ABSTRACT
The authors begin by explaining how the research of which we offer a sketch relates to, or more accurately does not relate to, the new horizons of Mediterranean scholarship as conceived. In retrospect one of the less clairvoyant dicta in The Corrupting Sea is its prediction of ‘the end of the Mediterranean’. As Peregrine Horden-Nicholas Purcell see it, the Mediterranean is overall a zone of intense topographical fragmentation, overlaid by a kaleidoscope of human ‘microecologies’, which are in turn densely interconnected. Have communications in the Sahara been as similar to those of the Mediterranean as the use of the term connectivity along with explicit reference to CS might suggest? The next macro-region with which it is instructive to compare the Mediterranean under the heading of connectivity is the so-called Silk Road. By far the greater problem is that the histories of ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘northern’ Europe have been thoroughly and comprehensively entangled since at least Roman times.
