Globalisation and the Roman World

Martin Pitts is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. Specialising in the quantitative analysis of consumption patterns, his research addresses the origins of mass consumption and the role of artefacts in large-scale historical processes and how such processes impacted on local cultural practices. Although his focus is on the northwestern Roman Empire, he has also published on consumption in the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries. He is co-author, with Dominic Perring, of Alien Cities: Consumption and the Origins of Urbanism in Roman Britain. He has published articles in the American Journal of Archaeology, the European Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Britannia, and the Journal of World-Systems Research. Miguel John Versluys is Associate Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Leiden. In 2010, he obtained a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research to build his own research group, Cultural Innovation in a Globalising Society: Egypt in the Roman World. In 2011, he was a guest professor at Université de Toulouse II, Le Mirail. In 2013, he received the Zenobia Essay Prize. His main research interest is cultural interaction in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. He has published many articles in international journals and is the author of several books, including Egyptian Gods in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean: Image and Reality between Local and Global (2012).

Part I. Introductions: 1. Globalisations and the Roman world: perspectives and opportunities Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys; 2. Postcolonial and global Rome: the genealogy of empire Richard Hingley; Part II. Case Studies: 3. Globalisation and the Roman economy Neville Morley; 4. Globalisation, circulation and mass consumption in the Roman world Martin Pitts; 5. The global and the local in the Roman Empire: connectivity and mobility from an urban perspective Ray Laurence and Francesco Trifilò; 6. Polybius' global moment and human mobility throughout ancient Italy Elena Isayev; 7. Roman visual material culture as globalising koine Miguel John Versluys; 8. Oikoymenh: longue durée perspectives on ancient Mediterranean globality Michael Sommer; 9. Globalisation and Roman cultural heritage Rob Witcher; Part III. Perspectives: 10. Ancient Rome and globalisation: decentering Rome Jan Nederveen Pieterse; 11. Global, local and in between: connectivity and the Mediterranean Tamar Hodos.