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This chapter discusses the extent to which communities in temperate Europe became increasingly integrated into the larger world of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, and how the process of integration worked. Major changes in the visual structure and patterning of objects took place in the context of major changes in the relationship between societies in temperate Europe and societies in the Mediterranean basin, in Asia, and in Africa. The changes emerged internally, from within the societies of temperate Europe. They were in no sense “caused by” outside societies, nor by trade relations with outside societies. The changes in the visual character of fifth-century-BC objects resulted principally from the expanded dissemination of ideas, embodied in new objects, styles, motifs, and designs. The changes in the second century BC resulted mainly from the expansion of commerce—of trade in goods.

The first part re‐examines the three worlds’ typology of welfare capitalism: the liberal welfare regime, the social democratic welfare regime, and the conservative welfare regime. A summary overview of the three regime characteristics is provided. The second part looks at the historical and comparative robustness of regime typologies, and examines whether a three‐way typology adequately exhausts the variance of the different regimes found in different countries. Three cases are identified that call for an additional fourth ‘world’; these are the Antipodes, the Mediterranean, and Japan.

Assuming the validity of these three claims, a total of six models is reached for 19–20 nations. These three cases are examined under the headings The Antipodean Fourth World, The Mediterranean Fourth World, and The East Asian Fourth World (Japan possibly with Korea and Taiwan). This second section of the chapter also looks at families and welfare regimes.

This chapter analyzes coins and writing in late prehistoric Europe. The development of coinage in temperate Europe and the first regular signs of writing are innovations that share some important features. Both were introduced from outside the region, specifically from the Mediterranean world, toward the end of the Middle Iron Age. Although both had existed in the Mediterranean world for centuries before their introduction and adoption in temperate Europe, both appear in temperate Europe at about the same time, during the third century BC and more abundantly during the second and first centuries. They were both adopted at a particular time in Europe's developmental trajectory, and under specific economic and political circumstances.

This chapter examines the connections between Sicily and other parts of the dār al-Islām during the years of Muslim dominion (ninth to mid-eleventh centuries), when Sicily's ports were most regularly in communication with those of North Africa and Egypt. The largest body of evidence for these connections comes from merchant letters from the Cairo Geniza, which detail trade and migration. The chapter discusses Sicily's intellectual connections with the dār al-Islām, economic connections with Egypt and Ifrīqiya, and connections with the wider Mediterranean world.

This book examines Sicily's place within the religious, diplomatic, military, commercial, and intellectual networks of the Mediterranean world. It traces the history of Sicily, from the sixth-century incorporation of the island into the Byzantine empire, through the period of Muslim rule (827–1061), until the end of Norman rule there in the late twelfth century. In particular, it investigates how Sicily moved from the Latin Christian world into the Greek Christian one, then into the Islamicate civilization, and then back into Latin Christendom. In order to understand Sicily's role(s) within the broader Mediterranean system of the sixth through twelfth centuries, the book explores patterns of travel and communication between Sicily and elsewhere—between Constantinople and Rome, between Byzantium and the Islamic world. Finally, it describes Sicily in the dār al-Islām.

This chapter examines the web of connections linking Sicily to the Greek Christian world of the eastern Mediterranean and, simultaneously, to the Latin Christendom of Rome and the Franks during the Byzantine period. It describes travel along the Sicily–Constantinople route under Byzantine rule and how the island served as a useful tool for Constantinople in its diplomatic and military relationships with the western regions. It shows that Sicily could and often did function as an extension of the political authority of Constantinople into Italy, which was both useful and necessary as part of the larger program of the Byzantine empire at the time. Finally, it considers how Sicily operated both as the far western frontier of the empire and as a center of official communication between Constantinople and the western Mediterranean world—particularly, Latin Rome and the emergent powers of Muslim North Africa and Frankish Europe.

This chapter focuses on the itinerants in Archaic Greece. Itinerants are differentiated from the economic migrants investigated in the previous chapter by virtue of the fact that they regularly moved from one place to another, some making only a brief stop, others staying a month or more. Some might have a home to which they periodically returned, others presumably did not. Even so, their lifestyle had points in common with that of the migrant, which is why it deserves inclusion in this study. The ubiquity of itinerants in the Greek world is a reflection of the relative scarcity of the human resource in the Mediterranean world.

This chapter examines patterns of travel and communication that linked Sicily to the Islamic world during the centuries prior to the Muslim conquest in the ninth century. Covering the period of transition to Muslim rule, it shows how Sicily began to “drift” closer to North Africa already in the seventh century. This growing relationship was established through a series of both military and diplomatic connections that brought Muslims into contact not only with Greek Christians in Sicily but also, due to the relationship between the island and Latin Christendom, with Latin Christians. During these years of both violence and diplomacy, from the first seventh-century raids through the ninth-century conquest, Sicily and the Islamic world also began to exchange material goods and economic products. In some ways, then, Byzantine Sicily acted as a meeting ground in the central Mediterranean world for Muslims, Greek Christians, and Latin Christians.

This chapter examines the discontinuities behind the apparent continuities in Norman Sicily during the twelfth century. It looks at the Muslim population of the island, as viewed from both inside and outside of Sicily, and Muslims' reactions to living for the first time on the “wrong” side of the new boundary between religio-political cultures. The chapter discusses Sicily's political, military, and diplomatic connections with the wider Mediterranean world, the connections between Sicily's Muslim community and the dār al-Islām, Sicily's intellectual and religious connections to the dār al-Islām and Latin Christendom, and economic connections in the Latin and Muslim Mediterranean.

This chapter charts an epochal change in how life beyond the grave was imagined as the Mediterranean world Christianized in the late antique period. Heaven was a dwelling place not just for the great and good, who after death found a place for themselves as stars in the firmament. It was, rather, a testing ground for all souls, striving to purge themselves of sin and to draw closer to God. The living were in a position to speed that journey along, reciting prayers for the dead and giving alms. From this perspective, it behooved one and all, and not just the mighty, to be generous, and so alms giving entered into the habits of the everyday, ritual practice, thus evolving in response to changing notions about the afterlife.

This conclusion summarizes the book's findings about Sicily's conceptual place in the Mediterranean world—a position that had been crafted by the Norman rulers. Later medieval maps, together with the Hereford Mappa Mundi, show that Sicily was closely integrated into larger currents in the political and religious world of Latin Christendom. The island's political and diplomatic role in the dār al-Islām was fundamentally different to what it had been under the Byzantine empire. Sicily's place within larger Mediterranean systems was determined not by its geographical location but by larger forces of political change, shifts in the balance of power, and economic need as well as the actions of regular people—merchants, pilgrims, envoys, and others—who traveled to and from Sicily and thus involved the island in patterns of communication, contact, conflict, and exchange.

This chapter explores how the French discovery of Roman ruins in Algeria was used to legitimate its annexation of the territory. Intellectuals and politicians argued that the Ottoman Empire was illegitimate; France was the true heir of the shared Latinate civilization created by the Roman Empire. The new French Empire would simply reunite the Mediterranean world. These efforts were, however, thwarted by both human and material actors. Parisian museum administrators thought that the North African finds were of low quality and not of much interest. French colonists argued, by contrast, that the Roman artifacts should stay in Algeria, to help build a French imperial identity. And the things themselves resisted; they broke when soldiers tried to extract them and their weight sank the ships used to transport them. The chapter then suggests that nineteenth-century campaigns to steal, export, and re-signify art and antiquities sometimes fell short of their ambitions.