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Book Review
| The Mediterranean: An Environmental History. By J. Donald Hughes. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Nature and Human Societies Series, edited by Mark R. Stoll. xx + 330 pages. Maps, index, bibliography. Cloth $85.00.
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| For about forty years, J. Donald Hughes has been working in the field of Mediterranean environmental history. In this book, he summarizes his accumulated knowledge of, and offers mature judgments on, his subject. It will be, for some time to come, the starting point for anyone interested in the long and tumultuous story of the interplay between society and nature in the Mediterranean basin. |
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Hughes uses a chronological structure. The first chapter starts with geographical and environmental descriptions—the arrival of humans and the transition to agriculture—while the second chapter considers the record of major civilizations from Mesopotamia to Rome. The next four chapters carry the narrative forward to the present. Within each chapter Hughes addresses what he sees as the essential themes. These vary somewhat, but are remarkably consistent from ancient times to the present. Each chapter deals with agriculture and herding, with forests and deforestation, with extractive and other industries, with technology, with settlement and cities, and with conservation. All but the last chapter also deal with human disease. Other subjects come up from time to time, such as invasive species (prickly pear cactus, for instance), water pollution, or desertification. |
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Hughes offers a long seventh chapter composed of three case studies. These are ancient Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire's decline, and the Aswan dams on the Nile. Each of these is a subject Hughes has written about before, in his 2001 book An Environmental History of the World, and in the case of the Roman Empire, many other places as well. The Aswan dams case study is done at greater length here, and is the best handling of the subject I have seen. The question of ecological reasons behind the decline of imperial Rome is presented compactly, and more cautiously than in Hughes's Pan's Travail (1994). |
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The book has no overall conclusion, although each chapter and each case study comes with one. However, the book includes more than sixty pages of additional material in the form of a twenty-seven-page super-glossary of names, terms, concepts from Abbasids to ziggurat; a five-page chronology of events from the formation of the Mediterranean Sea five million years ago to 2025 AD; and a thirty-one-page annotated bibliography of works in English on Mediterranean environmental history. This list, curiously, leaves out A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham's, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (Yale, 2001) and Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Blackwell, 2000). The first is a book that differs sharply in its judgments from Hughes, and since he prefers to say only good things in his annotations, perhaps he deemed it best to leave Rackham and Grove out. The latter is not explicitly environmental history, but is full of details and insight on the role of ecology in Mediterranean history. I thought both books should be there. A lengthy index is also included. |
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Hughes's sources are, for the most part, the texts of ancient writers, the findings of archeologists and paleoscientists, and the published works of modern historians and geographers. His knowledge of the ancient texts adds a dimension that most other authors working in this vineyard cannot provide. His prose is clear and enlivened by the occasional bon mot. |
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ABC-CLIO has produced the book nicely. Nine maps help orient readers unfamiliar with Mediterranean geography, and scores of photographs, mostly Hughes's own, are scattered throughout. |
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At times Hughes strays a bit from his central subject, as for example when discussing clock technology. He might have done more to compensate for the bias in his sources, which produced much greater knowledge of the northern shore than the southern, aside from Egypt. His sources also are more eloquent on environmental attitudes and actions of the literate elite than of the unlettered masses. I would have liked to see Hughes wrestle more vigorously with this problem, familiar to all historians. His insights and speculations on North Africa west of Egypt and on the environmental mentalités of the peasants and herders, even if inevitably documented less well than a scrupulous historian like Hughes might wish, would have been welcome. |
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The heart of the matter, however, is that this book is the summation and crystallization of a professional lifetime's work by an author who knows more about his subject than anyone alive. |
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J. R. McNeill teaches international environmental history at Georgetown University. He is the author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environ-mental History of the Twentieth-century World (W.W. Norton, 2001) and a forth-coming book on ecology, disease, and geopolitics in the Caribbean since 1600. |
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