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Mediterranean excuses: Historical writing on the mediterranean since Braudel

I borrow the main term of my title from a recent paper by the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, in which he once again interprets the sin of “Mediterraneanism” that he invented. Now he sees it as an “excuse” of various kinds—political, cultural, even (in a scholarly sense) heuristic. He argues, rightly, that the category “Mediterranean” should be an object of ethnographic enquiry: it should lie within our frame, whether we are ethnographers or historians; it should not constitute the frame itself. In this article, therefore, I try to see what the Mediterranean has been an excuse for within modern historical writing: first, briefly, in Braudel; then in four alternatives to Braudel that I detect in the present age of late postmodernism: that of the “reductivist”, the “rhapsode”, the “reflexive” and the “realist”. I end by outlining the eclectic “reflexive realism” of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (2000).