BMCR 2008.11.08, Henry Hurst, Ancient Colonizations

Henry Hurst, Sara Owen (ed.), Ancient Colonizations. Analogy,
Similarity & Difference.  London:  Duckworth, 2005.  Pp. 165.  ISBN
0-7156-3298-1.  L16.99 (pb).

Reviewed by Irad Malkin, Department of History, Tel Aviv University
([email protected])
Word count:  3320 words
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When Marc Ferro, one of France's leading historians and editor of the
recent Le livre noir du colonialisme (2003), published the English
translation of his Colonization: a global history (1997) he probably
did not imagine how little he would be read by ancient historians
dealing with Greek and Roman colonization, and specifically by those
interested in issues of "Analogy, Similarity, and Difference."
Similarly, it is not clear that Marcel Detienne's comparer
l'incomparable has been read by anyone participating in this
volume.[[1]] Even Jean Be/rard, a major historian of ancient
colonization, goes unmentioned, although he both warned against the
misnomer of colonization and, in his L'expansion et la colonisation
grecques (1960)[[2]] against the analogy of French colonization (les
franc,ais outremer) in north Africa. The books offers seven different
perspectives on explicit and implied analogies, three of which concern
the British  Empire, and the other Roman Colonialism, the Inka Empire,
the archeology of Siciy, and a wide-ranging Mediterraneanist overview.
The first impression given by the book under review here: the issue it
discusses is global, the scope of discussion is limited both in its
choice of reading and subjects. Those contributions which are more
directly concerned with the use of analogy refer mainly to British
examples.

Historians of Greek colonization have never been happy with the term
"colonization," yet to this very day, nobody has come up with a viable
alternative. To warn against fallacious analogies is always timely. But
how many have in fact made them in the past? And, when they did (except
for Freeman, discussed in Gillian Shepherd's article), how serious were
these lapses, beyond loose metaphors and associations of their time
(e.g., 'trade before the flag')? I found it striking, for example, that
the object of a recent and detailed study of colonialist and
imperialist analogies by Franco De Angelis was the  magnum opus of
Thomas Dunbabin The Western Greeks (1948).[[3]] Gillian Shepherd in
this volume follows De Angelis, but all either can offer are a handful
of quotes from Dunbabin, mostly from pages vi-vii of the preface with a
few more from pages 182-192, and this out of some 500 pages.

Yet the issue, as such, is serious, and the editors may be commended
for bringing awareness of it to the foreground. Indeed, the book's
subtitle reads "analogy, similarity and difference" but, except for
Purcell's article, most of it reads as if the latter two words are
merely implied in the first. Basically the question that interests the
editors is: are analogies helpful or should the attractive ones be
considered an enemy? I wonder, however, whether we are
anachronistically inclined to treat ancient colonization in terms of
modern imperialism and colonialism, or have we been so well trained to
be suspicious of anachronism that not only do we avoid analogies but
expect their existence in others' work where it is perhaps unjustified
to do so? One would expect the first task of such a book, before its
contributors warn against the various dangers of analogy, is to
establish whether or not the plague is rampant. Anthony Snodgrass makes
a remark, typical of the book, that the examples are simply too
numerous to cite, yet directs us to a rather specific article by
Gillian Shepherd on marriages among Greeks and non-Greeks. In truth,
when reading through its pages, one would be hard-pressed to find more
than just a handful of meaningful examples of the 'anachronistic
model,' at least for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

We need to remember that analogy and Zeitgeist are not equivalent. The
issue of Zeitgeist in historiography has been with us for almost as
long as critical modern historical scholarship. Since Croce, it has
meant that the historian of the past cannot avoid being a citizen of
the present. It is the present that influences perspectives,
assumptions, and mostly the choice of historical questions. For
example, economic issues in historiography came to the foreground with
the rise of Marxist thought, and studies of women in antiquity (beyond
books on 'daily life') have proliferated following the rise of
Feminism. If Zeitgeist is self-aware, there is nothing wrong with it,
since history is a constant, dynamic, and reciprocal dialogue with the
past. However, when Hurst and Owen discuss "assumptions" it is not
always clear when the issue belongs to Zeitgeist and when it is in fact
analogy. A clearer theoretical discussion of analogies in history, as a
genre, might have served the book better. This could have found its
place in Henry Hurst's Introduction, where we hear of the need to
"problematize" the intellectual tool of analogy and to "unpack (our)
cultural baggage".

