To Lampe and Jackson, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires exerted a greater influence on the Balkans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries than did Northwestern European consumers or businessmen.Despite these and other criticisms, World Systems Analysis has left an indelible mark on the study of market integration in Southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The overall narrative of this process has remained largely unchallenged: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, growing foreign demand for Mediterranean agricultural products facilitated the integration of regions along the Mediterranean littoral into a larger market for goods and labor. This integration caused the states of the Mediterranean to develop in a subordinate—if not altogether dependent—position vis-à-vis Northwestern Europe. The terms “core” and “periphery,” moreover, are still widely used to characterize this unequal relationship, although the more precise terminology of World Systems Analysis, such as “semi-periphery” and “peripheralization,” have receded from use. Instead of “peripheralization,” with its Eurocentric and teleological connotations, this process may be referred to simply as “market integration.”The newer work from a world-systems perspective has attempted to move beyond teleological modernization frameworks. Recent scholarship on “working class cosmopolitanism” in Mediterranean port-cities, for example, utilizes world-systems narratives and terminology, but it conceives of class outside of a Marxian framework, and it also posits important cultural identities other than national ones. This literature shifts focus from the port-cities’ merchant bourgeoisies to their sailors, day laborers, outlaws, and prostitutes, arguing that they constituted a diverse “cosmopolitan” class.
Migration between port-cities in the Eastern Mediterranean created cultural identities that no longer exist and have receded from view because of the rise of national historiography—market integration and the consequent rise of the Mediterranean port cities not only created a non-Muslim bourgeoisie,hydroponic fodder system but it also created a lower class of cosmopolitans.Other world-system studies attempt to transcend the literature’s overwhelmingly urban focus, for example by studying the ways rural banditry helped incorporate the countryside into the world economy.This newer world-systems-inspired literature fits neatly with other historical approaches to the modern Mediterranean region. First, it fits surprisingly well with other economic historical approaches, such as the more classical and “cliometric” study of modern Mediterranean economies.These once-oppositional frameworks have converged—the Mediterranean was not fully dependent, and the post-Ottoman nation-states did not suffer from a failed modernity, but they did develop in a subordinate position vis-à-vis Northwestern Europe, and this was largely due to aspects of the international trade of agricultural commodities. Second, this literature fits well with cultural and intellectual historical approaches to the modern Mediterranean region, such as the study of modern Mediterranean diasporas and of political and intellectual networks.With respect to Greece specifically, the story of market integration with Western Europe begins in the second half of the eighteenth century. The main catalyst was the rise of Greek merchant houses which opened in all the major cities of Europe and the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century. The result was that Greeks in Ottoman port cities controlled a significant portion of the empire’s trade with Europe. This was further facilitated by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed in 1774 between the Ottoman and Russian empires, which was interpreted to allow Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire to sail under the Russian flag.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, market integration was further promoted by several forces, especially advances in technology such as steam ships, liberal trade policies in the UK, the establishment of an independent Greek nation-state in the 1830s that was able to trade more freely with the West, and industrialization in Western Europe, which caused an increase in aggregate demand for commodities produced in Greece and elsewhere. As a result of all these processes, over the course of the nineteenth century, there was a marked increase in the volume of trade between Greece and Western Europe.In the second half of the nineteenth century, this process of market integration accelerated to an even greater degree. Beginning around 1860, there was a sharp rise in global demand for agricultural products grown in the Mediterranean region, and the vast majority of nuts, citrus, and dried fruits consumed in Europe and North America came from Mediterranean Europe— Southern Spain specialized in raisins, for example, and Southern Italy in citrus and almonds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, demand for these and other Mediterranean agricultural products rose due to general demographic growth in importing countries and the growing prosperity of the middle class in Western Europe.At the same time, industrialization created an ever-growing need for cotton for the textile mills of England, and Britain’s colonies and trade associates in the Mediterranean felt the pull of this demand. As a result, production of these agricultural commodities in Mediterranean Europe intensified. In sum, for the Mediterranean in general and for Greece in particular, the focus of scholarship on market integration and the globalization of Mediterranean agricultural products has been on its social, economic, and political consequences. The environmental consequences and the effects on agricultural practice, however, are not well understood. While the sub-field of environmental history has enjoyed great success in other regions, above all in North America and Germany, there is no environmental history of modern Greece per se.
