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At the same time, the success of the colonial resistance movements inspired a new interest in the historical sociology of resistance and revolution. The case for the existence of hitherto-overlooked movements of social revolt in history was forcefully made by Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits (1971) with the claim that those whom history has recorded as brigands, bandits, robbers and vandals were motivated by a wider social or political agenda. Whatever the merits of Hobsbawm’s thesis, it kindled an interest in resistance to Rome and Romanisation. The sixth International Congress of Classical Studies (Pippidi (ed.) 1974) was entirely devoted to the theme of “Assimilation and resistance to Graeco-Roman culture” and was followed by Stephen Dyson’s study of native revolt patterns in Gaul (1975) and Marcel Bénabou’s monograph on resistance in Roman Africa (1976). As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, however, a declining interest in ancient resistance movements could be observed. A Crocean reflection of the changing political climate, or merely a general sense of surfeit and tedium after so many words had been expended on the subject?

The postwar phenomenon of global cultural Americanisation also brought the realisation that a dominant power might impose changes in culture, language, lifestyle and patterns of consumption even without the formal political and economic control framework that had characterised the colonial era. Within the study of Roman history, this new insight translated into a dialectical analysis of the relationship between domination and Romanisation and the rediscovery that Romanisation could be an instrument of dominance rather than a consequence.

The study of Romanisation in its Mommsenian sense (as a process of linguistic and institutional assimilation) thus gave way to a concept of Romanisation closer to that of Francis Haverfield (whose classic The Romanisation of Roman Britain was republished in 1979). On the other hand, the new generation of researchers rejected Haverfield’s optimistic dualism of Romanity and barbarism as emphatically as they rejected Mommsen’s vision of an empire unified by common norms, laws and institutions. In the postmodern world of cultural relativism, there is no place for the notion of “higher” and “lower” cultures, and the worn-out idea of cultural diffusion has given way to concepts such as ethnic strategy, identity choice or cultural bricolage. The individual – to paraphrase Appius Claudius Caecus – is the maker of his own identity.

Romanisation remains a controversial and much debated concept. In the last decade, many researchers have felt that the whole notion of “Romanisation” is burdened down by so many imperialist connotations that it should be discarded. Instead of “Romanisation”, we now talk of “Kulturwandel unter Roms Einfluss” (Haffner and Schnurbein 1996), “Becoming Roman” (Woolf 1994; 1998), “cultural interaction” (Creighton and Wilson (ed.) 1999), “italicisation” (Lomas 2000, 165) or “Creolizing the Roman Provinces” (Webster 2001). Others concede that Romanisation “could be allowed to stand as a term, as long as some fundamental preconceptions about the processes it purports to describe are altered” (Alcock in Hoff and Rotroff (ed.) 1997). Romanisation has become the R-word of ancient history, banned from polite academic conversation.

As the twenty-first century dawns, it is being argued that the moral deficit of British imperialism was compensated by its modernising influence on the subject peoples (Ferguson 2002). It remains to be seen if this view will gain acceptance among contemporary historians, whether there will be a Crocean trickle-down effect on the perception of ancient imperialism and Romanisation, and whether the R-word will once more become a buzzword.