Sara Owen ("Analogy, Archaeology and the Archaic Greek Colonization")
states ". . . the analogy with modern European colonialism . . . exists
as a set of assumptions of what colonialism is." She is troubled by a
more specific assumption of [colonialist] asymmetrical power relations,
and rightly aims to show that archaeological evidence may point to a
whole spectrum of relations. She is correct in saying that
archaeologists work on time-scales which make it difficult to identify
the work of individual historical agents. On the other hand, this
approach may lead to an overemphasis on 'processes' and disregard of
'events' (that perennial tension in history, between 'change and
continuity'). In recent years I find the pendulum to have been swinging
too sharply against 'events,' or, in the case of colonization, against
the notion of 'foundation.' Yet just looking at the map and seeing the
enormous numbers of new settlements, 'created' within relatively short
periods over vast horizons, and structured along similar patterns,
would be a good starting point to refute this approach. The recent
publication of volume five of the excavation of Megara Hyblaia in
Sicily, confirming the overall existence of a planned, apparently
egalitarian, settlement around the last quarter of the eighth century,
is itself refutation enough.[[4]] 'Foundation,' claims Owen, has
clouded the issue of long-term processes and local conditions. There is
a big difference between drawing one's attention to something and
'clouding the issue'. True, one may see the processes leading up to
colonization as fragmented and processual, but should this cancel the
end-result as event? After all, aside from destruction, archeology in
general has difficulties in identifying any historical events.

Owen is rightly worried about the notion of asymmetrical power
relations between colonists and native populations and in her own work
has brilliantly demonstrated a sophisticated approach to movements not
only of Greeks but of others as well, as an integral part of settlement
movements during the Archaic period. However, to what extent the
assumption of such asymmetrical issues rests on analogy is another
matter. She cites in particular the short, popular book by A.G.
Woodhead (1962) and some remarks by Carol Dougherty in a book on the
Poetics of colonization.[[5]] This is meager evidence for a general
mindset of scholarship.

Gillian Shepherd's article ("The Advance of the Greek: Greece, Great
Britain and Archaeological Empires") is explicitly concerned with
British analogies. She makes merry with the abundant and explicit
racism and anti-Semitism of Freeman's History of Sicily (1891-1894),
better understood in the context of Great Britain's High Empire
(1880-1914). Shepherd puts into sharper focus Freeman's use of Aryans
(Greeks) vs. Semites (Phoenicians), and his Crusader analogy ("striking
a blow for Apollo"), thus foreshadowing Christianity and Europeanism.
Freeman, she claims (but does not quite demonstrate) expressed two
basic notions that have had a lasting influence: the superiority of
Greeks over others and the superiority of Greece over "colonial"
Greeks.

It is on the latter topic of ranking (the motherland as inherently
superior and a source for all that is significant in colonies) that
Shepherd's article is particularly good, especially when it comes to
material evidence and temple architecture. She notes Dinsmoor's
surprise at the wealth and quality of the western temples (bigger,
differently oriented, multiply grouped, placed within urban context,
generally more similar to each other than copying a 'home' style). "At
Syracuse . . . (says Dinsmoor) we see the highest point to which the
Greek colony could rise. The greatness of Syracuse is essentially of
the colonial kind. It was a greatness which could for a while outstrip
the cities of Old Greece in prosperity and splendor, but which was
still a greatness essentially inferior in kind and less lasting in
duration." Shepherd also rightly criticizes assumptions of "cultural
fidelity" (colonials constantly viewing the motherland as the superior
fountain of traditions and styles), and she is particularly good when
discussing the material evidence: "the common thread in all these
interpretations is that the western Greeks did not really know what
they were doing and floundered about producing structures based on
mainland models which were at best behind the times and at worst the
bungled attempts of parvenus to ape their betters."

Shepherd makes the most of what followed after Freeman, but the results
are meager in terms of the book's goals. There was, in fact, little
interest in Anglophone scholarship in colonial Greeks and when Gwynn
(1918) and Blakeway (1933) had their say they did it with few and minor
analogies. The fact that "signs of late imperial thought creep into his
text" (re Gwynn) is not tantamount to an explicit use of analogy. As
for Thomas Dunbabin he is mainly criticized for his Hellenocentrist
interpretations, but these have to do more with what he had to work
with, and Zeitgeist rather than with analogy.  Shepherd's article
oscillates between unmasking attitudes and pointing out analogies, and
the difference is not always made clear.

