I spent the first several months of 2025 working my way through
the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperbacks chronicling English history. These were originally published from 1950 to 1978, with updates extending to 1995, but beginning in 1996, Penguin allowed the series to fall out of print as they replaced it with a new series, the Penguin History of Britain. This series was made of longer volumes (compare the
Pelican Roman volume's 189 pages to the equivalent Penguin volume's 539!) and originally published in hardcover. My plan is to work my way through this series in 2026, beginning with David Mattingly's
An Imperial Possession, which covers British history from the arrival of the Romans to their withdrawal. (Like with the Pelican History, the volumes were not published in chronological order; this came out sixth.)
The Pelican Roman volume was one of my least favorites; I wrote, "I don't know that I've ever read a history book by an archaeologist before; if I am to be uncharitable, it certainly
reads like it was by an archaeologist." Unfortunately, David Mattingly is also an archaeologist and unfortunately, the book has much the same issue as its predecessor, in that it feels more like it jumps from place to place cataloguing things rather than telling a story about the time Britain spent under Roman occupation. However, the issues aren't as strong; presumably because of the greater space, I
did have a better sense of the broader context and story. Of the Pelican volume, I complained, "But I often felt like I didn't know
why things were happening:
why did the Romans decide to conquer Britain? why did Boudicca rise up
against it all? why did Roman influence fade? Often it felt like were
just getting brief summaries of
places things had happened without the actual context for the actual happenings." These questions are all ones that Mattingly actually does address here. On the other hand, I still do feel like we got a lot of description of what a villa's layout is without much of a sense why we might care to know this.
The best part of the book is its first chapter, where Mattingly argues that the British have too often identified with the Roman conquerors of Britain, rather than the British that were conquered. Because Britain itself was an empire when many of the histories of Britain began to be written in the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to for writers to see the Romans as benignly civilizing a bunch of "primitives," because that was how the British post hoc justified their own invasions of "primitives." As Mattingly points out, "[e]ven today, more than half a century beyond the effective end of a British empire, mainstream views of the Roman empire are.... closely bound up with issues of national nostalgia for our own lost empire. As a result, we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination" (4). If we move away from this way of viewing Roman Britain, Mattingly claims, then we get a more accurate view of the power relationships: the British elite weren't "Romanizing" because they recognized the Roman way of life as better, but because they wanted to maintain what power they could in a time of Roman domination. It's not as strongly put, but it reminded me of Howard Zinn's first chapter in A People's History of the United States, revealing the self-serving stories our national myths are rooted in. I just wish this project had been better and more clearly carried out into the rest of the chapters of the book, which occasionally feel more like Mattingly is trying to score points against rival scholars rather than speak to a general audience.
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