Michael Maas’s The Conqueror’s Gift seeks to understand how the corpus of Roman ethnographic discourse — which he calls ‘ethnographic infrastructure’ — changed as the empire evolved, and to use these changes as a lens through which to examine Rome’s evolution as a whole. Living with a wide variety of differences among peoples within and outside the empire, Roman elites were challenged to create a conceptual order to shape their diplomatic relations, governing mechanisms and approaches to integrating new peoples into the empire. The challenge M. highlights for historians is how to account for the variety of perspectives and discourses within this Roman ethnography and tell a story of how they framed imperial experience. This book is his attempt to do so in Late Antiquity, particularly focusing on the changes wrought by Christianity’s rise to prominence.

For M., these ethnographic discourses in a wide array of texts from Strabo’s Geography to the Theodosian Code to Augustine’s City of God served three main purposes: to describe peoples so as to make them intelligible in a Roman worldview, to judge degrees of difference and inferiority from the Roman ideal, and to delineate possibilities for inclusion. M. considers the initial development of Roman ethnography during the Principate to have been highly successful at all three of these goals. However, the dissolution of the western empire, the rise of Christianity and the arrival of new identities — whether as migrating new peoples or old peoples given new names — strained the old Roman ethnographic model. Late antique authors thus needed to rework the Roman discourses to account for the rapidly shifting situations in which they found themselves.

The introduction helpfully lays out the necessary definitions and context: how ethnography facilitates empire, the history of the term ‘ethnography’, how M. defines ethnography for the purpose of this study, the history of authors examining peoples in an ethnographic way before the term was invented, ethnography’s main functions, and the main changes in Late Antiquity that affected the ethnographic infrastructure. Ch. 1 describes the Roman foundations that late antique authors drew on, highlighting the civilised-barbarian dichotomy that Romans tailored to imperial purposes, the emergence of Rome’s centrality and ability to effect change, and geographical and intellectual distance from Rome. Ch. 2 explores relations with peoples outside the boundaries of the empire. As Romans encountered newcomers in western Europe, steppe nomads, Sasanian Persians and Arabs, they developed hierarchies of difference that shaped their diplomatic practice with each. Ch. 3 describes the variety of ways Rome incorporated outsiders within the empire, for instance as auxilia or foederati. Imperial law provided a recognisable framework to establish legal status and rules of engagement. Differentiation became as much about military obligations and land as about ethnicity. Chs 4 and 5 discuss astral and environmental determinism. In ancient Greece and Rome, many believed that the climate and terrain in which a people lived determined its character, and that astrological influences decided its fate. These elements of Roman ethnography gave way to Christian understandings of God as the driving force in the universe, and the choice whether or not to believe in him as a more powerful shaper of identity and status than the influence of land or stars. Chs 6 and 7 trace Christian interpretations of biblical stories that reshaped ethnographic discourse. First, peoples needed to be mapped onto the Table of Nations in Genesis in order to fit into salvation history. Second, Jesus making the Gospel intelligible in all languages at Pentecost meant Christian unity could cross linguistic boundaries. Ch. 8 shows how Christianity could also lead to fragmentation as the differentiation between correct belief and heresy was applied to whole peoples, not just individuals, and associated with Romanness or barbarity. By making orthodoxy central to their worldview, Christians developed a new global vision of community independent of Rome and laid the groundwork for a medieval world order. The conclusion summarises the major discourses and developments before explaining the title. The ‘conqueror’s gift’ was a positive place in the world for Rome, an unwanted gift that irrevocably changed non-Romans, and an unavoidable legacy that still shapes our discourses today.

There is much to recommend this book. Despite covering a wide variety of sources and topics, from ancient Greek to Syriac and astrology to law, M. provides brief yet thorough background for all elements essential for a reader to know. This, along with clear language and frequent headings, means undergraduates and non-experts could benefit from the book as much as subject specialists. Importantly, M. does not restrict himself to a particular genre, but instead considers all sources that seek to describe the peoples of the world to constitute ethnography. This allows him to trace how a wide variety of people thought about others, beyond modern genre definitions that the Romans did not hold. Not everyone will agree with every claim and connection here, but all of it is useful, important food for thought about how we can study ethnographic ideas and their relationship to changing worldviews in deeper, potentially more fruitful ways.