Weekend Reading: Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963): The Promissory Note and the Bank of Justice

Weekend Reading: Arthur Eckstein: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome

Weekend Reading: Arthur Eckstein: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome: "When Rome ran out of ferocious competitors in the interstate system, frequent large-scale war-making by Rome ceased, replaced by the pax Romana, the Roman peace. It is important to understand that in many regions of the Mediterranean the pax Romana came into existence not late but rather at a quite early point, and that most Roman high officials became administrators rather than generals at a quite early point. This is true in Sicily after 210 b.c.; in all of peninsular Italy by 200 (and in most areas of Italy long before that); in the Po Valley after 190; in most of Spain after 133; in North Africa after 100; and for ever-longer stretches of time in the Greek East. Similarly, Roman aristocratic culture after about 160 b.c. was gradually becoming more and more civilian in character and focus. Yet these twin crucial developments were both occurring well within the period when, according to most scholars, powerful internal cultural, political, and economic pressures were supposedly pushing Rome the war-machine and its militarized aristocracy implacably, in Schumpeteresque fashion, along its specially brutal and bellicose Sonderweg...


#weekendreading #2019-10-06

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