Call for papers: Critical Globalisation: A Theoretical Framework for the 'Crisis' of the 3rd century (original) (raw)

2020, TRAC - Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference

The Roman Empire has been recently considered a valid case study for the application of global history and globalisation theories by Roman historians and archaeologists (Pitts and Versluys 2014, Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture). This approach highlights the characteristics of the Roman Empire as an interconnected world, where numerous cultural, economic, and religious exchanges took place, creating everywhere a common cultural veneer considered as ‘Roman’. This panel aims to challenge the concepts of globalisation in the Roman Empire, using as case study the ‘crisis’ of the 3rd century CE. Current scholarship assumes that this connectivity came to an abrupt interruption during that period of crisis (Hekster, de Kleijn and Slootjes 2007, Crises and the Roman Empire). Despite abundant scholarly works on the subject, no satisfactory and shared theory of crisis exists. Combining globalisation and crisis as object of analysis, this panel explores whether the diverse range of trading and cultural Roman links, implied by the globalisation theories, would continue or be disrupted once the imperial world supposedly almost collapsed. Our main questions are how can we theoretically define the crisis that affected the Roman Empire in the 3rd century CE: economic, political, or military? Did it affect the connections across the Roman Empire and how far and how fast did they change? Finally, whether globalisation and crisis were two phenomena mirroring each other, and to what extent was (or was not) a global empire more prone to experience a global crisis?