Books by Jeremia Pelgrom
Roman colonization has been seen as a primary model for colonization and colonialism in more rece... more Roman colonization has been seen as a primary model for colonization and colonialism in more recent historical periods. The most comprehensive study on Roman colonization remains Edward Togo Salmon’s Roman Colonization under the Republic (1969). In the almost 50 years since the publication of Salmon’s seminal book many crucial revisions have been proposed for different aspects of the traditional view of Roman colonization. Despite the obvious importance of these new studies, their impact on our general understanding of Roman colonization and their deeper significance for understanding Roman imperialism has yet to be fully appreciated. The increasing fragmentation of the research field is an important reason that an overarching, radically new, understanding of Roman republican colonization has not, as yet, been brought forward. Issues that are central to the character of Roman colonization are studied in separate disciplines including Roman historiography, urban archaeology, architecture studies, landscape archaeology, Roman religion studies and Roman law. This volume brings together recent insights from a range of different academic traditions, lifting language and cultural barriers. By presenting both new theoretical insights and new archaeological discoveries, it explores the potentially productive interplay between different emerging research areas that are currently isolated.
You can access the full text of the book at https://issuu.com/knirrome/docs/roman_republican_colonization
You can order a paper copy of the book at info@knir.it
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Oxford University Press, 2020
The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning prope... more The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning property distribution and state formation, documented in fragmented textual and epigraphic sources. Once antiquarian scholars rediscovered and scrutinized these sources in the Renaissance, their analysis of the Roman colonial model formed the intellectual background for modern visions of empire. What does it mean to exercise power at and over distance?
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.
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Papers by Jeremia Pelgrom
The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Urbanism in Italy in the Age of Roman Expansion. Colivicchi, F. & McCallum, M. (eds.). Taylor and Francis Inc, 2024
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'Roman colonization under the Republic' by Edward Togo Salmon (1969) can be considered *the* stan... more 'Roman colonization under the Republic' by Edward Togo Salmon (1969) can be considered *the* standard work on the subject, and is often quoted as representing 'the traditional view' of Roman colonies and their purpose in Roman history. This paper seeks to position Salmon's study within the wider, and complex, debates in both Continental and Anglo-Saxon academia, arguing that Salmon's was a very specific view put forward in opposition to differing lines of thought. It follows that taking Salmon as a standard in recent and ongoing revisions of Roman colonisation, we risk losing sight of the much broader and richer debate on Roman colonisation and expansionism that was taking place up till the first half of the 20th century.
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This paper critically examines the long-standing view that Roman rural organization differed fund... more This paper critically examines the long-standing view that Roman rural organization differed fundamentally from that of the other polities of central-southern Italy, and that this difference somehow explains Roman imperial success. First, the intellectual history of this paradigm is examined, focusing especially on 19th century socio-evolutionary theory and on the role of landscape archaeology in the period following WWII. Then, recent archaeological studies on settlement dynamics and land division practices in ancient Italy are discussed. In light of these results, this paper proposes an alternative understanding of Roman-Italic rural development and land division practices and as such also questions the ancient topos which associates Roman imperial success with a specific form of peasant culture.
For the digital version of the paper and for better quality images see: https://journals.openedition.org/mefra/4770
Doi: 10.4000/mefra.4770
Publication Date: 2018
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Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project.
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In: The Renaissance of Roman Colonization (eds. Pelgrom and Weststeijn), 2020
Access via: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/169019524/IntroductionSettler_Colonies_betw... more Access via: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/169019524/IntroductionSettler_Colonies_between_Roman_Colonial_Utopia_and_Modern_Colonial_Practice.pdf
This chapter shows the relevance of Carlo Sigionio’s reconstruction of Roman colonial practices for the history and theory of settler colonialism. It discusses how Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization as a vehicle of social emancipation implicitly criticized Venetian colonial strategies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and sketches its impact on European visions of overseas colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting English and Dutch examples of settler colonialism between Batavia (Jakarta) and Savannah, Georgia. For Sigonio, the Roman colony could be characterized as a well-ordered agrarian landscape concerned with protecting the property claims and political rights of a clearly defined community of citizen–farmers. With his detailed study of Roman colonial law and practice, Sigonio showed that there was a historical foundation for settler colonialism to work effectively. His reconstruction of the Roman settler colony made it possible to conceive of a colonial utopia as a concrete colonial practice.
