Post-colonial and global Rome : the genealogy of empire.

Abstract

This chapter reflects upon how contemporary scholarship in Roman studies relates to the politics of our world. Classical concepts of order, security and civilisation are deeply embedded within political understandings of the present. The Roman empire makes sense to us, in part, because our society sees contemporary values and aims embodied in the evidence from the classical past. This reflects the two-way relationship between classical times and the present. Our comprehensions of order, logic and justice are bound up with an inherited body of knowledge, much of which ultimately derives from the classical societies of Greece and Rome. We transform and develop these ideas, but we also build on them in the changing interpretations of the Roman empire that are created within archaeology and ancient history. Whatever academics may think about the strengths and weaknesses of globalisation theory, many of the concepts on which it draws have become common currency within the media and society in general. People in the Western world draw upon these ideas just as directly as their ancestors drew upon colonial concepts. This is why we cannot ignore globalisation when we explore the culture of imperial Rome.