Anthony Snodgrass ("'Lesser Breeds': The History of a False Analogy")
is wisely sensitive to the pitfalls of analogies. He argues for the use
of analogy as a historical tool but also for making the right choices.
The wrong one is that of the later period of British imperialism, with
its assumptions of cultural superiority, as contrasted with the proper
analogy of the earlier period (starting around 1600), which held no
such assumptions, as articulated so well in the works of William
Dalrymple with regard to the early British presence in India.[[6]]
Snodgrass is also aware of how hard it is to find explicit evidence for
the use of such analogies in modern scholarship: "scholars were seldom
so nai+ve as to use it [the influence of Kipling's Imperialist era] for
direct analogy," he says. But this is also a weakness of the argument:
if it is true that "[i]t may seem remarkable to us now that the
'imperial analogy' found such acceptance", then why is the evidence
(both explicit and implied) so scant? On the other hand, when dealing
directly with the texts, and not with generalized impressions and
assumption about what is 'implicit,' he is right on the mark when
claiming (with regard to Dunbabin) that "there is an overwhelming sense
of anachronism, but little of imperialism" (p. 57).

Like the others, Nicola Terrenato ("A Deceptive Archetype: Roman
Colonialism in Italy and Postcolonial Thought") is much better when
providing sophisticated and perceptive warnings against analogies than
when demonstrating them. The 'postcolonial' in the title appears
superfluous, since his well-written criticism addresses no postcolonial
issues.[[7]] On the other hand he is clearer about correcting the angle
of vision that was directed "to the center" by nationalism and
colonialism (to which may be added Sara Owen's criticism of E.
Wallerstein's core-periphery models of World Systems): it is wrong, for
example, that Roman imperialism was happening 'in Rome.' He
perceptively observes that with the spread of European colonialism
scholarly interest in the Romans shifted away from Rome as a nation
state to Rome as a colonial empire, one with some very modern
characteristics. The assumption that Roman imperialism implied the
notion of the irresistible advance of a higher culture demonstrates yet
again a misguided approach: "all take for granted that a
straightforward and unquestioned similarity between Classical antiquity
and western modernity exists and it is a key element in the definition
of both terms of the equation." He provides what seems to me a
convincing assessment of the empire as a re-arrangement of, on the one
hand, the networks of Mediterranean societies and, on the other, the
integration of elites (a kind of analogy now comes in useful: imagine,
he says, an Indian Rajah serving in the House of Lords). On the other
hand he may be too quick to dismiss conflicting ethnic elements as too
modern; both Romans (e.g., Tacitus's Agricola) and non-Romans (e.g.,
Josephus's contra Apionem) seem to indicate that perceptions implying
conflicts with nationes could have a strong ethnic element.[[8]]

One wonders at the editorial decision to include Elizabeth DeMarrais's
paper on "A View from the Americas: 'Internal Colonization, Material
Culture and Power in the Inca Empire." It is a solid piece, providing
apt descriptions of the elements of power of the Inca, but with hardly
any discussion of comparisons or analogies. The author follows the
habit of citing authorities for the definition of concepts, then
applying those concepts (with little analysis of their suitability) to
particular issues. When comparisons do occur they are generalized and
not newsworthy, e.g., that both Rome and Cuzco used monumental
architecture to enhance their image of power.

The purpose of Carla Antonaccio's paper ("Excavating Colonization",
based on a chapter of her forthcoming book) is "a contribution to the
broader framework within which archeology is working to understand the
intricate interplay between material culture and identity, specifically
in the colonial context of Italy." This is a very good paper concerning
the complex relationship of archaeology and history, discourse and
praxis. We find excellent discussions on Morgantina, on "hybridity" (a
disagreeable biological metaphor current in post-colonial studies), and
a particularly good analysis of the relation of ceramics and ethnicity.
It is highly recommended chapter, although it is not clear why it found
a home in this book.

