For real globalisation, look at Ancient Rome
Peter Jones says the Romans made things work by keeping it simple. Gordon Brown could learn from this world in which complexity was an ill to be avoided not embraced
In South Shields there is a Roman funerary monument dedicated to 30-year-old Regina (‘Queenie’). It is dated around ad 200, at the height of the Roman occupation of Britain. It tells us that she was originally a slave from St Albans, freed by and married to one Barates from Palmyra in Syria. What on earth was Barates doing in South Shields, for pity’s sake, over 4,000 miles from home, in the frozen north of England? Why, doing business with the Roman army, of course, in the global world of the Roman empire.
So there is nothing new about a global world. We were living in one 2,000 years ago. As Lionel Casson says:
The Roman man in the street ate bread baked with wheat grown in North Africa or Egypt, and fish that had been caught and dried near Gibraltar. He cooked with North African oil in pots and pans of copper mined in Spain, ate off dishes fired in French kilns, drank wine from Spain or France... The Roman of wealth dressed in garments of wool from Miletus or linen from Egypt; his wife wore silks from China, adorned herself with diamonds and pearls from India, and made up with cosmetics from South Arabia... He lived in a house whose walls were covered with coloured marble veneer quarried in Asia Minor; his furniture was of Indian ebony or teak inlaid with African ivory...
Even more striking is how uncomplicated this global world was. Romans governed their provinces with a small bureaucracy co-operating with the local hierarchy to run the place as usual. Rome demanded its annual tax take, and the right to station legions there if needed, but apart from that they imposed no monetary system, no education system, no rules and regulations, and except in a limited number of cases, no laws either (so the Archbishop of Canterbury was right: legal systems can happily exist alongside each other). But their arrival opened up the massive economic network that was the Roman empire.
The contrast with our much-loved EU is stark, and one has to wonder why. There is a simple answer, relevant to all modern life: the ability, thanks to mathematics on the one hand (surely the central discipline of our age) and modern data-gathering, surveillance techniques, communications systems and computers on the other, to be complex. The motives for complexity are laudable — vital, indeed, in scientific and medical research — but put those systems in the hands of policy wonks and just see what happens. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, starting with Brussels and the Treasury under Brown. In other words, because we have the means to be complex, it does not follow that we should be complex. The Roman empire lasted 700 years without complexity.
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ian skidmore
May 22nd, 2008 2:20pmThe trouble is that the new replaces the old. It cannot bear to share.The railways replaced the canal and deliberately wrecked those waterways.
The motor car has replaced the horse and in larger issues we have repaced the classical world,more is the pity, Had we used modern innovations and the old ways side by side we wouldn't be in such a mess now
Steven Bushnell
May 23rd, 2008 5:27amSeven hundred years? Seven hundred years until the city of Rome fell, at which time the capital of the continuing empire was in Constantinople.
Sandeep Murthy
May 24th, 2008 5:59pmMr. Jones, surely you have heard of Democritus of Abdera, a Greek philosopher of ancient times who proposed a very simple and beautiful atomic theory of matter (more than two thousand years before its modern reincarnation). Leucippus and Thales of Miletus were two other Greek philosophers who were associated with the atomic theory.
Of course, the Romans were excellent administrators, lawyers, architects and engineers - that is, doers - but for philosophy we must learn from the Greeks.
More generally, philosophy is complex because reality is complex.
Mike Schroeder
May 26th, 2008 1:19pmOne reason the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did was that it exacted tribute from it's conquered nations, thus not having to over burden it's own citizens with draconian taxes--i.e., at least until the last couple of hundred years of its existence.
The reason America's Empire will collapse much quicker is because it does just the opposite.
David Chorley
May 27th, 2008 3:03amOf course the Roman Empire only spoke in two official languages. The polyglot EU will never catch up to the US until it voluntarily reduces the number of official languages... or the US abandons English.
Denitsa
June 4th, 2008 9:35amEuropean Union is complex, because our time is complex. You can't just gather bunch of countries that not too long ago fought among each other and tell them, you're brothers, we're one country.Whose country, whose history, whose money, whose language, whose laws, whose industries?
You can't just tell them, we're gonna use this language, because it's better than all other languages. Languages that were used for couple of hundreds or thousand years.
I share your respect for Roman Empire, but you can't compare the society now and then. Sure, more laws, more corruption. Same goes for people. More people with power, more corruption.
But can you run the EU with it's 27 members with 10 people? Or with 10 laws. Can you fix their relationships from patents to branding of local products? Trough environment, civil rights, taxes, markets, science transfer and so on.
The Romans had it easy, because they didn't care if in some province women were stoned to death. Should the EU not care about that?
Yes, you can easily say we don't have to fix those things, we can just let it have it their way. And then all your precious industry will go to Romania and Bulgaria, because of the cheap working force or lower taxes. Then to the next eventual members.
Or you'll buy something from another EU member, something to eat, and it will give you an exotic disease, because you don't have a common safety regulation. Or you'll apply for a patent in UK and someone in France will beat you to it. Or whatever.
Our world is complex my friend. You can't just take the money and leave the people to do whatever they like.
European Union isn't an Empire and it hasn't conquered any of those countries. They don't have any obligations to it if the EU doesn't have obligations to them. Same goes for rights and so on.
I don't understad why peolpe try in any way to kick the EU in the dust. If you happen to visit some other countries than the starting 7 or 8, you'll see what a MAJOR difference there is in the life style, quality of life, the understanding of quality life, the economics, EVERYTHING! WE're strong in our variety. And if we want to get even stronger, we have to learn to respect that variety, use it for the common good and control it for the common well-being. And if that has to pass trough 7000 laws and regulation and a million happy Brussel burocrauts, so be it. We can fix that in the process.
If we want to create, we have to be ready to destroy. But we can't destroy something that isn't even there. So instead of just building on the euro-scepticism, I suggest the author to get more realistic. And to stop for a minute and think of Europe 60 years ago. And then to see Europe today and explain to all of us how bad the result is. It's not the same withouth the cheap roaming tarifs, without the open borders trough the continent, without the money for infrastructure or any other idiotism you think of, without the free visit to a doctor in any European country you visit just like that.