Blurb:

This essay reflects upon the individual essays in this collection and considers how their deliberately local focus both informs and is informed by broader pan-Mediterranean frameworks, especially ‘post-Braudelian’ and globalization paradigms. As a result, it outlines a number of key observations about future directions: ‘izations’ (e.g. Romanization, Orientalization, Hellenization, etc.) are the result of complex processes of hybridization at the local and regional level, which are also inseparable from the increased wider connectivity; the exchange of ideas or goods is not inevitable or reducible to geographical or environmental conditions; exchange is not always fluid or symmetrical; the economic cannot be divorced from the socio-cultural impacts of complex connections within globalization/globalizing networks. As such, it argues that meta-narratives that have characterized Mediterranean-wide interpretations must be re-examined and recalibrated to account for globalization-style connectivities, which are truly local in their enacting.