A friction of distance map allows societies, cultural zones, and even
states that would otherwise be obscured by abstract distance to spring suddenly
into view. Such was the essential insight behind Fernand Braudel’s
analysis of The Mediterranean World. Here was a society that maintained itself
by the active exchange of goods, people, and ideas without a unified “territory”
or political administration in the usual sense of the term.22 On a somewhat
smaller scale, Edward Whiting Fox argues that the Aegean of classical
Greece, though never united politically, was a single, social, cultural, and
economic organism, knit together by thick strands of contact and exchange
over easy water. The great “trading-and-raiding” maritime peoples, such as
the Viking and Normans, wielded a far-flung influence that depended on fast
water transport. A map of their historical influence would be confined largely
to port towns, estuaries, and coastlines Vast sea spaces between these would
be small.