Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture

Martin Pitts · Miguel John Versluys

oct 2014 · Cambridge University Press

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This book explores a new perspective for understanding the Roman world, using connectivity as a major point of departure. Globalisation is apparent in increased flows of objects, people and ideas and in the creation of translocal consciousness in everyday life. Based on these criteria, there is a case for globalisation in the ancient Roman world. Essential for anyone interested in Romanisation, this volume provides the first sustained critical exploration of globalisation theories in Roman archaeology and history. It is written by an international group of scholars who address a broad range of subjects, including Roman imperialism, economics, consumption, urbanism, migration, visual culture and heritage. The contributors explore the implications of understanding material culture in an interconnected Roman world, highlighting several novel directions for future research.

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Martin Pitts is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. Specialising in the quantitative analysis of consumption patterns, his research addresses the origins of mass consumption and the role of artefacts in large-scale historical processes and how such processes impacted on local cultural practices. Although his focus is on the northwestern Roman Empire, he has also published on consumption in the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries. He is co-author, with Dominic Perring, of Alien Cities: Consumption and the Origins of Urbanism in Roman Britain. He has published articles in the American Journal of Archaeology, the European Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Britannia, and the Journal of World-Systems Research.

Miguel John Versluys is Associate Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Leiden. In 2010, he obtained a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research to build his own research group, Cultural Innovation in a Globalising Society: Egypt in the Roman World. In 2011, he was a guest professor at Université de Toulouse II, Le Mirail. In 2013, he received the Zenobia Essay Prize. His main research interest is cultural interaction in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. He has published many articles in international journals and is the author of several books, including Egyptian Gods in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean: Image and Reality between Local and Global (2012).