Medieval island societies : reassessing insulation in a central Mediterranean context

Abstract

One of the effects of nuclear age environmentalism in the social sciences has been to help widen the focus from straightforwardly economic and political processes in human history such as global economic integration and socio-economic peripheralisation of the underdeveloped world. The establishment of the environment as an autonomous category in the political arena, as well as the filtering of ecological concerns from scientific research bodies through different social and age groups, has led to a new appreciation of the underlying relationships between human society and the environment with which it constantly interacts. The study of this interaction across time had already been firmly established within the new historical orthodoxy founded by Annales historians and Fernand Braudel's classic thesis on the Mediterranean. Even if most of the historical studies produced at an academic level today are still conceived in anthropocentric terms, Braudel's work led successive generations of historians to realize that man's changing relationship with the environment is also part of his history. [excerpt]