Shaping Roman Britain : Frontiers and Borderlands

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: on the one hand, the military forts of the frontier zones in northern England and Wales, and on the other, the towns, villas and farms of the civilian south and east. In reality, these were closely connected areas. Andrew Gardner offers a new theoretical approach, using the perspective of Border Studies, to study the development of Roman-British society and shows that it needs to be understood as an integrated whole, interconnected also with the wider Empire and with the regions outside of the frontier.

Furthermore, Gardner explores how the frontier zones of Roman Britain were dynamic borderlands which were impacted by, and had major influences on, the story of the province and of the regions beyond. Looking in turn at the diverse boundaries, and interactions across them, in northern Britain, the Irish Sea, and the North Sea/Channel frontier of the ‘Saxon Shore’, the book examines the threads of economic, political and cultural connections along and across these zones. The shaping of Roman Britain over time is a microcosm of important processes across the wider Empire, where the frontier regions became increasingly important over the long-term, 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.