In 1998, in his study of the area around Volaterrae, T. suggested that accumulating more and more local studies could eventually create a clearer understanding of Italy's development after Rome's conquests (‘Tam Firmum Municipium: the Romanization of Volaterrae and its Cultural Implications’, JRS 88 [1998], 94–114). Two decades later, he has synthesised the results. His conclusion is that Italy did not undergo some radical remaking as a result of Rome's unification of the peninsula, and that this is the best clue we have for the nature of that process of ‘conquest’. Given that the broader Italian elite derived such benefit – as indicated by social stability, enrichment, strengthened peer networks and eventually Mediterranean hegemony – from Rome's expansion, the wisest course is to assume that they encouraged it and participated in it. T. then produces a vision of the fourth and the third centuries bce in which, through ‘a grand bargain between specific urban elites’ (p. 261), Rome ‘transformed itself into the administrative centre of a territorial state and abandoned completely its old nature of autonomous city-based polity’ (p. 238). There are some big claims here, and few will agree with all of them; even fewer, however, will have read everything upon which T. draws, and none will emerge without plenty of new ideas.

T. begins with an introduction offering a long and discursive review of all that has been said about Roman imperialism from Polybius to today. The most important conclusion is that the study of Roman imperialism has never been properly contextualised. There has been too little attention paid to the period prior to the fourth century (did the Romans suddenly become bellicose in this period when the expansion erupted?), and too little attention to the Central Mediterranean context in which other polities – most obviously Syracuse and Carthage – also became more aggressive. This leads to Chapter 2, which sketches earlier Italian history as a place of emerging cities and powerful clans. Chapter 3 is a profoundly useful contribution. Those of us who have tried to teach Mediterranean history in this period have struggled with discrete readings that detail the situation in this or that place, piling multiple articles on students or focusing merely on one or two places, but T. provides a review of the evidence from Carthage, Syracuse, Massilia and Tarquinia. The key conclusions are important. These places saw the proliferation of densely-packed farms, experienced a new wave of urbanisation and intensified their civic ambitions, often with respect to military engagements. Any causal explanation for Roman imperialism that does not explain these simultaneous trends can only take us so far.

Employing a similar case study approach, Chapter 4 explores the variety of ways in which different communities in Italy experienced Italian unification; some willingly joined and some offered stiff resistance, while Veii's obliteration was an anomaly. No single experience encapsulates the totality. Chapter 5 offers what will likely be the most controversial claims. Arguing that each year's Roman army was a more or less impromptu creation of the commander, T. sees the Roman state as a vehicle for various families’ ambitions. T. focuses on the undeniable fact of non-Roman elites penetrating the Roman aristocracy, but arms this view with a different set of local agenda. T.’s Italians – Münzer's old ‘princely clans’ – adopt whatever tactics and join whichever elite network is most likely to promote a lineage. By the time the expansion was up and running, T. argues, many powerful Italians saw Rome as the most promising vehicle for their own advancement and often joined out of self-interest. As they joined, they brought their cities with them. Chapter 6 is a sustained argument that there was little disruption to the fabric of Italian life in the fourth and the third centuries, and that – to the extent that colonies, roads and other features emerged – it was all part of strengthening the elite networks that underpinned the phenomenon of integration. The result was a Rome that, far from being a polis on the banks of the Tiber, was an almost federal coalition of elite clans from different parts of the peninsula, but especially from the coastal lowlands of West Central Italy.

An easy read, the book consciously and admirably eschews the most technical language of the field. Though T. roams across various types of evidence and engages with reams of scholarship, there is nothing here that undergraduates could not handle, and I will certainly be assigning various sections in my courses; the clear and provocative thesis also makes it an attractive teaching text. More than anything, T. demands that readers situate the middle Republic in its Mediterranean context, and – especially when combined with an insistence that non-Romans were important actors in the story – that in itself makes this a valuable teaching tool and a real contribution to scholarship.

Like all worthy arguments, T.’s requires multiple sub-arguments, each of which will be contentious in certain circles. His cities are remarkably ‘uncivic’ places. Voters and soldiers are largely agents of their patrons, while there are few taxpayers or worshippers whose motivations need to be considered. T. is determined to endow non-Romans with agency, but non-elites are granted no such privilege. Instead, T.’s elites cruise Italy like trawlers; wherever they go, they drag beneath them nets of followers so vast as to encompass entire communities. It is striking that, after such an effective demonstration of discontinuity in Chapters 3 and 4, there is such an insistence on continuity when it comes to this old social control enjoyed by Italy's elite families. It is here – in the insistence that old lineages would not have allowed all this change if it did not preserve the old power networks (p. 64) – that so many of the believers and non-believers will part ways. T. insists that the loyalty of ambitious clans to their communities was transactional to the point of being ephemeral, yet the best-informed descriptions of such elite (though non-Italian) factions – Polybius’ accounts of Lycortas and Callicrates in the Achaean League – suggest that neither side was merely using the state for convenience. There were real allegiances here, and nobody broke them lightly. Similarly, while T.’s elites are always willing to defect from their cities in pursuit of their own power, what is striking about Rome compared to, say, Syracuse, is the rarity of political/aristocratic violence between 342 and 133 bce. As so often with the middle Republic, much will depend on whether one sees it as a descendant of archaic Rome and its warlords (like T.) or whether it was the harbinger of the late Republic and its civic institutions.

T. intentionally crafts a synchronic sketch across two centuries, which leads to a rich and valuable portrait. The price he pays is chronological imprecision. Transformative years – 396, 366, 342, 338, 295, 287, 264, 241 – play little to no role here. This does not worry T. because such histoire événementielle is swamped by the great (often archaeological) continuities he identifies. Yet his tactically astute elites must have noticed such changes in the game. How important is it, for example, that his paradigmatic gens, the Plautii, emerge after the Licinio-Sextian laws but before the leges Genuciae of 342? Was it easier or harder for others to follow this course in other periods? One of the most interesting parts of T.’s thesis is that the great houses seem to be aware that the Central Mediterranean was in a 200-year hurtle towards great power hegemony, and each is manoeuvring in light of this ‘bid’ (pp. 103–4 and elsewhere) that Rome was making to be the one great superpower. Could the Plautii in 359 really understand what would be coming by 200?

That T. has provided so many claims to probe is testament to the richness of the model he has presented. This is a thought-provoking book and is essential reading for all students of the period.