The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (5 page)

and British empires, Césaire and the former soldier Daniel Nguta

provide a powerful rejoinder to modern scholars and policy makers

who invoke historical examples to extol the virtues and rewards of

Introduction 19

imperial ventures. For there were Daniel Ngutas in every empire, even

ancient Rome. Imperial apologists can laud the Romans for bringing

civilization to the British Isles because the names and experiences of

the common Britons who became Roman subjects have been lost to

history. Yet the story of how simple people have the power to thwart

grand imperial projects begins in this remote and backward corner of

the Roman Empire.

Wall of Pius

N

Tweed R.

Hadrian’s Wall

Tyne R.

Eburacum

(York)

Humber R.

Deva

(Chester)

PARISI

I C E N I

E S

R

U

L

I

S

(St. Albans)

Camulodunum

(Colchester)

Londinium

Calleva Atrebatum

(Silchester)

Regnum

I I

(Chichester)

N

O

O T R I G E S

Gessoriacum

N

(Boulogne)

M

U

Isca Dumnoniorum

D

(Exeter)

0 10 20 30 40 50 mi

0 20 40 60 80 km

Roman Britain

1

The Myth of the Civilizing Empire

Unlike most imperial projects, Roman Britain began with a formal,

premeditated state-sponsored invasion. Emperor Claudius’s most

likely pretext for sending forty thousand legionnaires and auxiliaries

across the English Channel in a.d. 43 was to restore the exiled king

and Roman client Verica to power. The emperor’s bid to conquer a cold,

remote land that the Romans knew very little about also served pragmatic personal ends. Coming to the imperial purple with the backing

of the Praetorian Guard, Claudius needed a heroic victory to establish

his legitimacy and to pay off his military backers. Julius Caesar had

led a pair of speculative expeditions to the island in 56 and 54 b.c.,

and Claudius’s predecessor Gaius (Caligula) had aborted an invasion

in a.d. 40. Britain was thus one of the last unconquered territories in

western Europe. By adding it to the Roman Empire, Claudius sought

to win over the army, burnish his imperial credentials, and answer

critics in the Senate by accomplishing what his more distinguished

predecessors could not.

Political considerations aside, Britain’s actual value was less clear.

The extractive worth of the island’s population remains a matter of

debate. Modern historians have alternately depicted southern Britain as either a rich commercial and agricultural region with a dense

population and considerable tax potential or a mist-shrouded land

that Emperor Augustus deemed too undeveloped to warrant the cost

of conquest. The Greek geographer Strabo recorded that Caesar’s

military expeditions intimidated the Britons into paying tribute

21

22 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and returned with slaves and plunder. Yet he also suggested that the

overall value of the island was not worth the cost of permanent occupation.

This may have been why Claudius’s legions initially refused to cross

the channel. The Greek historian Cassius Dio recorded that Claudius’s

freedman Narcissus convinced them to board the ships by appealing

to their pride, but the promise of extra pay and plunder was probably

the real inducement. Claudius delegated command of the four-legion

invasion force, drawn primarily from the German provinces, to Aulus

Plautius, whom Dio considered a “senator of great renown.” There

was no initial opposition to the Roman landings. Most Britons probably viewed the invasion as another short-term military expedition

and hoped that the Claudian army would follow Caesar’s example

by withdrawing with its loot. They therefore avoided direct combat,

gathering for battle only when it became apparent that the Romans

were not leaving. Organized by the Catuvellaunian brothers Caratacus and Togodumnus, a British confederation fought the Romans and

lost on the banks of the river Medway in southeastern England. Dio

recorded that eleven British kings surrendered after Togodumnus

died in the fi ghting and Caratacus retreated northward.

With southern Britain in Roman hands, Claudius arrived to claim

the fruits of victory and founded a colony near Camulodunum, the

closest thing to a British capital at the time. The emperor then left for

Rome with a parting order to Plautius to “subjugate the remaining

[British] districts.” By a.d. 82, the legions had overrun all of modern

England and Wales and most of lowland Scotland.1

Claudius’s imperial adventure helps to explain why modern

debates about the nature and utility of empire invariably begin with

Rome. The Roman Empire’s scope, power, cultural accomplishments,

and longevity made it the standard by which westerners measured

all other imperial states. The Romans’ spectacular art, architecture,

engineering, and literature refl ected the wealth and sophistication of

their empire, but the passage of time obscures the reality that ruthless extraction made these achievements possible. Ancient generals

sought the immediate rewards of loot and plunder, but subject populations represented the most durable and sustainable dividends of an

imperial conquest. In time, most eventually developed new methods

of resisting central authority, but the Romans were particularly adept

Roman

Britain 23

at creating sustainable bureaucratic systems to draw this process out

and make the most effi cient use of their enormous subject population.

From the top down, these institutions seem rational and relatively

benign, but in reality it took intimidation, naked force, and institutionalized slavery to produce all the grand monuments and cultural

achievements of the ancient world.

