Free The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall by Timothy H. Parsons

empire, it paid meager returns. Yet Roman
    Britain fi gures prominently in the imaginations of English-speakers,
    for it allows them to pretend that Great Britain is the direct heir of
    a grand and majestic Roman Empire. Nonetheless, the Roman era in
    British history was not as uplifting or infl uential as contemporary
    imperial enthusiasts might imagine.
    Classical sources referred to the primary island in the British Isles
    as Britannia, thus the inhabitants of this island were Britons. Greek
    and Roman sources depict them as prototypical candidates for imperial subjugation. Casting them as giant forest-dwelling barbarians,
    Strabo asserted that they had “no experience in gardening or other
    agricultural pursuits.” Caesar, who actually visited Britain, granted
    that the southern “tribes” were civilized through contacts with more
    advanced continental Gauls, but he borrowed from Strabo in describing northern Britons as ferocious tribesmen who lived solely on milk
    and meat, dyed themselves blue for war, and shared wives. Tacitus,
    who wrote well after the Claudian conquest, continued to depict
    northerners as wild and militaristic but added the qualifi cation that
    the peace and stability of Roman rule had made them decadent.
    For Roman authors and readers, Britain was an alien, exotic land
    that was literally beyond the known world. The English Channel was no mere maritime body. It was “Ocean,” a watery boundary that marked the limits of civilization. Life in this remote, cold,
    inhospitable, and mist-shrouded land turned Britons into wild men.
    In Roman eyes they were a different order of humanity that deserved
    conquest.20
    These accounts actually tell us very little about the people we now
    describe generically as Britons. There were strong continuities in the
    material culture of Iron Age southern Britain, but preconquest Britons had distinct and separate identities based on their means of subsistence, political and social organization, and perhaps even language.
    Regardless, classical authors invariably portrayed all barbarians—
    including Britons—as nomadic, cannibalistic, and sexually immoral.21
    These historians provide most of the narrative detail of the Roman
    Roman
    Britain 41
    conquest of Britain, but we need to read them with caution, for most
    used Britannia as a backdrop for debates about society and politics
    in metropolitan Rome. Evidence demonstrates that Britons, particularly southern Britons, were not isolated and shared a material culture with their Iron Age neighbors across Ocean in Gaul, Belgica, and
    Germania.
    Contrary to Strabo and Caesar, late pre-Roman Iron Age communities practiced specialized agriculture; mined copper, iron, and tin;
    and produced wheel-thrown pottery and fi nished metal goods. The
    British Isles most likely experienced signifi cant population growth in
    the fi rst century b.c., and competition for resources probably led to
    friction and warfare. Britons in the more mountainous northern and
    western highland zones had fewer commercial and cultural contacts
    with continental Europe, but they produced a suffi cient agricultural
    surplus to sustain settled communities. The agrarian lowland regions
    of southern Britain supported much higher population densities. In
    the rugged regions of Wales and southwest England, populations
    clustered around hill forts, while oppida , large semiurban settlements
    enclosed by extensive networks of earthen dikes, were the most common form of settlement in southeastern England.
    While Iron Age Britons shared a similar material culture, they
    were politically fragmented. Powerful chieftains probably built hill
    forts between the fi fth and second centuries b.c. to claim productive
    territories. The origins and function of the oppida , which fi rst emerged
    in continental Gaul during the second century b.c., are less certain.
    Continental oppida were built for defense, but their British counterparts were less fortifi ed.