PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

It can be a daunting prospect for an academic to hold up a new idea for critical scrutiny (or savaging). However, what most authors fear more than bad notices are no reviews and limited sales—essentially finding one’s work ignored. Fortunately, Imperialism, Power, and Identity has sparked an intense and interesting debate. The mainly favorable reviews and numerous unsolicited emails suggest that it strikes a chord with many readers. That is very satisfying as the book is a deliberately argumentative one and my hope was always that it would engage people in a process of reflection on the state of Roman archaeology and of the discipline of Classical Studies.

Since the publication of the hardback edition, I have given lectures on its themes in Britain, the U.S., and Australia, but also in non-Anglophone countries (Rome, Leuven, Amsterdam, Bayreuth). The issues I raise evoke strong passions in some readers, both pro- and anti-, but the discussions that the book sets in motion have proved lively and illuminating. My experience debating this book with these varied groups, representing very different intellectual traditions, have confirmed my belief that these are important issues for study of the ancient world, not just a British intellectual side-show. As acknowledged in the original preface, many of the ideas in this set of essays are not original or unique to me, but rather represent the first fruits of a group of scholars who have engaged with post-colonial theory and thought about how the discipline of Classical Studies (and Roman archaeology in particular) can profit from joining in such debates. This book may thus serve as a useful waymarker on a collaborative intellectual journey that seeks to re-position Roman archaeology in the 21st century. However, it is far from being the end point of the itinerary.

Some of the (minority of) less positive reviews have attacked my methods and approaches, without seeming to comprehend what the book is really about. My book is above all an exploration of different perspectives on the nature of Roman imperialism, on the operation of power networks, on identity presentation and on the inter-relationships between these three aspects of Roman societies. Following a trend established in reviews of my earlier book on Britain in the Roman Empire, there have been further suggestions that I am anti-Roman because I seek to offer a more balanced critique of negative and positive aspects of Roman imperialism. The most serious charges levelled at my work have been that I have no method as such, but simply pull random incidents and bits of evidence to support a predetermined case. That I refute most strongly and I suggest that such challenges would have more weight if the reviewers who have disliked my approach had also offered a point by point rebuttal or alternative reading of my analytical conclusions.

One reviewer took me to task for reiterating my view that Romanization is a broken paradigm and that Roman archaeology needs to find new tools of the trade. Apparently, this is ‘old news,’ though my experience in debating the book with different audiences suggest that this is still not as widely acknowledged as that reviewer seems to think. For a more acute reading of my objectives and methods, the interested reader is referred to The Classical Review 62.1 (April 2012), 249–251.

I am sometimes asked if I consider myself a post-colonial theorist and tend these days to deny this, though admitting that I have been profoundly influenced by post-colonial theory. What I have tried to do is to integrate some of the key post-colonial ideas about imperialism in my thinking about the Roman world, while at the same time contextualizing these new approaches with the vast dossier of more top-down data that has been accumulated in Roman studies over the past centuries of research. My overall goal is to promote the study of Roman societies from multiple perspectives: top-down, bottom-up and sidewards-in.

The present book was in many ways my attempt to broaden out an intellectual debate that had been running for some time in the British and Dutch research community, expressed in terms that would open up its relevance to a broader Classical Studies community. I have major concerns about an agenda of study of the ancient world that, in relation to some fundamental characteristics, has not been seriously updated in the past century and that is still very off-putting for the bulk of the modern population occupying the southern and eastern half of the area of the Roman Empire. An approach that focuses above all on elite culture, on a benign view of colonialism and that strongly correlates the Roman Empire with Western Civilization does look curiously old-fashioned and ill-suited to the world we live in. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, these issues seem even more urgent to address. The lack of a sophisticated theory of Roman imperialism generated from within Classical Studies has also relinquished the field to modern specialists and politicians who all too readily misrepresent the nature of the Roman Empire in modern debate about imperialism more broadly. The Roman Empire has great potential, it seems to me, to contribute in more dynamic ways to the comparative study of imperialism.

Another question that is often raised in discussion about the book is whether I can explain further how I define and employ the term ‘identity.’ I hope the answer to that will be clear from a careful reading of the book, but feel it worth clarifying some important characteristics here. The first point to stress is that I believe that individuals did not frame their identity in terms of a singular affiliation, but rather than for many people there were multiple identities that they adopted according to social context, life-stage, social status, employment and so on. Regional and local identities remained strong in most parts of the empire, with behavior in certain key areas of life revealing strong continuities with pre-Roman cultures (notably in things like religion and burial). These plural identities of individuals were also accompanied by a multiplicity of group identities, more or less formalized within society. The Roman military community or early Christian communities would be two examples of such identity groups. The archaeological identification and analysis of this multiplicity of identities requires a sophisticated understanding of a range of factors that promote and constrain displays of identity in ancient society, especially relating to elements of the population less represented in traditional epigraphic and artistic displays of status and culture. A key point here is that identifying an element of material culture in the archaeological record is not the same as diagnosing a display of identity. We also need to define and analyze the patterns of behavior associated with the use of that material culture. In addition, we need to frame that knowledge within a broader understanding of how the structures of imperial power and colonial exploitation operated in the Roman Empire and how these constrained and directed human agency. So my formulation of ‘identity’ aims to bring together a consideration of material culture and behavioral practices in relation to an analysis of structure and agency. My initial analyses of this sort have provided confirmation that there are distinctive patterns in the archaeological record that serve (and served) to differentiate self-identifying groups and individuals from each other.

Some people struggle with the use of the term ‘discrepant’ in my particular reading of multiple identities in the Roman world. Indeed, my ideas might have enjoyed wider acceptance had I simply opted for the expression ‘Different Identities’ or ‘Plural Identities’ in place of ‘Discrepant Identities’. However, I am unrepentant on this point. Discrepancy is strongly linked in my work to the networks of power and my response to criticism of the term is that it reminds us that power operated through both hard and soft channels in the Roman Empire. We are confronted with a very broad spectrum of experiences of empire and reactions to colonial power—spanning from strong promotion of cosmopolitan elite norms to outright resistance and rebellion. The word discrepant encompasses all of that range, though I would emphasize that by its use I am not claiming that the negative reactions to empire always and everywhere outweighed the positive engagement. Nonetheless, in studying a colonial encounter such as Rome, it seems to me that our default reading should err on the side of caution, rather than assuming strong approbation and engagement on the basis of the material traces left behind by the elite and the most privileged groups in society (the stuff we tend to find in our museums and published in most detail).

In Britain, the long-running Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference has facilitated an open debate on the agendas and driving paradigms of the discipline, as well as test-driving a range of theoretical models. Classical archaeology in the U.S., in comparison, has for long been seen as a more conservative and under-theorized discipline, but there are positive signs of change. A ‘Critical Roman Archaeology Conference’, held at Stanford, has now been published and a ‘Theory in Greek Archaeology Conference’ has recently been held (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/tiga/home). We need more of this sort of critical reflection. It will increase the relevance of Classics to the world in which we live, which cannot be a bad thing in terms of the long-term health of the discipline and student recruitment.

In Spring 2013, I delivered the Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, using the occasion to amplify the themes of this book in relation to the specific example of North Africa. The responses of the audiences were very positive and many stimulating conversations ensued with graduate students, early career, and more established researchers and practitioners from many different branches of Classical Studies. This experience has reassured me that this sort of critique has a real value. I very much hope that the appearance of the paperback edition will facilitate the extension of those discussions even further in the teaching of Classical Studies.

David Mattingly

Leicester, May 2013