Trade Gift Giving And Romanitas A Comparison Of The Use Of Roman Imports In Western Britain And Southern Scandinavia

'Trade, Gift-giving and Romanitas' is a short but detailed study of the way in which elites outside of the Roman Empire used and imported Roman luxury items, focussing on Southern Scandinavia and Western Britain as case studies.It can be argued that these items were being used in the same manner in both regions, with local elites consciously trying to appear Roman in order to secure and legitimise their rule. Furthermore the distribution of these artefacts can tell us a significant amount about the internal structures of these 'barbarian' polities, their economic sophistication, and the role played by gift-giving in both societies.

The Edges of the Roman World is a volume consisting of seventeen papers dealing with different approaches to cultural changes that occurred in the context of Roman imperial politics. Papers are mainly focused on societies on the fringes, both social and geographical, and their response to Roman Imperialism. This volume is not a textbook, but rather a collection of different approaches which address the same problem of Roman Imperialism in local contexts. The volume is greatly inspired by the first “Imperialism and Identities at the Edges of the Roman World” conference, held at the Petnica Science Center in 2012.

As the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm remain, to a considerable extent, obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, this volume approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, allowing overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity to be detected and defined – and thereby challenging the notion that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities – or ‘hydrarchies’. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to a number of distinct regional case studies. The parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment. Monarchs and Hydrarchs will appeal to both students and specialists of the Viking Age, whilst serving as an equally valuable resource to those investigating early medieval Francia, Scandinavia, and the North Sea world as a whole.

This book reintroduces ecclesiastical history in a concise manner that speaks both to the laymen and academic, informing them concerning the events and theology that the church struggled with and emerged victorious over the past two millennia. It is an objective study of ecclesiastical history that led the author to a more robust understanding of theology which challenges some of the novel differences in the numerous Protestant denominations of today.

First published in 1926, this book provides an outline of Roman economic life during the first two centuries of the Empire. Each chapter focuses on a different section of the Roman sphere of influence, including trade routes to China and India, the goods native to various areas, and the means by which they communicated and traded with Rome.