Orientalism and Classicism: The British-Roman Empire of Lord Bryce and His Italian Critics

Abstract

In this chapter, I aim to explore the impact of James Bryce’s The Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (1901) on the early-twentieth-century Italian historiography of Rome. I will particularly focus on the reception in Italy of Bryce’s comparative discussion of the notions of assimilation, denationalisation of subjects and decline in the Roman Empire and in the British Empire in India. I will in this way attempt to show how the genre and themes of Bryce’s work inspired a similar comparative approach in Italy and gave rise to responses among the prominent Italian historians of Rome of the early twentieth century, and in particular in Ettore Pais. My contention here is that the Italian commentators elaborated a contrasting rhetoric and use of the trope of Rome which, on the one hand, responded to the British domestication of Rome and, on the other, reflected Europe’s and Italy’s cultural, political, and social concerns of the time.