2000 years ago, Rome was the world’s third largest city and it governed as many as one in five of all the world’s people. From Egypt to Britain, the empire was highly diverse and often politically fractious but it was well integrated by both ideology and economy. Our course explores the conditions for Roman imperialism and assesses its limitations with particular attention to the Western Empire.
Rome emerged among its rivals as Central Italy’s principal city state 2500 years ago. It encouraged militarism from the outset. Alarmed by immigrations to the north and challenged to the south, by first the Greeks and then Carthage, it came to dominate the Central Mediterranean. As the empire spread: east, west and north, the army was reformed and then the government with it. The politics of both institutions became fraught. Foreign affairs threatened to overwhelm the Romans too. Conflict with the Persian Empire became a costly preoccupation but, from the mid 200s AD, the ‘barbarians’ of the north proved more difficult to resist and, after 200 years, they overran the Western Empire. Interpreting the debacle has kept historians busy since the 1700s.
Rome has long been the Western archetype of ancient imperialism but the interpretations of its history have varied bewilderingly. We can take account of the principal theories by analysing the Roman Empire from two sets of perspectives. The first is to distinguish between complementary aspects of the history: social, economic, political and cultural. Cross-cutting those approaches, the second set distinguishes: metropolitan accounts, mostly literary, from the evidence of the provinces, mostly archaeological.