There is, however, great potential to construct an environmental history of globalization in nineteenth-century Greece by combining disparate approaches and putting them into conversation with environmental histories of other parts of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.These approaches include the literature on the economic history of Greece and the Mediterranean;the historical, geographical, anthropological, and archaeological literature on land use, historical demography, and agricultural practice in Greece and the Mediterranean; and historical ecologies of the Mediterranean.Scholarship on the Mediterranean has envisioned the region as a unit from antiquity to the early modern era. This literature has had difficulty, however, in dealing with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is generally acknowledged that sometime in the nineteenth century, Mediterranean unity was destroyed by the fracturing of the region into nation-states and by the globalization of trade. As a result, scholarship divides the study of the Mediterranean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the rival civilizational spheres of Europe and the Middle East. For the literature on the pre-modern Mediterranean, ecology and agricultural practice are often regarded as key commonalities—Mediterranean agriculture is understood as a series of integrated strategies developed in concert with the environment for making productive use of diverse micro-ecologies and for limiting the risk of subsistence failure. In this section, I adapt this model in order to apply it to the study of the nineteenth century. I contend that the agricultural system outlined in the literature on pre-modern Mediterranean agriculture and historical ecology was the norm in Greece and Mediterranean Europe generally at the beginning of the nineteenth century,fodder system and that it was transformed over the course of the century. In applying this model to the present study, I historicize “traditional” Mediterranean agricultural practice, arguing that it was not an unchanging structure, but a dynamic process that was influenced by a variety of factors, particularly economics, demography, and climate. The literature on the pre-modern Mediterranean is largely grounded in historical ecology, as studies of the Mediterranean in history identify it as a unit based either wholly or in part on environmental or ecological factors. One approach is to define the Mediterranean region as a unit based on a shared climate—the Mediterranean is the region with a “Mediterranean” climate, characterized by hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters.Other definitions rely on the areal extent of the production of certain crops associated with the region—the northern limit of the growth of the olive tree, for example, is offered as a border between Europe and the Mediterranean.Another approach which has gained in recent years employs the concept of “micro-ecologies” to describe the Mediterranean in history. This approach, particularly as elaborated by Horden and Purcell in their 2000 book Corrupting Sea, conceives of the premodern Mediterranean as a unit not because it is homogenous; on the contrary, the region is defined as such by its great internal diversity.This approach has attracted scholars studying the history of places along the Mediterranean littoral from antiquity to the early modern era.
The lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and the islands contained within it possess a myriad of physical features including Alpine mountains, arid deserts, lush forests, and volcanic islands, and the distance between two distinct ecologies can be very small. As Grove and Rackham write, “In Crete there is an immense contrast between the misty, well-vegetated rain-excess areas on the north sides of high mountains and the arid rain-shadows a few kilometers away on the south sides.”The result is that one slope of a snow-capped mountain is a desert, the other slope is a jungle, and at its base is a boggy marsh. The Mediterranean region is not unique for its ecological diversity and fragmented landscape, but it is exceptional for its degree of fragmentation as well as the degree of connectivity between fragmented landscapes. As one scholar has written, “Nowhere else is the weave of the world’s surface so fine.”Mediterranean micro-ecologies are understood to be shifting and unstable. Due to natural erosion, variations in precipitation, regular fires and occasional natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, micro-ecologies do not remain the same from year to year. They also transform due to changes in human interactions with the land.As a result of their differing productive strengths as well as their volatility from year to year, pre-modern Mediterranean micro-ecologies were highly interdependent. A single micro-ecology was unlikely to be able to support the various needs of its population, but various forms of connectivity are built into the landscape, the sea being the most important of these. This is a large part of what gave the Mediterranean its unity. It was very highly fragmented into small ecologies, the populations of these places needed products from other places in order to survive, and the sea and other forms of connectivity facilitated exchange between these micro-ecologies. In a Mediterranean region composed of shifting micro-ecologies, instability and uncertainty were built-in factors of life. The instability and uncertainty were caused above all by two forces: variable climate and variable markets. With respect to climate: from one year to the next, rainfall could vary dramatically. As a result, a given location might provide very productive agricultural land one year and be barren the next. The other factor that shifted from year to year and affected the characteristics of a micro-ecology is what Horden and Purcell call “its changing configuration within the web of interactions around it,”or what for the purposes of this study might more simply be called “markets.” Precipitation was variable, but so were the needs of the populations within a given micro-ecology. Moreover, precipitation and needs varied in neighboring micro-ecologies and in more distant ones that were nevertheless connected through exchange. All of these variables were relevant at the micro-scale to the productive capacities and the overall fate of a given locale from year to year. It was in this context that traditional Mediterranean agriculture took shape as a way to manage risk and ensure that subsistence needs were always met. As a result of the capricious Mediterranean climate and shifting interactions with other micro-regions, populations living in Greece had to be flexible in order to meet the needs of their own subsistence from year to year. In the words of Paul Halstead, “Each year the farmer may be aiming for a different production target, from a different area of land, with a different labour force and with the cushion of a greater or lesser amount of produce in store.”On the local scale, Greek populations adopted certain strategies in order to maximize their potential for meeting their subsistence needs as well as those of their families. The three over-arching strategies undertaken by Mediterranean populations in order to survive were “diversify, store, redistribute.”Diversification can be seen in every choice made by Greek populations to meet their subsistence needs. In terms of agricultural production, Greek populations knew that they could not rely on a single plot of land to meet the needs of their subsistence from year to year. As a result, they undertook strategies to diversify their production.