Harbours do not operate in isolation. They operate in connection to other harbours, and should properly be studied in their mutual relationships. This obvious, though often neglected, truth is driven home forcefully by Rome, Portus and the Mediterranean, a wide-ranging collection of twenty-two papers on Roman maritime exchange, preceded by an excellent synthesizing introduction (Keay). The volume's overarching theme is the commercial rôle of Portus in relation to Rome and the larger Mediterranean, its methodological angle the study of evidence from archaeology. All papers result from a 2008 workshop at the British School at Rome, save for one investigating the towpath between Portus and Rome (Aguilera Martín), and the final one on ‘computational network methods’ (Earl, Isaksen, Keay, Brughmans and Potts), both presumably added to give greater depth to the ‘connectivity’ theme that is the main thread running through the book.

The volume consists of seven parts, the first of which, ‘Portus and Ostia’, deals not only with the ports in the Tiber estuary but also with the harbour installations in Centumcellae further north — a harbour frequently overlooked — and in Rome itself, treating them as one interconnected system (Keay; Rizzo). This is a salutary approach, highlighting the vast logistical challenge that supplying the imperial metropolis posed.

The second part, ‘Ships and Navigation’, continues with general themes such as the choice of commercial routes based on ship size and type of cargo. It considers the rôle of islands as both navigational hindrances and aids, and focuses in particular on the evidence from shipwrecks in the Straits of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia (Arnaud; Gambin; Boetto). An underlying point of this section, and indeed the book generally, is that le grand commerce maritime between major emporia rather than cabotage was the motor of overseas exchange, a view which (though subscribed to by the reviewer), may not be as uncontroversial as the volume's editor would like to think — ‘[i]ndeed, as is now generally accepted …’ (8).

The next four sections are devoted to regional studies, ‘Hispaniae’ unsurprisingly taking a prominent position. The export of salted fish products and olive oil as gleaned from amphorae, tituli picti and inscriptions naturally receives much attention (Bernal Casasola; García Vargas; Remesal Rodríguez). But also included here are two studies on the import and distribution of (Luni-Carrara) marble into Baetica and Tarraconensis, a welcome addition to our thinking about the economic ties between Spain, Italy and the wider Mediterranean (Beltrán Fortes; Gutiérrez Garcia-Moreno and Rodà de Llanza). Two further regional studies are devoted to ‘Africa’ (Bonifay and Tchernia on maritime networks distributing African ceramics) and ‘The East’, discussing the rôle of Smyrna and Ephesus as entrepôts for Asian coloured marble (Barresi), and of Egypt as a pivot between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (Tomber; Peacock). The section ‘Italy and Sicily’ contains a study on ceramic assemblages from Sicilian cities (Malfitana and Franco) and one on the warehouses at Classe, the late antique harbour of Ravenna (Augenti and Cirelli). But although these are valuable contributions, the absence of Puteoli seems strange here. This omission, as well as the absence of a chapter devoted specifically to the harbour of Alexandria and its grain fleet, seems puzzling, also in light of the book's stated goal of ‘characterizing commercial interrelationships between ports, and to gauge how far they might reflect the notion of a Mediterranean focused around the demands of Rome’ (2).

In the last part, ‘Broader Issues’, the idea of Mediterranean ‘connectivity’ and ‘micro-regions’ is explored in a more general way. Three of the four essays explicitly engage with Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea (2000), together reiterating that regular commerce between major nodes rather than coastal cabotage drove overseas exchange. The most persuasively argued chapter in this respect discusses the circulation of African ceramics as an indicator of separate trading zones, and also considers the heavy dependency of the Roman glass-making industry on maritime transport. It further explores the possibilities and limitations of determining the relative importance of ports by the size of their harbour infrastructure (Wilson, Schörle and Rice). The concluding chapter points to the future by discussing the value of modern information technology for understanding Roman seaborne commercial networks. If these chapters show how much work is still to be done and how much to be learnt, they also demonstrate how much these approaches have already yielded and how much promise they hold.

Although the connection to Portus and Rome is brought out more strongly in some chapters than others, a number standing more on their own, the major contribution of this volume is that it makes a deliberate and in the main effective attempt to put Portus in broader context. It does so by treating it as part of a larger conglomerate of ports serving the imperial capital, and by treating it as a place not only importing but also exporting goods (wood and bricks) and redistributing goods like marble, partly in the service of a private market (Pensabene). The idea of redistribution and onward shipping is also applied to the other major marine and river harbours discussed in the volume like Hispalis, Gades, Smyrna and Classe. This approach of studying ports in their relationship to others makes eminent sense. Scholars interested in Mediterranean ‘connectivity’, and especially in the shipping lanes leading to Rome, will find much to their liking in this rich collection.