- Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration, and Public Order by Christopher Furhmann (2014; ISBN 978-0199360017) Advanced Cultural Social Cultural – Christopher Furhmann’s work is a fantastic, in-depth look at the interactions that occurred between the military and the public on a day to day basis. He investigates how the Romans maintained public order and administered their empire at the level of the citizenry, in tax collection, enforcing laws, etc., in an era before police and other public services had been invented. Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study by CR Whittaker (1994; 978-0801857850) – An important book for changing our understanding of what the edges of the Roman world looked like. Whittaker challenges the idea that Rome operated a ‘grand strategy’, instead seeing frontier policy as an ad hoc arrangement made piecemeal in response to the needs of the moment. He also uses the concept of the frontier as a legal, military, cultural and economic zone without a clear boundary, where the directness and indirectness of Roman influence varied continuously. Romans, Celts, Germans: The German Provinces of Rome by Maureen Carroll (2001; ISBN 978-0752419121) Advanced Social Cultural – Carroll’s work takes the reader to the Rhine and the upper Danube and analyzes the evidence for cultural crossover in the Germanic frontier of the Roman Empire. Covering from the pre-Roman Celtic society that was present before the Roman conquest to the late Principate, it assesses their transformation and their role as border frontiers of the Empire. An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire by David Mattingly (2007; ISBN 9780140148220) Intermediate Overview/General – Mattingly’s excellent book reassesses the archaeological evidence for the Roman occupation of Britain, emphasising the realities of life in the province. There is a narrative of the conquests drawn from literary accounts, but the bulk of the book explores the impacts of Roman rule as told by the archaeological evidence. Imperial Possession is incredibly dense with data in places, making it sometimes challenging for the uninitiated, but nevertheless this is still the most succinct and up-to-date monograph on Roman Britain. The Sons of Remus : Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain by Andrew C. Johnston (2017; ISBN 9780674660106) Advanced Cultural Social – The author explores Romanity in Gaul and Spain not as an integral shift of local identities but as a transformative process where provincial identities were both shaped by their relation to the Empire, its institutions and its social-economical ensemble but as well by their own past, mythologized and interpreted along the new realities. Andrew C. Johnston thus describes provincials of the western provinces as the result of a controlled self-acculturation by indigenous elites whose result were different variants of Roman identities. Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilisation in Gaul by Greg Woolf (2006; ISBN 978-0521789820) – a very important book on how Roman identity spread into the Roman provinces, using Gaul as a case study. Woolf argues both for the speed at which Gauls were forced to accept Roman culture and the importance of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy in driving cultural change and creating an interface between the Roman centre and Gallic subjects. He is also good at defining what cultural change means, and paying attention to the dialogue and negotiation that goes along with accepting and reinterpreting certain cultural practices, rather than a single Roman ‘package’.
- Tripolitania by David Mattingly (1994; ISBN 978-0472106585) – Looks at the extent to which Roman culture was adopted (or not) in Libya, a generally under-studied region of the Roman Empire. Mattingly is primarily an archaeologist, and uses the results of then-recent archaeological projects like the UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey to argue that most Libyans did not significantly change their ways of living in response to Roman occupation. He also deals extensively with the frontier, and the role of the Roman army in monitoring and policing it. The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East by Benjamin Isaac (1994; ISBN 978-0198149521) – In many ways complementary to the approach taken by Mattingly’s Tripolitania, with more focus on the role of the military and frontier ‘policy’ in (in particular) the Arabian frontier. Another important book for debunking the idea of discrete, impermeable frontiers – Isaac talks extensively about the importance of regular migration into and out of Roman territory.