UC Berkeley History Professor Carlos Noreña first came to Berkeley as a student in 1988, where he developed a lifelong fascination with Mediterranean antiquity. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and teaching at Yale in the Department of Classics, he returned to Berkeley, where he has spent the past two decades sharing his passion for Roman history with students.
Noreña’s research encompasses Roman history, geography and material cultures. He is currently working on a book about Roman imperialism, a series of articles on the empire’s Atlantic frontier and comparative studies on memory and place in the Roman and Han Chinese empires.
Noreña recently spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences about his background and current research. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about your background and what brought you to UC Berkeley?
Carlos Noreña: I first came to Berkeley in 1988, intent on majoring in Rhetoric and then going to law school. But then, I discovered history! Though I was, and remain, interested in many different periods and places, I ended up focusing on ancient Rome. Mediterranean antiquity exercised a magnetic pull on me that has only grown stronger over time.
Following graduation, I spent a year in Madrid teaching English, and then dedicated the next year to getting my ancient Greek and Latin in shape for graduate school in ancient history. After 10 years on the East Coast, I returned to Berkeley in 2005 as an assistant professor of history.
I was thrilled to be back. Things I love about Berkeley include our intellectual culture and commitment to big, ambitious, interdisciplinary work; the remarkable diversity of our student body; and the fact that we are a world-class public university.
Your book Empire of Laws: Lawmaking and Imperialism in the Roman Republic argues that Rome’s overseas expansion was driven by their republican form of ordering the world. How did that republican vision shape their conquests?
Carlos Noreña: The Roman empire is nearly unique in world history in that it was created and sustained, for two centuries, as a republic, whereas most premodern empires were built under various forms of monarchical rule.
How Rome managed to build a vast empire under a republican system of government, with multiple points of decision-making authority and a host of inefficiencies, is a longstanding question. I am approaching it through the prism of Roman law in general and, in particular, the legislative process. Many of the surviving statutory laws deal with the problems of the empire. They provide an invaluable – and overlooked – window onto changing conceptions of what the empire was.
What I hope to show is that these statues, cumulatively, express a sort of master narrative about the superiority of the Roman citizen body and its right to control far-flung territories and to direct material resources to the metropolitan center. A key argument is that it was precisely the generation of that narrative, specifically through the instrument of public law, that helped to motivate the violent process of imperial expansion.
Your research positions the Atlantic façade as an overlooked frontier of the Roman world. What made that region so politically distinct?
Carlos Noreña: What I call the “Atlantic façade” of the Roman empire is a wide swath of land which includes southern Ireland; southern Britain and the English Channel; Brittany and the west coast of France; the northern coast of Spain; the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula; the Strait of Gibraltar; and the far northwestern corner of Africa. Its distinction from the rest of the empire was mainly ecological, shaped by climate, a maritime culture, the interplay between coastal and oceanic economies and the vastness of a dizzyingly open-ended space.
I am especially interested in how this region transformed after it became part of the Roman empire. Its incorporation into the empire shattered the region, breaking it into separate pieces. These pieces were reorganized to better serve the needs of Rome’s more centralized power system.
Your studies on the institutions and ideologies of the Roman and Han empires touch on the intersection of memory, place and culture within imperial systems. Can you tell us more about that?
Carlos Noreña: Empires are systems of power with very real effects “on the ground," but they are also spaces of the imagination residing in the collective consciousness of their inhabitants. How rulers and subjects thought about their worlds – including what it is they remembered and how they inscribed those memories in particular places – is as much a part of what an empire was as were armies and taxes.
By comparing how such imperial imaginings were generated in the Roman and Han Chinese empires, with equally rich but differently configured imperial cultures, I hope to offer a new perspective, complementing current work on the Roman and Han political economy, for why imperial acculturation and imperial statecraft were so different in these two ancient empires.