Popular histories of Rome ignore these realities because Roman

subjects are largely missing from the historical record. Ancient historians and geographers such as Strabo, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius,

and Zosimus provide rich and colorful accounts of Roman empire

building, but their descriptions of the “barbarians” who became the

subjects of the empire cannot be taken at face value. Concerned primarily with domestic issues, classical authors used the empire as a

backdrop for critiques of Roman politics and society. Epigraphs, legal

texts, bronze copies of discharge diplomas, and census data help to

contextualize and correct the classical historians. Archaeology is also

particularly helpful because it shows how people actually lived rather

than what others said about them. But many archaeologists are drawn

to grand monuments and stately villas, and too few pay attention to

the Roman conquest’s violence and disruption. Consequently, simple

farmsteads and urban dwellings remain largely unexamined.

There is therefore no comprehensive picture of what it meant to

be a common Roman subject. A careful reading of the ancient historians in fact suggests that the Romans themselves knew very little

about the peoples of the empire, regardless of how long they ruled

them. Indeed, it is almost certain that Roman offi cials and tax collectors were no more successful in governing captive territory directly

than their more modern successors were.

This fogginess surrounding the realities of the Roman past

allowed succeeding generations of historians and theorists to follow

Tacitus and Cassius Dio in reinterpreting the Roman Empire to speak

to contemporary concerns. In the early modern Andes, Spanish conquerors used Roman imperial analogies to understand and govern the

conquered Inkan Empire. Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire
voiced worries about the decline of the fi rst British

Empire in the late eighteenth century. A century later, late Victorian

and Edwardian imperial enthusiasts imagined themselves the heirs of

a grand imperial Rome that had uplifted their Iron Age ancestors.2

24 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

As the dominant force in the ancient world for more than fi ve

centuries, Rome exemplifi ed imperial power and became a yardstick

for westerners to measure the empires that succeeded it. The Roman

Empire was therefore a blank slate. Variously, the Rome of Cicero

and Virgil stood for high culture, Caesar’s assassination was a triumph of republican virtues, Augustus’s principate embodied imperial greatness, and the excesses of Caligula and Nero were cautionary

tales about the corrupting infl uences of imperial power.3 Rome thus

is the starting point for today’s debates over the nature and effi cacy

of empire building.

In contrast to the liberal western empires of the twentieth century that pretended to govern in the interests of their subjects, the

Romans made no apology for expanding
imperium Romanum
by

violence and conquest. They also did not initially see any incompatibility between empire building and their democratic institutions. It

was actually the Roman republic that built the
imperium Romanum
.

Invoking Rome’s destiny for universal rule, the republican statesman

Cicero declared in 56 b.c. that “it has now fi nally come about that the

limits of our empire and of the earth are one and the same.” This view

continued into the imperial era. Augustus bragged that Rome controlled the world, and the poet Virgil had Jupiter sanctify the empire

in the
Aeneid
: “For these [Romans] I place neither physical bounds

nor temporal limits; I have given empire without end.”4

Yet the Romans were by no means as self-assured as these boastful quotes suggest. They actually acquired most of their territory

in piecemeal, almost accidental fashion. Claudius’s planned invasion of Britain was an exception. Almost universally, the Romans of

the post-Augustus era were more concerned with stability and control than with expansion for its own sake. Moreover, they needed

allies to exercise power at the local level. In this sense, the
imperium

Romanum
was actually an administrative grid imposing control on

an enormously diverse range of local polities and cultures. Strength

alone was not enough to consign an entire population to permanent

subjecthood, and so the Romans shared power with useful local elites

to govern the larger subject majority. Like all of the empires that

came after it, the Roman Empire established its authority through

militarism and terror, but it needed these partners and intermediaries

to actually rule.

Roman

Britain 25

The Romans were generally more open to easing the line between

citizen and subject than their successors in later empires. At a time

when identities were highly fl uid and fl exible, Roman elites were

usually willing to accept any person of status as Roman provided

he or she spoke Latin and embraced Roman culture. The Senate was

quite generous in granting citizenship to friends and allies during the

republican era, and the emperors continued this practice to the point

where Caracalla bestowed blanket citizenship on all residents of the

empire in a.d. 212. Those who prefer to imagine the Roman Empire

as a civilizing force cite this mass enfranchisement as evidence of its

benevolence, but it is more likely that Caracalla’s concession was a

pragmatic acknowledgment that the boundaries of true subjecthood

had blurred to the point where the Roman Empire was actually no

longer an imperial institution by strict defi nition.

In other words, if empire is the direct and authoritarian rule of

one group of people by another, then Rome ceased to be truly imperial when it turned its subjects into offi cially recognized Romans.

The Roman state certainly exploited its lower orders, but Caracalla’s action suggests that the respectable and military classes of the

empire had become so romanized that the distinction between citizen and subject no longer mattered at the elite level. This universal

enfranchisement must have tempered the extractive power of the

state and may have contributed to the fi nancial crisis that beset the

later Roman Empire.

The Romans’ assimilationist policies were possible in part because

modern conceptions of race did not apply. They did not conceive of

“Romanness” in terms of race or blood, but they had a strong sense

of their own distinct identity and considered themselves inherently

superior to everyone who did not share their culture and morality.

While they inherited the Greek perception of foreigners as barbarians, they also borrowed freely from subject cultures even as they

despised them. Confi dent of their superiority, the Romans assumed

that “tribal” peoples became less virile and easier to handle once

they embraced Roman culture. Assimilation was thus a coercive and

administrative tool as well as an affi rmation of Roman preeminence.