In "Colonization and Mediterranean History," the most condensed and
thoughtful of the papers in the volume, Nicholas Purcell starts by
bypassing "analogies" in favor of "comparisons," in the tradition of
the great Mediterraneanist historians Fernand Braudel and Shlomo Dov
Goitein. He aptly quotes Ettore Lepore's assertion that "des mode\les
de comparaison historique sont presque aussi ne/cessaires que les
te/moignages me^mes."[[9]] Taking his cue from certain traits of
Mediterranean economics, Purcell discusses the Mediterranean habit of
avoidance of risk through diversification and, in contrast, the
development of more risky -- yet more profitable -- specialized crops
by Greek settlements, re-distributed, for example, by means of emporia.
This leads him to emphasize the role of elites and to claim an
aggressive aspect to Greek colonization that would encourage risky and
profitable crops. Comparisons with Roman, Medieval, and Venetian
colonization illustrate the viability of the argument for other
periods, when allotment (lands sectioned and allotted to colonists,
such as the Greek kleros) covered enormous areas. However, the
comparison is problematic, since in contrast to some of the later
examples, the territorial size of early, coastal Greek colonies was
meager in relation to vast hinterlands. For example, Massalia's chora
in southern France remained narrow (up to 20km) for about 600 years.
Also, in the settlements, the concept of 'elite' also needs qualifying,
since the relatively egalitarian kleros system poses a question mark
over what may have been considered elite. The elites that developed
were complicated in another respect, since first-generation colonists
sometimes became the elite in relation to later immigration. Within the
wider perspectives of pan-Mediterranean commerce what constituted
commercial elites is not a simple question since ships, at least since
the days of Hesiod and down to the developed age of Athenian merchants
in the fourth century, could carry 'sub-cargoes' which sometimes
belonged to several non-elite 'investors.'

Purcell is interested in human mobility and sees families sending their
sons to colonize overseas as another strategy of risk-avoidance through
extending the family. In spite of the common emphasis in foundation
lore on land hunger as a pushing factor, in fact, the 'pulling' aspect
of the frontiers for richer kleroi was more significant. (One could
note that the motif of land hunger is actually not so predominant among
foundation stories; when Plato speaks of "narrowness of place"
(stenochoria, Laws 708b) he may be referring equally to a narrowness of
political space.) Purcell proceeds to discuss "Aristocratic diasporas",
though with Crusader examples, not Greek ones (these exist: e.g., the
exiled Bakchiads who found refuge at Corcyra, a colony originally
founded by one of their own family; Dorieus, the frustrated Spartan who
went to first to Africa and then to Sicily; Demaratos who came to Italy
in insert himself among the local elites; and Miltiades the Athenian
who went to the Thracian Chersonesos). Purcell brilliantly observes
that "the object of colonization can be the web of connectivity itself
rather than the productive terrains."

Analogy comes in with "frontier history," and the debates following the
famous thesis of Frederic Jackson Turner on the influence of the
open-ended American frontier on the society and culture of the United
States.[[10]] Purcell follows Ettore Lepore, who modified the one-sided
thesis to include the shifting migrations and settlements of Greeks and
non-Greek alike. Purcell follows these points with detailed examples
from southern Italy that are somewhat loosely connected with the
earlier parts of the article, except for the recurring theme that
"colonization is a category in crisis." In truth, when was it not? But
now we get more sophisticated reasons. Basically, he concentrates on
examples (e.g., Incoronata) where we find a fluid and 'recursive'
version of colonization, with subtle movements of Greeks and "natives"
across colonial frontiers, and "interactions, gateway-functions, points
of cultural transition." He is particularly illuminating when
commenting on the unstable relations of hinterlands and the sea.

Although Mediterraneanist historians like Purcell may be more flexible
when applying a wide-angle lens to geographical areas and to history
'in the long term' (la longue dure/e), this also creates problems of
assessment and interpretation, since events and phenomena may change
their historical significance over time. Greek settlements appear to
Purcell as disruptive and domination-oriented, and eventually end in
failure. Yet this vision depends on a chronological foreshortening of
the 'history of events.' After all, centuries would pass before certain
Greek colonies became 'Lucanian' or 'Oscan,' and even then not always
through direct conflict. Moreover, I find it difficult to square
aggressiveness with the another aspect of land possession,
well-illustrated by Purcell: this time it is not the foundational
kleros, but the spread of individual, unprotected farmsteads, for
example both at Metapontion in Italy and in Rumanian Istria.[[11]]

