DAVID MATTINGLY. An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC - AD 409 (Penguin History of Britain). xvi+622 pages, 17 illustrations, 12 tables. 2006. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books; 978-0-713-99063-8 hardback £30; paperback edition 2007: 978-0-140-14822-0 £12.99.
Review by Alain Ferdière
Laboratoire Archéologie et Territoires, UMR CITERES, Tours, France
(Email: ferdiere@club-internet.fr)
(translated from the French by Reviews Editor)
This volume has no references to interrupt the flow of the text, but an important 'bibliographic essay' of no less than 40 pages and a voluminous and extremely useful index. Its author, who is professor of Roman archaeology at the University of Leicester and whose research focuses on the western Roman provinces and North Africa, describes himself as essentially an archaeologist - as well as the spiritual heir of his illustrious ancestors.
The book consists of five parts: 1) an introduction, with principles adopted and sources consulted; 2) the military community; 3) the (urban) civilian communities; 4) the rural communities; 5) a conclusion with comparative perspectives and reflexions. The intention is to replace Ian Richmond's Roman Britain of 1955, from the same stable. The title, An Imperial Possession, already gives an indication of the author's purpose: the term possession appears to be used in its strongest sense, akin to domination. Richmond's book belonged to a time of decolonisation, when the Roman empire was seen as a model for the British empire, much as Gaul (and the French Empire) was portrayed in J.-J. Hatt's essay of 1959 (Histoire de la Gaule romaine). It seems therefore appropriate to consider Mattingly's work from a historiographical point of view and, since I am a French historian-archaeologist working on Gaul, contrast the research traditions in Britain and France.
What immediately strikes a French reader of Mattingly's book is the largely negative appreciation of Rome's control over the province of Britannia, when French - and probably continental research in general - has been putting forward, for a good fifteen years, the concept of 'integration' (see for example C. Lepelley (ed.) 1998, Rome et l'intégration de l'Empire; there this perspective is applied to Gaul and Britain by M.-Th. Raepsaet-Charlier and P. Southern respectively).
Integration is understood to be the result, for the (multiple) cultures that developed, of a relatively harmonious fusion between indigenous components and 'Roman' and Mediterranean elements, leading to truly 'Gallo-Roman' cultures (and not Gaulish + Roman). It is clear that, at least for the Three Gauls, the élites were deliberately integrated and active in the process of 'Romanisation'. The élites adopted such a cultural model apparently willingly, pulling along in their wake - no doubt to a lesser degree - the lower echelons of society. This does, however, not deny the brutality of Caesar's conquest, or ignore, for example, the exploitation of the Transalpine (later Narbonnaise) province by Roman senators during the later second and first centuries BC.
Mattingly describes the Roman conquest of Britain as a 'nasty, brutish and long' period (Preface, p. xiii). The surprise, to a French reader, is compounded by the fact that a historian appears to pass a value judgement on the period or culture he is studying... But once over his initial 'disorientation' - essentially due to the divergent historiographical traditions of the French and the British- the reader can enjoy Mattingly' s work: it is rich, innovative and intelligent, drawing capably on a large amount of archaeological data. It is indeed the author's aim - successfully achieved - to write an 'experimental, speculative and heretical' book (Preface, p. xv), one that breaks away from a 'soft consensus' based on vague notions: thus the concept of 'Romanisation', a concept that is indeed not clearly defined, is rejected - in my opinion justifiably so.
The archaeological data, though copious, are nevertheless taken more as illustrations of the concepts the author of this history ofBritannia under Roman domination wishes to explore than as elements to develop a specifically 'archaeological' vision of a history based on texts and epigraphy: thus epigraphic documents play a large part, even if the emphasis is on those original and vivid documents that are the Vindolanda tablets. Moreover the chapter entitled 'Sources' (p. 26 ff.) deals with texts and inscriptions and not with archaeological sources, which are treated separately; this reduces the role of archaeology, an impression also conveyed by the quite 'classical' bibliography.
In effect, parallels cannot be drawn too closely between the provinces of Gaul and Britain, so different are the time and conditions of their conquests, and indeed their lengths: nearly five and a half centuries for Gaul, only just over three and a half for Britannia. This difference of two centuries explains, amongst other factors, why the history of these provinces cannot be the same and why the Roman conquest cannot have had the same consequences on both sides of the Channel; granted, on the margins, certain Dutch scholars have also produced negative accounts of the Roman period in northern Gaul (lower Germania).
The author agrees that history should be 'objective, not judgmental' but explains (p. 3) that he has in some ways been forced into the positions he has taken up... His vision of Roman Gaul, however, appears somewhat simplistic (p .4), reduced to a pro-Vercingetorix nationalism - out of date since C. Jullian - and ... Asterix: it is somewhat regrettable that, both on the subject of Roman imperialism and in the particular case of Gaul, no title in a language other than English appears in the bibliography (pp. 544-5).
