehicle for the fertile intermingling of scholarly traditions.3 It is a stimulatingly versatile idea, which it would be perverse to attempt to claim for any one tradition, but this chapter relates primarily to its historical manifestation. It offers a number of particular enticements to the historian who is concerned with how more local histories engage with the history of everything—universal history, histoire à très large échelle—not least because of its emphasis on the integration of history with its neighbouring disciplines.4 It is important, though, to recognize a paradox at the outset. Although it is informed by maritime history in these more usual senses of the term, and has, indeed, grown from it, thalassography is not primarily concerned with the sea. The impetus for these remarks derives from helping to write a work on Mediterranean history in which a constant concern was precisely not Tide, Beach, and Backwash 85 to revive or condone geographical determinism.5 That book examined briefly how deterministic and exceptionalist theories of Mediterranean history had arisen, and oriented itself around the recognition that the subject-matter of the historian is the human behaviours which manipulate the conditions of life and invent the settings in which they do so. That was the reason for using as a title, The Corrupting Sea, a label derived from the hostility to mobility and connectivity which conservative ancient Greek thought linked closely with all that the sea stood for.6 The aim of the book was to find elements which would make large-scale historical comparison both easier and more rigorous, starting within a large but reasonably well-defined space, looking for ways of overcoming the tyranny of period. The investigation entailed extended reflection on historical space, and on the nature of the microregions of which Mediterranean landscapes are composed, as well as the macroregions with which global history might be conducted, and of which the Mediterranean as a whole might be an instance.7 The logical next step is to consider how the findings of that project relate to what was happening in adjacent macroregions, and to proceed to the désenclavement of Mediterranean history. The plan is to move on to see how sets of characteristics of the kind which Mediterranean history exhibits might be used comparatively in the task of explaining the interactions of even larger pieces in the jigsaw of global history, also across profound time-depths but, in addition , overcoming the barriers of space and scale. Now, this trajectory of Mediterranean research encourages the general observation that seas— including both maritime ensembles much larger than the Mediterranean and more locally focussed ones—can be very helpful for the investigation of global historical (and, by extension, other cultural) themes just because they are so good at eliding the boundaries of space and time, by promoting an emphasis on social, economic, and cognitive patterns which have different extensions and distributions. It is trivial to say that the emancipated historiography which results is “denationalized.” What it offers, more constructively, is the possibility of new historical objects. The present discussion uses the phenomenon that I shall call “mobilization ” to help display this. Let us begin with a vignette from the years 49–46 BCE. In the difficult days of the Roman Civil War of that time, a eunuch (that is, a self-castrated) priest of the Great Mother named Soterides, in a harbortown called Kyzikos on the south shore of the Sea of Marmara, set up a votive inscription to the deity whom he served.8 He is...

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