The issue of historical angle is also found in the final section of
Purcell's article, "Conclusion: Problems of Focus." As a
Mediterraneanist historian, Purcell sees matters in the long term,
hence his ocular metaphors: "The master-narrative of 'colonialism' in
antiquity is a classic instance of a problem of historical focus; it
derives from a myopic reading of ancient literature, a long-sighted
failure to discern the patterns which archeology revealed, and an
astigmatic preoccupation with colonial locations outside the frame of
discussion." Yet historical significance often depends precisely on the
definition of the ocular angle, the space it covers and its time-frame.
These days, what may seem like a victory during the first moments after
a successful war might appear to be an appalling defeat of purpose in a
longer perspective. Thus the misguided ocular perspectives that Purcell
warns us against (and he is perfectly correct for long-term history)
may be turned precisely against his overall argument on the nature of
Greek colonization. We cannot content ourselves with a long-term
perspective, and its implied risk of teleological thinking: true, most
Greek cities in southern Italy 'eventually' ceased being Greek. What
does this say of their first generations? Whenever the late David
Asheri spoke of Greek de-colonization in Israeli universities, he would
end, dead-pan, by reminding the audience that the Ionian colonization
of Asia Minor 'eventually' ended in 1922.[[12]] We need to be careful
with our assessment of the 'Archaic period,' unless we wish to give up
on that category as well.


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Notes:


1.   Marc Ferro (1997). Colonization: A Global History. London:
Routledge); Marcel Detienne (2000). Comparer l'incomparable. Paris:
Editions du Seuil.

2.   Jean Be/rard (1960). L'expansion et la colonisation grecques
jusqu'aux guerres me/diques. Paris: Aubier.

3.   De Angelis, Franco (1998). "Ancient Past, Imperialist Present: The
British Empire in T.J. Dunbabin's The Western Greeks". Antiquity 72,
539-49.

4.   Michel Gras, Henri Tre/ziny and Henri Broise (2004). Me/gara
Hyblaea. Vol. 5: La ville archai+que. Paris: E/cole franc,aise de Rome,
with Irad Malkin, "Exploring the Validity of the Concept of
'Foundation': A Visit to Megara Hyblaia", in V.B. Gorman and E.W.
Robinson (eds.) (2002). Oikistes: Studies in Constitutions, Colonies,
and Military Power in the Ancient World. Offered in Honor of A.J.
Graham (Leiden, Boston, Koeln: Brill), pp. 195-224; Irad Malkin,
"Foundations" in Kurt Raaflaub and Hans van Wees (eds.), Blackwell's
Companion to Archaic Greece, in press.

5.   A.G. Woodhead (1962). The Greeks in the West. London: Thames and
Hudson. Carol Dougherty (1993). The Poetics of Colonization: From Text
to City in Archaic Greece. New York: Oxford University Press.

6.   William Dalrymple (2002). White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in
Eighteenth-Century India. London: Harper Collins.

7.   Irad Malkin (2004). "Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek
Colonization." Colonialism and the Past, in Barbara Fuchs and David J.
Baker (eds.), special issue of the Modern Language Quarterly 65,
341-364.

8.   Doron Mendels (1997). The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism.
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.

9.   Ettore Lepore (2000). La grande Gree\ce: aspects et proble\mes
d'une colonization ancienne. Naples: Centre Jean Be/rard, p. 68.

10.   Frederick Jackson Turner ([1921] 1962). The Frontier in American
History. New York: Henry Holt.

11.   See (cited by Purcell) Krebs, S.A. (1997). "Greek Colonization
and Agriculture in Dobrudja", in John M. Fossey and P. J. Smith (eds.)
(1997). Antiquitates Proponticae, Circumponticae et Caucasicae II.
Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Archaeology
and History of the Black Sea (McGill University, 22-24 Nov. 1994).
Amsterdam: Giesen. 47-65. See also J.C. Carter, "The Greek identity at
Metaponto", in Kathryn Lomas (ed.) (2004). Greek Identity in the
Western Mediterranean: Papers in Honor of Brian Shefton. Leiden: Brill,
pp. 363-90.

12.   David Asheri (1999). "Processi di 'decolonizzazione' in Magna
Grecia: il caso di Poseidonia Lucana," in La colonization grecque en
Me/diterrane/e occidentale: Actes de la rencontre scientifique en
homage a\ Georges Vallet organize/e par le Centre Jean Be/rard,
l'E/cole Franc,aise de Rome, l'Istituto Universitario Orientale et
l'Universita\ degli Studi di Napoli 'Federico II' (Rome-Naples, 15-18
novembre 1995). Rome: E/cole Franc,aise de Rome, pp. 361-70.