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TMA50, 2013
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Atlante tematico di topografia antica, 34, 127-138, 2014
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This paper investigates the settlement developments of the landscape around the ancient town of V... more This paper investigates the settlement developments of the landscape around the ancient town of Venusia in southern Italy using legacy field survey data. A Latin colony was established here in 291 BC and also other subsequent Roman colonization movements are known from the literary sources. As in many other Roman colonial landscapes, trends in the settlement data of Venusia have previously been linked to the impact of Roman colonization, which is usually understood as a drastic transformation of the pre-Roman settlement landscape and land use. Rather than using theories on Roman colonial strategies for explaining possible settlement patterns (deductive approach), this paper presents an alternative, descriptive, bottom-up approach, and GIS-based inductive location preference analysis to investigate how the settlement landscape evolved in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (particularly in the fourth–first century BC). Following closely the settlement choices from the pre-Roman conquest period onwards and assessing patterns in continuity and change in the settlement record, we demonstrate that pre-Roman rural settlement and land use strategies were not eradicated but instead strongly determined the location preferences for later settlements in the “colonial” periods. If these settlement trends can be related at all to the colonization waves mentioned in the ancient literary sources, the conclusion should be that Roman colonization did not lead to radical landscape and land use transformations, as has traditionally been suggested. Instead, an organic and complementary rural infill over time is documented, in which cultural factors instead of land use potential played a key role.
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This article focuses on the second and last phase of the Dutch excavations (1964-1966) conducted ... more This article focuses on the second and last phase of the Dutch excavations (1964-1966) conducted underneath the garden south of the church of Santa Prisca and directed by Maarten Josefzoon Vermaseren. The results of these excavations have remained largely unpublished and only very recently have been restudied in the context of the Santa Prisca Project. Using archive material from both the KNIR Vermaseren Archive and the Archivio Storico of the archaeological service Rome, this project seeks out to reconstruct the social and institutional history of this pioneer project of Dutch archaeology abroad and at the same time aims to publish relevant archaeological information hidden in these records. This paper focuses on the data mining aspect of the project and offers a first comprehensive overview of the Vermaseren excavations in the garden of the Santa Prisca.
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Archaeological field survey data can be biased by many factors, such as ground visibility conditi... more Archaeological field survey data can be biased by many factors, such as ground visibility conditions (e.g. vegetation, plowing) and geomorphological processes (erosion, deposition). Both visibility and geomorphological factors need, therefore, to be assessed when patterns of settlement and location preferences are inferred from survey data. Although both factors have been taken into account in a variety of fieldwork projects and studies, their combined effects remain hard to predict. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by presenting a visualization method that helps in evaluating in combination the possible visibility and geomorphological effects in regional, site-oriented field surveys. Capitalizing on first-hand data on both archaeology and soil types produced by the recent Leiden University field survey project in the area of Isernia (Roman Aesernia, Central-Southern Italy), we propose a combined application of statistical tests and geo-pedological analysis to assess the extent and scale of the main biases possibly affecting the interpretation of the ancient settlement organization. Translating both sets of biases into GIS maps, we indicate the likelihood that negative field survey observations (absence of sites), in specific parts of the landscape, are genuine or rather distorted by biasing factors. The resulting " archaeological detectability " maps allow researchers to formally highlight critical surveyed zones where the recording of evidence is likely unreliable, and thus provide a filter through which archaeologists can calibrate their interpretations of field survey datasets.
