The dark side of the Empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

Abstract

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

Re-balancing the Romans

“…While there is considerable variation under the ‘post-humanist’ umbrella—and I am acutely aware that advocates of these approaches share many of the political concerns of Fernández-Götz et al . (2020) and indeed myself—I leave it to other commentators to address the characterisation of this theoretical alignment. Instead, here I focus on the specific questions raised about how we view the Roman Empire, and the significance of this vision in the early twenty-first century.…”

“…Manuel Fernández-Götz, Dominik Maschek and Nico Roymans (2020) offer a timely and compelling rejoinder to advocates of broadly ‘post-humanist’ approaches in Roman archaeology. I agree with much of what they argue.…”

“…I concur wholeheartedly with Fernández-Götz et al . (2020) that ‘new materialist’ perspectives—much like approaches associated with the understanding of modern globalisation—are ill-suited to progressing with this task.…”

“…Clearly, debating the relationships between people, objects and empires is a timely subject to which the issues raised by Fernández-Götz et al . (2020) are highly relevant. Just as the British Empire requires critical and balanced appraisal to remove some of the ‘rose-tinted’ lenses through which it has been viewed, so too does the Roman Empire.…”

Nothing else to think?

“…My aim was to outline an intellectual agenda for Roman archaeology as a whole, incorporating globalisation studies as well as 'material turn' paradigms, to move us beyond the Roman-Native dichotomy, and to advance fruitfully the 'Romanisation' debate. Fernández-Götz et al (2020), however, are interested in Roman expansion and, specifically, its predatory political economy in the late Republic and early Empire. This represents a much more limited subject and perspective-particularly as they retain the traditional Western European focus of post-colonial Romanisation studies, instead of examining the wider Empire.…”