In Rome, Global Dreams, and the International Origins of an Empire, Sarah Davies explores how the Roman Republic evolved, in ideological terms, into an “Empire without end.” This work stands out within imperialism studies by placing an emphasis on the role of international-level norms in shaping Roman imperium.

Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was “a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war.” Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud’s conclusion that the “death drive” made any deliverance impossible—the psychological impulse to destruction was universal in the animal kingdom. The global wars of the later 1930s and 1940s seemed ample evidence of the dismal conclusion. A preeminent historian of those wars, Overy brings vast knowledge to the title question and years of experience unraveling the knotted motivations of war. His approach is to separate the major drivers and motivations, and consider the ways each has contributed to organized conflict. They range from the impulses embedded in human biology and psychology, to the incentives to conflict developed through cultural evolution, to competition for resources—conflicts stirred by the passions of belief, the effects of ecological stresses, the drive for power in leaders and nations, and the search for security. The discussions show remarkable range, delving deep into the Neolithic past, through the twentieth-century world wars, and up to the current conflict in Ukraine. The examples are absorbing, from the Roman Empire’s voracious appetite for resources to the impulse to power evident in Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler. The conclusion is not hopeful, but Overy’s book is a gift to readers: a compact, judicious, engrossing examination of a fundamental question.

What ambitions lay behind Roman provincial governance? How did these change over time and in response to local conditions? To what extent did local agents facilitate and contribute to the creation of imperial administrative institutions? The answers to these questions shape our understanding of how the Roman empire established and maintained hegemony within its provinces. This issue of imperial hegemony is particularly acute for the period during which the political apparatus of the Roman Republic was itself in crisis and flux—precisely the period during which many provinces first came under Roman control. Imperial Power, Provincial Government, and the Emergence of Roman Asia, 133 BCE-14 CE uses a case study of the province of Asia to focus closely on the formation and evolution of the Roman empire's administrative institutions. Comparatively well-excavated, Asia's rich epigraphy lends itself to this detailed study, while the region's long history of autonomous civic diplomacy and engagement with a range of Roman actors provide vital evidence for assessing the ways in which Roman empire and hegemony affected conditions on the ground in the province. Asia's unique history, moving from allied kingdom to regularly assigned provincia to a reconquered and reorganized territory, offers an insight into the complex workings of institutional formation. From an investigation of the institutions which emerged in the province over a long first century (133 BCE-14 CE), Bradley Jordan considers the discursive power of official utterances of the Roman state, and the strategies employed by local actors to negotiate a favourable relationship with the empire.

Despite Roman claims to have brought peace, unrest was widespread in the Roman empire. Revolts, protests and piracy were common occurrences. How did contemporaries relate to and make sense of such phenomena? This volume gathers eleven contributions by specialists in the various literatures and modes of thinking that flourished in the empire between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE - including Graeco-Roman historiography and philosophy, Jewish prophecy, Christian apology and the writings of the Tannaitic rabbis - to investigate these questions. Each contribution analyses the discourses by which the diverse authors of these texts understood instances of unrest. Together the contributions expand our understanding of the varied politics that pervaded the Roman empire. They highlight the intellectual labour at every level of society that went to (re)making this imperial formation throughout its long history.

Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to religious traditions and/or to peoples who have largely "stayed put"; the tendency to reimagine and retell stories in new ways over centuries; and the imbrication of epic storytelling and forms of colonialism and imperialism, especially those perpetuated and glorified by Euro-Americans over the past 500 years, resulting in unspeakable and immeasurable harms to humans, other living beings, and the planet Earth. The Epic World is a go-to volume for anyone interested in epic literature in a global framework. Engaging with powerful stories and ways of knowing beyond those of the predominantly white Global North, this field-shifting volume exposes the false premises of "Western civilization" and "Classics," and brings new questions and perspectives to epic studies.

A fresh approach to the Roman imperial tradition on Alexander the Great

This book offers a distinctive take on the civil wars that unfolded in the Late Roman Republic. It frames their discussion against the backdrop of the Mediterranean contexts in which they were fought, and sets out to bring to the centre of the debate the significance of provincial agency on a traumatic and complex process, which cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on Roman and Italian developments. The study of the late Republican civil wars can be productively read as an exercise of ‘connected history’, in which the fundamental interdependence of the Mediterranean world comes to the fore through a set of case studies that await to be understood through a properly integrative approach. Our project brings together an international and diverse lineup of scholars, who engage with a wide range of literary, documentary, and archaeological material, and make a collective contribution to the reframing of a problem that requires a collaborative and interdisciplinary outlook, and can yield invaluable insights to the understanding of the Roman imperial project.

This study considers the relationship between geography and power in the Roman world, most particularly the visualisation of geographical knowledge in myriad forms of geography products: geographical treatises, histories, poems, personifications, landscape representations, images of barbarian peoples, maps, itineraries, and imported foodstuffs.

How did Roman writers use the metaphor of the body politic to respond to the downfall of the Republic? In this book, Julia Mebane begins with the Catilinarian Conspiracy in 63 BCE, when Cicero and Catiline proposed two rival models of statesmanship on the senate floor: the civic healer and the head of state. Over the next century, these two paradigms of authority were used to confront the establishment of sole rule in the Roman world. Tracing their Imperial afterlives allows us to see how Romans came to terms with autocracy without ever naming it as such. In identifying metaphor as an important avenue of political thought, the book makes a significant contribution to the history of ideas. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

It introduces a religious dimension to the study of ethnic identity and globalization in the provinces of the Roman Empire.