Irad Malkin. A Small Greek World

Irad Malkin has written an excellent book on archaic Greek colonization, but not in the way he claims. His goal is “to identify the phenomenon of network formation” in Greek colonization (p. 16). He wants “to use network perspectives” to understand the Greek colonial movement (p. 19). Malkin argues that Greek civilization and Greek identity emerged “not in spite of distance but because of it” (p. 5). Thus, “it was not concerted action but divergence through colonial networks that created ... the important commonalities of the civilization we know today as Greek” (p. 61). Variations of this thesis have been argued before. Malkin wants to add value through network theory. He suggests that networks have “an explanatory rather than just a representational value for the formation of the historical Greek network” and that network theory “is a relevant approach” to archaic Greece (pp. 8, 15). He proposes that links between Greek colonies “reduced the distance between the nodes of the network,” creating a “‘small world,’ a defining term in current network theory” (p. 5). Malkin follows in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000) but correctly insists that they paid inadequate attention to “the formative dynamics of the networks” at stake, which a network approach can rectify (pp. 44–45).

Ancient Greek · Ancient history · Archaeology · Civilization · Colonialism · Genealogy · Value (mathematics) · Chinese history and philosophy · Classics · Computer Science · History

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