It may well be that Britannia was for the Roman empire 'A province too far', a late conquest, where the imperial power struggled to establish a provincial system which worked in so many other Continental provinces. Furthermore, this happened in a country far removed from the Mediterranean cultures which characterise most of the Roman world; the author says as much (p. 24), while recognising that Britain was not unfamiliar, judging by the volume of Continental trade even before the conquest.
Certain aspects of Mattingly's negative stance strike me as anachronistic: to state, for example (p. 7), that Roman imperialism was applied without the consent of the population is inappropriate, since democracy, as it is now understood, is a relatively recent concept! In fact, through a critique of the Roman provincial system, it is the colonialism of the seventeenth-twentieth centuries that Mattingly is taking to task. Though this is a political position I share, it is not a historical viewpoint: I believe that historical critique must shed its ghosts, in this case colonialism, as has already been done in the now obsolete debate on the ancient economy between 'primitivists' and 'modernists'.
The positions taken up by the author lead him to give the military domain (part 2) a very large place in the volume. But once again the situation is not comparable to that in Gaul, let alone Germania: military occupation in Britannia was fundamental and led, for example, to the creation of Roman towns on former camps. In response to this very structured military occupation, which included the South, resistance movements and revolts flared up (p. 101 ff.), which in turn led to the building of military installations and roads close to native settlement areas (Figure 7).
If I find much to argue with, I also recognise enormous qualities in this history of Roman Britain, in particular in parts 3 and 4, where the huge diversity of regional cultures, economies and communities is presented. This is the core of the book (revisited in conclusion on p. 520 ff.): it highlights the plurality of cultural identities, perceived here in terms of resistance to the Roman model. Cultural diversity is also a hallmark of Gaul; but where we Continentals see a mark of respect for local cultures on the part of Rome, Mattingly sees the will to resist in local populations. This meant that three legions had to be kept in the province, when, as Mattingly points out, Britannia was surrounded on three sides by 'Barbaricum'; but, for a much smaller space, did the two provinces of Germania not also require four legions?
In part 3, the urban phenomenon is presented as essentially artificial, with large tracts of the territory escaping from the control of the civitates and therefore towns (Figure 10); the same would have applied to small towns, whose economic role was so important in Gaul. This forced urbanisation could therefore, according to the author, only result in failure (Chapter 11: 'Urban failure?'); this, an idiosyncrasy of British history and archaeology (see for example T. R. Slater 2000: Towns in decline), again comes as a surprise in France. The view from the Three Gauls is quite different, even if these provinces possessed some forty 'ephemeral' Roman towns, out of one hundred or so civitas capitals (see Ferdière (ed.) 2004: Capitales éphémères).
In rural areas (part 4), the author emphasises zones of native settlement, culturally autochthonous when compared to the villae that bear the imprint of Rome; yet the situation does not appear fundamentally different from that known in the Three Gauls, where, in many regions, numerous farms built of timber and earth coexisted with villae built 'in the Roman fashion'. What is seen in Gaul as the reflection of cultural and socio-economic diversity is translated in Britain into 'islands of resistance'. Biases in archaeological data acquisition, could usefully be considered in greater depth to explain, for instance, the extraordinary density of 'indigenous farms' in certain areas like the Fens (Figure 13).
The role of the (indigenous) élites (p. 457 ff.), as investors in the land and in craft production and as agents in the towns' governance, is played down: the economic vision is purely 'colonial', in the modern, non-Roman sense, with only Romans and their partisans involved. The situation is quite different in Gaul, with systematic and almost sole investment by the local élites. The author sees (p. 493 ff.) the imperial power as following a real economic policy in its exploitation of the province's resources, not just a financial one through taxation. This point warrants further discussion. Also played down is the role the Anglo-Saxon migrations played in the Roman withdrawal from its far-flung province. This fits in with a vision that sees the end of Roman domination in Britain (p. 529 ff.) as the logical end result of a permanent indigenous resistance to the invader. Indeed the Roman 'interlude' is superimposed on an indigenous continuum which endures from the last centuries BC to the Middle Ages: this idea of an episode without deep cultural consequences has also sometimes been proposed for Gaul and is recently making a come-back in an ideological rapprochement between Continental protohistorians and early-medievalists; but once again, France is not Britain and I would find it difficult to dismiss the impact the Roman conquest had on Gaul.
In sum, this book is rich and original, bringing a fresh perspective to the Continental reader; it will cause surprise, so much are our research traditions different, with repercussions on the practice of history in the Roman provinces today.
