The dark side of the empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

This paper offers a critique of some recent new materialist approaches and their application to Roman expansionism. According to certain authors, ‘Romanisation’ should be about “understanding objects in motion”, a perspective that carries ethical implications. In contrast, we introduce the notion of a predatory political economy as an alternative for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. Our approach aims to make visible the dark sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce a more balanced and inclusive account. Two archaeological cases studies –Roman conquest and rural communities– are presented to illustrate the potential of such a perspective