Empires and resistance: the rise and fall of Great Powers
A conference held on Saturday 8th May 2004,
at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU
9.30am - 4.00pm
Neil Faulkner, "The rise and fall of Roman military imperialism"
The world of Rome, with its wars of conquest, slave labour, bloody games and crucifixions, can seem a terrible one. Or, thinking of town planning, civil engineering, bath-houses, mosaic pavements and Latin literature, Rome can appear as a peak of human cultural achievement. Which of these is dominant? Rome the bloody conqueror or Rome the great civiliser? Should we deplore the historical example of Rome, or admire it, perhaps even seek to emulate it?
For some, this is a question with relevance today. Open comparisons are being made between ancient Rome and the modern American Empire. The office of Donald Rumsfeld, neo-conservative US Secretary of State under George Bush Jnr., sponsored a private study of great empires, including the Roman, asking how they had maintained their dominance and what the United States could learn from them. When the Islamist militant Osama bin Laden called for ‘a general mobilisation to prepare for repulsing the raids of the Romans’, it was a metaphor for holy war against the American occupation of Iraq. Ancient historians Tom Holland and Peter Jones, writing in the BBC History Magazine, debated whether US power offered parallels with the Roman imperium. And Alex Callinicos, a leading left-wing intellectual, compared the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 with that of the fourth-century Roman emperor Julian in the opening passages of his recent book The New Mandarins of American Power. As ever, the past is about the present – but rarely so explicitly.
This article offers a definition of Roman military imperialism to help assess the validity of such comparisons. There are, of course, both similarities and differences between imperialism past and present. Imperialism is always rooted in a specific social formation, so capitalist, feudal and ancient imperialisms are different in important respects. Capitalist imperialism is driven by competitive capital accumulation: it arises when the expansion of capital depends upon access to essential commodities, new markets and investment opportunities outside the domestic economy; and it contributes to, and is facilitated by, a partial fusion of finance capital, industrial capital and state power. This form of imperialism – ‘the highest stage of capitalism’ – has dominated the global economy since the late nineteenth century. Ancient imperialism, on the other hand, was quite different from this.
[The rest of the text can be read on the downloadable version of the paper]