De-Centering Rome

Abstract

Teaching the history of architecture from a global perspective remains controversial. First, there is no consensus on what global history is or should be. Second, global history warrants a fundamental transformation of the disciplinary tactics of knowledge production and new models of grounded research in cross-border phenomena. Third, historians often feel intellectually and morally challenged as to how to tackle the epistemic framing of the Other through the institutional mandate of inclusivity. In this essay, I examine how architectural history textbooks typically frame the Roman Empire as part of the Greco-Roman foundation of “Western civilization.” I then highlight how Rome’s long-distance trade relationships, strategic alliances, taxation policies, and frontier activities render untenable the historical canon’s essentialization of the Roman Empire as a cohesive Mediterranean unit propelled by its internal dynamics. Analyzing the works of Greek historian Strabo, Greco-Roman geographer Isidore, and the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Eurythraean Sea, I demonstrate how the Roman emperor Augustus’s seizure of Egypt after the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE transformed Rome’s economic and imperial aspirations. I argue that just because we can now use recent research to highlight Rome’s “trans-civilizational encounters” with Afro-Eurasian regions does not mean that it is easy to de-center an entrenched academic tradition. But global histories can provide architecture students with new insights into the challenges of articulating history as a narrative of entangled human experiences.

Keywords:

• criticism
• education
• Europe
• curriculum
• analytical philosophy

Notes

Notes

1 Sibel Bozdogan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey,” Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 4 (May 1999): 207–15.

2 See, e.g., Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973). Beginning in 1973, Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture played a key role in developing a systematic “political” discourse on architecture. From the 1980s onward, postcolonial studies provided architectural historians with the tools to examine architecture’s complicity with structures of power in society. For a collection of multidisciplinary essays, see Russell Ferguson et al., eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

3 For a cross-section of this type of historiography, see the Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 4 (May 1999).

4 Keith Jenkins, On “What Is History?”: From Carr amd Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995).

5 John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–6. The political implications of questioning the ideological foundation of Western civilization is daunting. As Peter K. J. Park noted in Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013), “the only options taken seriously by most scholars in the 18th century were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.”

6 Stanford Anderson, “Architectural History in Schools of Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (September 1999): 282–90; Jerry Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996): 749–70; Jerry Bentley, “A New Forum for Global History,” Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): iii–v; Bozdogan, “Architectural History”; and Paul Duedahl, “Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History, 1945–1976,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (2011): 101–33.

7 National Architectural Accrediting Board, NAAB Conditions for Accreditation for Professional Degree Programs in Architecture (Washington, DC: NAAB, Inc., 2004), 12–13.

8 National Architectural Accrediting Board, 2014 Conditions for Accreditation (Washington, DC: NAAB, Inc., 2014), 15–16.

9 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

10 Tess Thackara, “We Are Living in the Era of Big Art History,” Artsy, February 26, 2016, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-we-are-living-in-the-era-of-big-art-history.

11 Thackara, “We Are Living.”

12 Richard Feloni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Wants Everyone to Read the 14^th-Century Islamic Book ‘The Muqaddimah?,’” Business Insider, June 2, 2015.

13 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 4.

14 Two textbooks should be mentioned: Francis D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017); and Richard Ingersoll and Spiro Kostof, World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

15 See, e.g., Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Beyond Postcolonialism: New Directions for the History of Nonwestern Architecture,” Frontiers of Architectural Research 3, no. 1 (March 2014): 3; and Regana Davis, “Writing Multiculturalism into Architecture Curricula,” Journal of Architectural Education 47, no. 1 (September 1993): 30-37.

16 See, e.g., Evelyn Lip, Feng Shui in Chinese Architecture (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009); Nancy Statzman Steinhardt, Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); and Christopher Tadgell, The History of Architecture in India (London: Phaidon, 1990).

17 William McNeill, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Janet Abu-Lughod, among others, have explored the idea of world history. What their variants on world history share “is a concern with systemic processes and patterns among a wide variety of historical and natural phenomena that affected diverse populations.” Braudel abandoned the concept of “civilization” in favor of “world systems”—trade relationships and cultural exchanges that reshape our world—presenting new interpretations of the “Mediterranean World” as a way to understand world systems. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siaan Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 386–87.

18 Donald Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (New York: Sharpe, 1997). See also Peter Mark’s review of that book in African Studies Review 41, no. 2 (September 1998): 168–71. Alex Haley, the author of Roots, traced his family tree to Niumi. The legend of Kunta Kinte has even created a local tourist industry, served by a reconstructed village of Juffure, dotted with a slavery museum, guest houses, and fast food eateries.

19 Lucia Allais, “This Criterion Should Preferably Be Used in Conjunction with Other Criteria,” Grey Room, no. 61 (Fall 2015): 66–127.

