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The Western Roman Empire from Augustus to Trajan 265 Exploitation and Assimilation

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The Western Roman Empire from Augustus to Trajan 265 Exploitation and Assimilation the western roman empire from augustus to trajan 265 Exploitation and assimilation: thE wEstErn roman EmpirE from augustus to trajan Richard Hingley* 1. Introduction this chapter explores the assimilation of indigenous peoples across the western roman empire from the end of the first millennium BC and in the first century AD. it provides an assessment of the variable ways in which rome incorporated provincial peoples and the reactions of these people to imperial control. the roman administration usually co-opted local élites into the power structure of empire, while communities that were not co-operative were forced into submission or defeated. a number of influ- ential texts, published during the past twenty years, are drawn upon, in order to review interpretations of roman identity and social change. these recent works explore how people of variable status were integrated into the roman empire in ways that exploited their abilities and local resourc- es. the empire expanded across a vast area and was consolidated as a result of the co-opting of local people. the successful assimilation of such peo- ples transformed their cultures but did not create a fully unified and coher- ent ‘roman’ identity; people retained aspects of their indigenous identities in the transformed local cultures that constituted individual elements of a mosaic of regional societies across the empire. the expansion of roman imperial control was based on a process of imperial incorporation that exploited people while enabling them to live in new ways. this involved the spread of a malleable imperial culture—a culture of inclusion and exclusion (dench 2005, 35)—that identified and helped to create imperial order through a structuring system of difference.1 * i am grateful to dexter hoyos for asking me to write this paper and to Chris gosden, shelly hales, tamar hodos, david mattingly, nico roymans, michael shanks, Carol van driel-murray, Christina unwin, rob witcher and greg woolf for discussion over a number of years of some of the issues addressed here. 1 these ideas are addressed in greater detail in hingley 2005 and hingley 2009. an important issue that is not addressed here is the cultural context in which these new ideas about roman identity and social change are developing and what this tells us about the rôle of classical scholarship in our contemporary age of empire (see hingley 2009). 266 richard hingley 2. Cultures of Inclusion: Romanisation and ‘Becoming Roman’ for the past hundred years, the most influential concept of social change has been ‘romanisation’, an idea that has been used to address societies across the empire (for recent accounts, see macmullen 2000 and millett 1990a; for a critical review, see hingley 2005, 30-46). originally, romanisa- tion was taken to represent a fairly unitary process through which barbar- ian societies across the western empire came to adopt roman civilisation (hingley 2005; mattingly 2002). approaches to romanisation have gradu- ally changed, being increasingly focused, from the 1980s, upon the methods by which local groups within italy and the provinces came to adopt vari- able forms of roman culture. during the 1990s, new interpretations devel- oped to account for the active rôle of local élites in the adoption and adaptation of the imperial culture offered to them by the expanding impe- rial system (e.g. millett 1990a; terrenato 2001; woolf 1998). these recon- struct the empire as focused upon numerous local élites, within the imperial core of the mediterranean, who negotiated their own identities in order to create a system that worked to the benefit of at least a significant proportion of the population. these accounts no longer viewed ‘roman’ culture as a clearly bounded and monolithic entity, but as a malleable group of practices that were derived from a variety of sources spread across the mediterranean (woolf 2001). during the final centuries of the first millennium BC, élite groups across italy developed a growing unity through a process that nicola terrenato has called ‘élite negotiation’ (terrenato 2001). a new culture arose as a re- sult of the benefits of peace and relative prosperity brought to these groups through closer contacts with the growing power of rome. as part of this process, communities within the expanding empire became allied with rome and incorporated precisely because they bargained for, struggled for, or were offered the privilege of retaining the core of their traditional or- ganisation within an imperial framework intended to guarantee order and stability (ibid., 5). greg woolf’s account of ‘becoming roman’ in gaul dur- ing the late first century bc and first century ad provides a detailed and influential exploration of the assimilation of the upper strata (woolf 1998) while comparable approaches have been adopted in the netherlands, Brit- ain, and elsewhere (hingley 2005). the local élites across the provinces were co-opted to run and administer their own peoples so that much of the control of the empire was devolved to the descendants of the upper strata of the indigenous societies that had been incorporated into the .
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