Quote:
Originally posted by Rodeo
Well, I thought about posting this with the disclaimer that my knowledge of acient Rome is zilch (well, I did watch the mini-series  )
So I appreciate commentary from those that are more, um, learned on the subject
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Well, I hope I didn't rant too much. I do believe the comparison is a worthy exercise - it was just Harris' Op-ed that I disagreed with. Even after two millenia, I think there are lessons to be learned from the Romans. And it would not hurt to throw the British Empire in there as well. Rome still stands as the longest lived and most successful super-national state (except maybe for China - depending on how you define "China"). And Britain was, of course, the first global empire. If America decides to walk down the imperial path - which appears to be the case - then it can't hurt to look at how others succeeded and failed.
For instance, one of the things that, I think, helped the Romans succeed (where others failed) was that they were extremely generous with citizenship. They made it a point to bring "conquered" peoples directly into the imperial power structure so they could have a sense of "ownership" in the empire. I was always amazed to see how many senators and even emperors were born outside of Italy or whose families came from recently "conquered" lands. This is something that Britain, for instance, was never very good at. The Romans also invested enormous amounts of money into the "conquered" provinces to improve the infrastructure and facilitate trade and defense. Again, this tended to please the locals and helped to reduce rebellions.
Of course, it was never that simple. And I don't mean to imply that the Romans did everything well in every case. Sometimes they just moved in and killed everybody (as was the case in Carthage). But they did make a lot of surprisingly smart choices which helps to explain why they lasted as long as they did.
Yeah, we can probably kill a lot of bandwidth hashing all of this out...
