West of Miletus, on a tideless shore, the waters of the Maeander flow out quietly into the Aegean sea. Like the river, this book has no conclusion. Nonetheless, certain ideas and approaches have recurred, and it may be helpful to draw out four leading themes of this study.

The first key theme of the book was that of the production of space. In Chapter 1, I argued that it would be highly misleading to regard the Maeander valley as a ‘natural’ space, objectively determined by geological facts. The Maeander valley was a historically contingent social construct, created by human communities at a specific point in past time, which ceased to exist (or at least was transformed into a different kind of spatial expression) at another specific point in past time. Within this region there existed further spatial units, produced both organically by resident groups (such as city-territories) and through creative negotiation between local peoples and external powers (such as administrative divisions). Those produced in dialogue with external powers inevitably possessed a political dimension. These ‘politicised’ spaces in the Maeander region took three notable historical forms: geographies of imperialism, geographies of resistance and geographies of appropriation.