L.’s volume, a revised version of her 2018 doctoral dissertation, is a rara avis. It is a work of immense learning that chronicles how the study of Roman imperialism and Romanisation in Anglo-American scholarship has been shaped by postcolonial thought over the last century. What makes the book remarkable is not so much its topic, but rather its fundamental presupposition: that the writing of Roman history is a political act that is as much about the present as it is about the past. It is L.’s commitment to this line of thought that makes the book an essential read for all Roman historians.
The introduction, which draws on E. Said and H. Bhabha’s theorisation of the writing of history, outlines the book’s argument. L. argues that postcolonial thought and practice challenged a number of fundamental assumptions in the study of Roman history, altering the field’s ‘views on the ancient Roman world, views on the relationship between the past and the present, and views on imperial history and colonialist historiography’ (p. 10) and interrupting the field’s longstanding narratives of homogeneity. Importantly, L. acknowledges that this process of transformation has been rather complicated. Not only has the application of postcolonial thought to the Roman world met with resistance, but it has led to the theories themselves acquiring ‘new significances’ (p. 8) in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world.
The political and intellectual currents that shaped the development of theories of Romanisation in the early twentieth century take centre stage in Chapter 1, ‘The Framework of Romanization’. L. demonstrates how gentlemen scholars of the early twentieth century were informed by their experiences in the British civil service. These men analogised British and Roman imperial endeavours, both when it came to assessing the ancient past and when taking action in the circumstances of their time. Though the exemplary mode of these scholars was rejected in the following generation, their endeavours were no less shaped by contemporary circumstances. The likening of archaeology to science, L. argues, was a political gesture that aimed to ‘maintain the privileged position of Roman history in the social hierarchy’ and ‘write the elite-driven Roman history for the elite’ (p. 27). Nevertheless, the purported objectivity of the methodologies was undermined by the acceptance of two problematic conceits: (1) racially driven beliefs about civilisational priority and (2) narratives of national exceptionalism.
In Chapter 2, ‘Postcolonial Themes’, L. elucidates the tenets of postcolonialism that have most influenced the study of Roman imperialism, namely, the various entanglements between knowledge, power, and the production of history and historiography. L. begins with the poststructural roots of postcolonialism before moving on to explicate four key postcolonial themes: (1) Said’s theorisation of the West as Self and the colonised non-West as Other; (2) G.C. Spivak’s analysis of subalterity and the elite production of knowledge; (3) F. Fanon’s laying bare of the ‘naked violence’ of colonialism from a colonised perspective; and (4) Bhabha’s observations about the ambiguous and unstable nature of colonial formations. L.’s explication of postcolonial theory in this chapter is impressively lucid. She skilfully summarises these complex ideas as well as their broader consequences without losing much in the way of nuance. I would very much recommend this chapter as a starting point for those interested in postcolonial theory and its potential applications to the study of the ancient Mediterranean.
Chapter 3, ‘Postcolonial Questions in the Age of Decolonization’, examines how the study of Romanisation and Roman imperialism shifted due to poststructural and postcolonial thought. L. contends that M.I. Finley’s 1971 Ancient Economy and W.V. Harris’s 1978 War and Imperialism were crucial to sowing the ‘seeds’ of these theories in the study of the Roman world. While neither work explicitly draws upon poststructural or postcolonial thought, they both position the Romans as an alien Other, thereby disrupting teleological and totalising narratives that saw the Romans as predecessors to the Western Self. The tipping point for the diffusion of postcolonial epistemologies in the study of Roman imperialism, for L., is M. Millet’s 1990 The Romanization of Britain. Millet’s acknowledgement of the civilisational developments of pre-Roman Britain and reframing Romano-British relations as a negotiation proved critical to breaking the colonial and imperial hold on the study of Romanisation. This work paved the way for G. Woolf’s 1998 Becoming Roman, which drew on Foucauldian concepts of multi-dimensional power relations and postcolonial formulations about discourses of power to describe Romano-Gallic relations during the Empire.
The book’s final chapter, ‘Towards a Paradigm Shift in the Age of Globalization’, turns to the early twentieth-first century and the scholarship of J. Webster, R. Hingley and D. Mattingly on Roman imperialism. According to L., Webster’s highlighting of subaltern counter-cultural movements through the framework of creolisation, Hingley’s emphasis on the multivalent and fragmented nature of imperial power, and Mattingly’s attention to the discrepant experiences of empire and the alternative histories that stem from such experiences produced two major changes in the way in which we understand Roman imperial rule. First, these works disrupted the latent Romanocentrism of studies on Roman imperialism. These scholars not only challenged the simplistic coloniser–colonised model of imperial rule, but also revealed how Roman imperial practices had reinscribed themselves in European thought and practice. Second, they showed that the writing of alternative histories that avoided rendering the past as a ‘sequence of empires’ was something that scholars needed to do to challenge Romanocentric perspectives on the past.
One thing that becomes clear from L.’s analysis is that the impact of postcolonial thinking on Roman history has been implicit rather than explicit. Despite the obvious influence of postcolonialism, there has been an unwillingness among Roman historians to acknowledge those debts explicitly through citation or discussion. For instance, L. notes that Woolf in Becoming Roman specifically describes his position as apolitical and encourages empathy towards the Roman past. Such practices speak, at best, to the unintentional ignorance of the intellectual traditions in which they operate and, at worst, to the wilful denial of an epistemological standpoint in relation to postcolonial thought. To move forward, Roman historians must acknowledge and credit the postcolonial epistemologies that have informed their work.
A brief envoi, ‘Historical Intervention’, offers L.’s thoughts on these concerns. L. observes that, in spite of the obvious influence of postcolonialism on the field, the discipline of Classics remains deeply entangled in the Eurocentrism that subtended its formation. This historiographical morass, however, is not necessarily a death knell for the study of the ancient past. Rather, L. contends that postcolonialism provides disciplinary practitioners with a way forward, offering the tools to ‘interrupt the present and negotiate a different future’ (p. 204). Giving different groups of people the ‘right to narrate’, she argues, will produce sites of inquiry that operate in opposition to Eurocentric modes of knowledge production.
I wholeheartedly concur with L.’s conclusions. M. Ward and M. Umachandran’s Critical Ancient World Studies (2024) and D. Padilla Peralta’s Classicism and Other Phobias (2025) have drawn upon postcolonial theory to offer powerful critiques of the discipline of Classics and shed light on the ways in which it might move forward. Similarly, K. Blouin and B. Akrigg’s The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory (2025) provides a number of examples of how postcolonialism can help Classicists to understand the ancient Mediterranean world and its various receptions. For Roman historians a deeper probing of concepts such as settler colonialism, indigeneity and diaspora would offer a means of both decentring Romans and attending to previously unimagined alternatives.
I believe that L.’s book deserves to be a tipping point in the study of Roman imperialism. Whether or not it will be, will be determined by whether students and scholars of Roman history are willing to admit that, as Said noted, the work of studying the past is always a political act.
