The global and the local in the Roman Empire: connectivity and mobility from an urban perspective

The Roman empire covered a significant proportion of the globe, therefore, the discussion of Roman culture through a geographical perspective, plotted and studied with distribution maps of different classes of evidence, can be legitimately made via theories of globalisation. The global-local relationship provides the key focus for this chapter, first within Romanisation theory developed in the 1980s, and second through a series of data-led case studies. Fundamental to our approach is the realisation that to study globalisation in the Roman empire is to shift the academic focus of the disciplines of Roman archaeology and history from a focus on region/single province study to a wider viewpoint accounting for more material, either through projects on a larger scale or via scholars specialising in different regions or types of evidence working together. The collaboration between Ray Laurence, Gareth Sears and Simon Esmonde Cleary from 2005 through to 2010 provides a model based around weekly discussion of their views of the Roman city. The outcome was the monograph The City in the Roman West.