Britain and its Empire in the Shadow of Rome: The Reception of Rome in Socio-Political Debate from the 1850s to the 1920s by Sarah J. Butler (review)

For Sarah J. Butler, it was “fear” for their future which impelled late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britons to take a greater interest in a hitherto rather neglected past: ancient Rome and specifically the Roman Empire. “Influential opinion formers” worried not only that their rapidly expanding Empire might be difficult to maintain without undermining their political values, but also that it might be undermined at home by ethnic division, class conflict, or the impact of industrializing cities on the health and morals of the working classes (11). It was only natural that they should be drawn to a civi-lized, multi-ethnic, and urban empire which variously figured in their minds as a model of imperial rule or as a textbook illustration of the ways in which such empires might decline and fall. Rome became a “significant force” in converting British political culture to a “conservative ideology in which order and control were seen as virtues” (16, 169). Butler adopts what she calls a “generic approach” to establishing her thesis, sketching these imperial and national “debates” and then establishing the “nucleus that was Rome” within them, primarily by harvesting Roman references from a wide range of sources—everything from parliamentary debates to popular novels (3, 5). The survey treats much intriguing and unfamiliar material. Her discussion of the connections between racist apologies for British imperialism and interest in Rome, for instance, discovers that Frederic William Farrar, the mild cleric celebrated for his Life of Christ (1874), condemned black races as “irreclaimably savage,” “without a past and without a future, doomed,” in the Transactions of the Ethnological Society (28). Francis Haverfield is familiar from Richard Hingley’s work as a pioneering theorist of Romanization and an ardent imperialist. Yet he features here as the author of Ancient Town-Planning (1913), trading off the Garden City movement by presenting Silchester as almost an ancient Letchworth.

The claim that the Roman Empire helped to articulate pride in and anxieties about the British Empire and national identity is hardly new. Norman Vance’s The Victorians and Ancient Rome (1997) emphasized the political dimensions of later Victorian Britain’s interest in late Rome. Hingley’s Roman Officers and English Gentlemen (2000) stressed that interest in Roman Britain reflected a quest for a common origin for the British people that transcended mid-century “Teutomania” which, in privileging the later Saxons as ancestors, had excluded the Celtic fringe. Butler buttresses these interpretations more than she complicates them, although she does helpfully extend the investigation into the interwar period, arguing, for instance, that the increasing tendency to view the British as addicted to house and home led to a similar domestication of the Romans with whom they were often identified at the time.

The book’s methodology is problematic. The chapters begin with conventional rehearsals of debates about empire, identity, and cities before harvesting citations of Rome that had a bearing on them. The inadvertent impression is that these debates had a life of their own in which Roman examples had a decorative rather than a decisive role. Butler does not engage with the counterargument that many participants in these debates ignored or explicitly disowned ancient parallels. Though she sportingly cites J. A. Hobson’s dictum that “history devises reasons why the lessons of past empires do not apply to ours,” she does not grapple with Duncan Bell’s suggestion that new technologies of transport and communication rendered ancient references nugatory in later Victorian debate about empire (qtd. in Butler 51). The claim that Rome was the “nucleus” of debates in which it was infrequently mentioned comes to look like a weak riposte to arguments from silence: the “shadow of Rome” over Britain often looks shadowy indeed...