Shaping Roman Britain

This open access book is a new and important account of the part the frontiers played in developing the culture and society of Roman Britain.

The archaeology of Roman Britain is often seen as divided into two different worlds: the military frontier zones of the periphery and the civilian provincial core. In reality, these were closely connected areas. Andrew Gardner offers a new theoretical approach, using Border Studies to analyze the development of Roman-British society, and shows that it needs to be understood as an integrated whole, interconnected with the wider Empire and the regions outside of the frontiers.

Gardner explores how the three major frontier zones of Roman Britain were dynamic borderlands, examining the threads of economic, political and cultural connections along and across these zones. The shaping of Roman Britain over time is a microcosm of processes across the wider Empire, where the frontier regions became increasingly important, transforming the culture of the Empire, and at the same time driving the process of fragmentation that led to the fall of the Western Empire. Looking at Britain in this way builds into a new narrative of the history of the Roman West.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University College London.