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It is well known that colonisation was a crucial and formative component of the ancient world. Fr... more It is well known that colonisation was a crucial and formative component of the ancient world. From the Early Iron Age onwards, a period of unprecedented intensity in colonial migrations began that drastically reshaped the geopolitical and ethnic organisation of the Mediterranean. The influence of this development on Classical culture in general, and political theory specifically, is well-known and these topics have a long history of study. Understandably, research has primarily focused on the early phases of this phenomenon, particularly on Greek colonial settlements founded during the late 9th to 6th centuries BCE. Certainly, this formative period in ancient colonial history, which is closely linked to the debate on the rise of the polis, deserves our fullest attention. However, this preoccupation with early Greek colonisation has also resulted in a marginalisation of the later phases of ancient colonial history in the Mediterranean, and of the other, non-Greek colonial polities that were active in the area. As a result, the evolution of ancient colonial practices, as well as the diverse colonial strategies that were adopted in the region by different colonising polities, are only poorly understood.
This is of course not to deny that recent decades have seen important progress in the study of colonial ideology and practices of the different imperial powers that dominated the Classical and Hellenistic world. New interpretive models deriving from a variety of social and philosophical disciplines have offered refreshing new insights into the impact and structure of colonial rule in the ancient Mediterranean, and alongside epigraphy and archaeology have greatly enriched our understanding of the field. These exciting new developments, however, have remained largely contained within specific disciplinary fields. As a result, one rarely encounters studies that deal with Roman, Athenian, Macedonian, Syracusan, Carthaginian, or Achaemenid colonialism in a comparative perspective, or scholars working on both Classical and Hellenistic forms of colonisation.
This digital platform aims to fill this lacuna by combining and showcasing data and expertise on colonial polities in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The first objective of creating a systematic inventory of colonial settlements was taken up together with a group of MA-students from the history department of the University of Groningen. Our methodology and preliminary results are presented in the various pages of this ArcGIS StoryMap. It is important to emphasise that our inventory is set up as a dynamic data source that can be adapted and/or completed according to new insights and discoveries. It is an interactive, work-in-progress project that will also develop and improve through the input and feedback provided by those who visit the website. A second aim will be to create a network of specialists that work on the topic at hand to facilitate exchange of knowledge and expertise. Interaction is enabled in the form of regularly organised workshops and an expert blog function, which will be added to this platform in the near future. The programmes of past workshops, as well as future events, will also be published here.
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Books by Jeremia Pelgrom
You can access the full text of the book at https://issuu.com/knirrome/docs/roman_republican_colonization
You can order a paper copy of the book at info@knir.it
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.
Papers by Jeremia Pelgrom
For the digital version of the paper and for better quality images see: https://journals.openedition.org/mefra/4770
Doi: 10.4000/mefra.4770
Publication Date: 2018
This chapter shows the relevance of Carlo Sigionio’s reconstruction of Roman colonial practices for the history and theory of settler colonialism. It discusses how Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization as a vehicle of social emancipation implicitly criticized Venetian colonial strategies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and sketches its impact on European visions of overseas colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting English and Dutch examples of settler colonialism between Batavia (Jakarta) and Savannah, Georgia. For Sigonio, the Roman colony could be characterized as a well-ordered agrarian landscape concerned with protecting the property claims and political rights of a clearly defined community of citizen–farmers. With his detailed study of Roman colonial law and practice, Sigonio showed that there was a historical foundation for settler colonialism to work effectively. His reconstruction of the Roman settler colony made it possible to conceive of a colonial utopia as a concrete colonial practice.
This is of course not to deny that recent decades have seen important progress in the study of colonial ideology and practices of the different imperial powers that dominated the Classical and Hellenistic world. New interpretive models deriving from a variety of social and philosophical disciplines have offered refreshing new insights into the impact and structure of colonial rule in the ancient Mediterranean, and alongside epigraphy and archaeology have greatly enriched our understanding of the field. These exciting new developments, however, have remained largely contained within specific disciplinary fields. As a result, one rarely encounters studies that deal with Roman, Athenian, Macedonian, Syracusan, Carthaginian, or Achaemenid colonialism in a comparative perspective, or scholars working on both Classical and Hellenistic forms of colonisation.
