The ‘Romanization of Britain’ 30 years on: an account on archaeology and subalterns

2020 marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Martin Millett’s “The Romanization of Britain”. The essay, which has proven influential for all Classics’s studies then, was largely inspired by Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, used by Millett as a framework to analyse the role of local elites in shaping Britain as a Roman province. 30 years, and many postcolonial studies, on, we ask how has the role of Gramsci’s theories evolved in the archaeology of Roman times, from Millett’s essay to nowadays? How does “The Romanization of Britain” link to the current questions that try to give a consistent role to the subalterns of history? By reviewing the evolution of hegemonic paradigms related to the Roman world (i.e. Romanization), this paper aims at highlighting the ways in which scholarship has managed, over the last 30 years, to translate the relationship between power and consent into the material remains of the past. Indeed, if the concept of hegemony has been far more consistently applied to representational paradigms that look at the uniformity of the archaeological record, others amongst Gramsci’s ideas that tend to highlight the nature of history as made of fragmentation and diversity have been much less so. For this reason, this paper will touch upon the state of the art of the application of postcolonial theories, notoriously inspired by Gramsci’s notebooks, to Roman and classical archaeology.