“The Future So ended civilization in the once thriving Roman province of Britainnia. The lessons for Australia seem obvious: the collapse of an Imperial order brings only economic and political chaos, death and destruction, and regression into an era of civilizational darkness from which it takes many centuries to emerge, if ever. Perhaps those shrill ideologues, academics, teachers, media propagandists, and other useful idiots demanding the end of American Imperialism, and an ill-defined ‘End of Empire’ should do some historical research or, at the very least, should be challenged to justify their nihilistic demands. The global reality is clear, we live in an increasingly dangerous and uncivilized world where the sole guarantor of our liberal democratic system and way of life is the United States: Make America Great Again!”
The End of Empire For many years it has been de rigueur on the Left to denounce ‘American Imperialism’ and demand the end of ‘the American Empire’, usually in favour of an ill-defined ‘socialist alternative’, or some global socialist system (modelled on the European Union, or the United Nations, or Communist China) or, at an even more extreme level, a global Islamist theocracy (modelled on Iran or the Taliban). Such demands are quite shrill in Australia and are emitted with monotonous regularity by the Greens, the Socialist Left of the ALP, Islamist organizations, the various Trotskyite groupuscules, most academics and teachers in the humanities and social sciences, and much of the media and the arts. But what has been the historical experience when empires die? And, specifically, how has such an event impacted on nations, such as Australia, that exist on the periphery of an empire?
Case Study: Roman Britain  The fate of Roman Britain provides a case study of this traumatic experience. Indeed, it provides a particularly vivid example of what happens on ‘the edge of empire’ when that empire dies, and it is not at all a re-assuring picture. The Fall of Rome and the sacking of the eternal city had ramifications not only for the Italian Peninsula but for all the Roman provinces, which were closely integrated into the Imperial system; as the centre fell apart they found themselves exposed to unprecedented internal stresses and external threats, which they were ultimately unable to resist, plunging into the Dark Ages from which it took a millennium to emerge.
Britannia Perched in the Great Ocean, on the farthest margins of the Empire, by the beginning of the 5th Century, the island province of Britannia had enjoyed some 300 years of the Pax Romana. In that time, its settled and cultivated area had expanded inland from the southern and Channel coasts across fertile and productive fields to the frontiers of Scotland and Wales, beyond which lived ancient tribal societies with little interest in being integrated into an Imperial system, the immensity and complexity of which they couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
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Author: Ruth King
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