This digital platform aims to fill this lacuna by combining and showcasing data and expertise on colonial polities in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The first objective of creating a systematic inventory of colonial settlements was taken up together with a group of MA-students from the history department of the University of Groningen. Our methodology and preliminary results are presented in the various pages of this ArcGIS StoryMap. It is important to emphasise that our inventory is set up as a dynamic data source that can be adapted and/or completed according to new insights and discoveries. It is an interactive, work-in-progress project that will also develop and improve through the input and feedback provided by those who visit the website. A second aim will be to create a network of specialists that work on the topic at hand to facilitate exchange of knowledge and expertise. Interaction is enabled in the form of regularly organised workshops and an expert blog function, which will be added to this platform in the near future. The programmes of past workshops, as well as future events, will also be published here.
You can access the full text of the book at https://issuu.com/knirrome/docs/roman_republican_colonization
You can order a paper copy of the book at info@knir.it
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.
For the digital version of the paper and for better quality images see: https://journals.openedition.org/mefra/4770
Doi: 10.4000/mefra.4770
Publication Date: 2018
This chapter shows the relevance of Carlo Sigionio’s reconstruction of Roman colonial practices for the history and theory of settler colonialism. It discusses how Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization as a vehicle of social emancipation implicitly criticized Venetian colonial strategies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and sketches its impact on European visions of overseas colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting English and Dutch examples of settler colonialism between Batavia (Jakarta) and Savannah, Georgia. For Sigonio, the Roman colony could be characterized as a well-ordered agrarian landscape concerned with protecting the property claims and political rights of a clearly defined community of citizen–farmers. With his detailed study of Roman colonial law and practice, Sigonio showed that there was a historical foundation for settler colonialism to work effectively. His reconstruction of the Roman settler colony made it possible to conceive of a colonial utopia as a concrete colonial practice.
This is of course not to deny that recent decades have seen important progress in the study of colonial ideology and practices of the different imperial powers that dominated the Classical and Hellenistic world. New interpretive models deriving from a variety of social and philosophical disciplines have offered refreshing new insights into the impact and structure of colonial rule in the ancient Mediterranean, and alongside epigraphy and archaeology have greatly enriched our understanding of the field. These exciting new developments, however, have remained largely contained within specific disciplinary fields. As a result, one rarely encounters studies that deal with Roman, Athenian, Macedonian, Syracusan, Carthaginian, or Achaemenid colonialism in a comparative perspective, or scholars working on both Classical and Hellenistic forms of colonisation.
This digital platform aims to fill this lacuna by combining and showcasing data and expertise on colonial polities in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The first objective of creating a systematic inventory of colonial settlements was taken up together with a group of MA-students from the history department of the University of Groningen. Our methodology and preliminary results are presented in the various pages of this ArcGIS StoryMap. It is important to emphasise that our inventory is set up as a dynamic data source that can be adapted and/or completed according to new insights and discoveries. It is an interactive, work-in-progress project that will also develop and improve through the input and feedback provided by those who visit the website. A second aim will be to create a network of specialists that work on the topic at hand to facilitate exchange of knowledge and expertise. Interaction is enabled in the form of regularly organised workshops and an expert blog function, which will be added to this platform in the near future. The programmes of past workshops, as well as future events, will also be published here.
Research Master students are expected to submit a paper of 3000-4000 words and PhD students a paper of 5000-6000 words. These papers will circulate among the participants and are to be submitted before 14 January 2020. During the Master Class participants will present their paper, followed by a response and discussion under the expert guidance of Professor Bielfeldt. The Master Class is an OIKOS and ARCHON activity and students will earn 2 ECTS by active participation.
For more information, send an e-mail to crasis.aws@rug.nl or see: http://www.rug.nl/crasis.
This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.