20 Mark Jarzombek, “Architecture: The Global Imaginary in an Antiglobal World,” Grey Room, no. 61 (Fall 2015): 66–127.

21 Martin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman, Architecture: From Prehistory to Post-Modernism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 115.

22 See Trachtenberg and Hyman, Architecture; and Richard G. Tansey and Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 10th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996). A new generation of textbooks sought to highlight an interconnected history of architecture in the world, abandoning the traditional model of autonomous civilizational growth units. Among them are Ingersol and Kostof, World Architecture; Robert Tignor et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World (New York: Norton, 2011); and Ching, Jarzombek, and Prakash, Global History of Architecture.

23 Tansey and Kleiner, Art Through the Ages, 234.

24 Tignor et al., Worlds Together.

25 Tignor et al., 261.

26 For a general discussion on cross-cultural interactions, see Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction”; Patrick Manning, “The Problem of Interactions in World History,” American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996): 771–82; Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 264–66.

27 Quoted in Mazlish, “Comparing Global History,” 387. See also Janet Abu-Lughod, The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor? (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1994), 2, 6.

28 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome: The Indian Ocean Trade Network and Roman Imperialism,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (2011): 28; J. Thorley, “The Development of Trade Between the Roman Empire and the East Under Augustus,” Greece and Rome 16, no. 2 (1969): 209–23; M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Gary Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BC-AD 305 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), and J. Paterson, “Trade and Traders in the Roman World: Scale, Structure, and Organization,” in Trade, Traders, and the Ancient City, ed. H. Parkins and C. H. Smith (London: Routledge, 1998).

29 Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome,” 30.

30 Strabo, Geographika, in The Geography of Strabo, ed. and trans. Horace L. Jones (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 131.

31 Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome,” 31.

32 Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015), 15.

33 Edward T. Salmon, A History of the Roman World, From 30 B.C. to A.D. 138, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1963), 106.

34 R. Bagnall and B. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 54, 104. See also Frankopan, Silk Roads, 15.

35 Colin Wells, The Roman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 89. See also Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome”; and R. Duncan-Jones, Money and Government in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21.

36 Wells, Roman Empire, 89.

37 Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 33-34. Robert K. Ritner, “Egypt Under Roman Rule,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. Carl F. Petry and M. W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1, 7-8; A. Bowman, Egypt After the Pharaohs, 332 BC-AD 642: From Alexander to the Arab Conquest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 92-93.

38 Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome,” 34–36.

39 C. Howgego, “The Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World, 200 BC–AD 300,” Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 4–5; K. Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 BC–AD 400),” Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): 101–5; and Duncan-Jones, Money and Government.

40 Karl Galinsky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 270–71.

41 Galinsky, 271.

42 Andrew Dalby, Empires of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2000), 162. Augustus’s triumph over Egypt reportedly inspired the appearance of Egyptianizing motifs on the wall of the Emperor’s Study at his primary residence.

43 Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome,” 33.

44 Thorley, “Development of Trade,” 212.

45 Isidore of Charax most likely authored this text. See P. M. Fraser, Cities of Alexander the Great (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 136–37.

46 Horace, “In Praise of Augustus,” Odes 1.12, quoted in Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome,” 27–54. See also Frankopan, Silk Roads, 21.

47 E. H. Warmington, The Commerce Between the Roman Empire and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 14 and notes on 333–34. See also Thorley, “Development of Trade,” 210.

48 Frankopan, Silk Roads, 17. See also H. Kulke and D. Rothermund, A History of India (London: Routledge, 2004), 107–8.

49 Frankopan, Silk Roads, 18.

50 Grant Richard Parker, The Making of Roman India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 171–72.

51 Parker, 172–73.

52 Parker, 125–27.

53 Dell Upton, “Starting from Baalbek: Noah, Solomon, Saladin, and the Fluidity of Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 4 (December 2009): 464.

54 A relevant discussion can be found in Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Ferguson et al., Out There, 9–14.

55 Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” New York Review of Books, June 24, 1982; and “Orientalism: An Exchange, Edward W. Said and Oleg Grabar, reply by Bernard Lewis,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1982.

56 Jarzombek, “Architecture.”

57 Conrad, What Is Global History?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adnan Z. Morshed

Adnan Z. Morshed is an architect, architectural historian, and professor of architecture and architectural history at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. He received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a 2018 TEDxFoggyBottom speaker and currently serves on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). He is the author of Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (University Minnesota Press, 2015). His articles have appeared in JSAH, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of South Asian Studies, Thresholds (MIT), Constructs (Yale), New Geographies (Harvard), Architectural Design, and Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review.