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How do we fit the Roman Empire into world history? Too often the empire has simply been conceived of in terms of the West. But Rome was too big to be squeezed into a purely European model; her empire bestrode three continents. Peter Fibiger Bang develops a radical new world history framework for the Roman Empire, presenting it as part of an Afro-Eurasian arena of grand empires that dominated the shape of history before the forces of globalization and industrialization made the world centre on Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. It was a world before East and West. The book traces surprising cultural connections and societal similarities between Rome and the other vast empires of Afro-Eurasia. Whether we look at war-making, slavery, empire formation, literary culture or intercontinental trade and rebellion, Rome is best approached in its Afro-Eurasian context.
List of contents
1. Rome and pre-colonial world history; 2. The expanding world of warring states: ecology, state-formation, slavery; 3. Among empires - the universal realms of the Afro-Eurasian world; 4. The Imperial cosmopolis: courtly literary languages and monotheist religions; 5. Premodern globalization? Transcontinental trade and the rituals of consumption in the Afro-Eurasian arena; 6. Resistance, rebellion and renewal; Conclusion: Beyond globalization: the world histories for Rome.
About the author
PETER FIBIGER BANG is Professor of Roman History at The Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He has been in the vanguard of attempts to develop a new comparative and global history perspective on the Roman Empire for the last three decades. His previous books include The Roman Bazaar (Cambridge 2008), with Dariusz Kolodziejczyk (eds.) Universal Empire (Cambridge 2012) and with C. A. Bayly & Walter Scheidel (eds.) The Oxford World History of Empire, 2 Vols (2021).
