We write global history in order to live. Of its many strengths, maybe the greatest virtue of The Roman Empire and World History is its clarity of purpose. Peter Bang describes history in terms of its power to expand the mind of reader: to "make sense of the world" (xii) in light of our curiosity and desire for narrative, and thus to reflect the kinds of narratives readers are curious about in a particular era. "Global history" reflects, then, something of a shift in the market. Whereas earlier forms of 'big history' were overtly teleological, explaining and often justifying Western hegemony, global history tells a less directional story about massive, interconnected worlds changing over time. This story better fits modern audiences, who can experience the richness of good history without exiling vast swaths of it to the margin. But it also better suits the reality of the Eurasian past. People living in these spaces understood their lives within cultural and economic exchange networks stretching far beyond what one sees in a traditional monograph; these kinds of projects help us understand history from a different angle. The Roman Empire and World History is not a flawless book, but it is a fascinating one that I recommend highly.

The Roman Empire and World History consists of six chapters, but really breaks down into two distinct parts - Chapter One addresses 'global history' as a contemporary historiographical phenomenon, while the remainder of the book practices global history and shows how one might write a coherent narrative that covers the first five hundred or so years of the Common Era, and fit Rome into a broader history of imperial consolidation and dissolution. The book's most explicit argument comes in its Preface, which argues that global history can usefully engage with the Roman empire while nevertheless satisfying the calls for change issued by historians like Phiroze Vasunia or Dan-El Padilla Peralta. [1] From there, Chapter One is, essentially, an intellectual historiography of 'world history' as a discipline. This chapter is the most traditionally scholarly of the book - more on that later - and argues that our current models for ancient global history are built around an older model with its roots in the era of European expansion. Appropriately for the series (Key Themes in Ancient History), Bang's argument is in line with contemporary readings of the field, and he situates the reader masterfully within this scholarly movement.

After Chapter One, Bang dedicates the remainder of the book to a case study and writes the kind of global Eurasian history that he thinks ought to exist in the world. That history is organized thematically, with Chapter Two devoted to questions of state formation and labor history, Chapter Three focused on imperial conquest, Chapter Four religion and court cultures, Chapter Five connections and trade among the established states of the Eurasian corridor, and Chapter Six the various political changes that accompany imperial fragmentation. Each chapter is a bit of a grab bag, given the fundamentally synchronic nature of Bang's analysis, but they all follow a roughly similar structure. Striking quotations from primary sources challenge the reader's view of fundamentally different warring states, and Bang explains the cultural contexts of these odd archives (a Palmyrene milestone from the regency of Zenobia at page 56, a Han account of tribute from the Fergana Valley at page 119) by illuminating processes of exchange. Finally, a conclusion returns to the historiographic questions raised earlier in the book and imagines what an even broader global history might do with some of the nomadic cultures populating Eurasia and with precontact Mesoamerican empires.

I enjoyed The Roman Empire and World History immensely. Bang is a clear, fluid writer with an intuitive understanding of what matters to historians working today - the book is fascinating, and a joy to think with. I will return to that encomium in a bit, but I want to flag two reservations. First, I noticed a number of odd, small errors: for example in claiming that Roman enslaved women were legally discouraged from marrying their owners until late antiquity (51) [2] or in describing the third-century praetorian prefecture as a military post (81). These nitpicks are both bigger and smaller than they appear. On one hand, the scope of The Roman Empire and World History is so vast that most readers will not be able to catch errors outside of their narrow expertise - as an imperial historian specializing in law, I noticed problems in my own orbit, but there are almost certainly others I lack the knowledge to spot. On the other hand, Bang is not trying to write the kind of granular history where these issues would matter. Bang is dead right on the broader texture of Roman administration, and the book works on that level. If some illustrative details feel a bit under-nuanced, that does not make Bang's vision any less compelling or persuasive. The Roman Empire and World History does not present itself as a book one goes to for details, so it would not really be fair to hold it to the standards of more granular, specialized, smaller-scale history.

My second concern is less with the book than with its series. Cambridge's Key Themes series, as I understand it, aims to break a field down and render it accessible to nonspecialists. This book does something similar, but not exactly identical, to what I expect from a Key Themes monograph. Outside of the excellent first chapter, Bang is not so much explaining how global history works as offering an example of it. In keeping with the series, that example is somewhat down the middle and does not make a big tendentious argument - other recent 'big histories' written by ancientists, like Jo Quinn's How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History (Random House, 2024) and Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton University Press, 2019) make distinctive and falsifiable claims. By contrast, Bang synthesizes existing scholarship to tell a story about ancient Eurasia that is novel in its framing but otherwise uncontroversial. Again, this feels right for Key Themes but makes the book's takeaway a little murky. Anyone wishing to write global history will find this book enormously helpful, as an example of the argumentative maneuvers that work in the subfield requires; scholars who simply want to bring global material into their own projects, however, may find more purchase in the book's excellent bibliographical essay.

There is, however, another kind of reader for whom this book is perfection - the kind who reads for pleasure. Like many professional historians, I got into this field because I loved reading about the past; that said, like many professional historians I now have a hard time enjoying popular historiography without wincing at the shortcuts. The Roman Empire and World History made me feel like a kid again. It is serious history from a serious historian, with good footnotes and obvious rigor, but it is also delicious. Bang captures the wonder of big history, and tells stories that feel both exciting and humane, populated by traders, kings, and scholars who jump off the page. I have read other ancient history this year that I will cite more regularly, but none that I devoured so eagerly.

Notes:

[1] The latter, oddly, is not mentioned by name - Bang cites two magazine articles about Peralta's views of the discipline but not the man himself. I suspect this is an unfortunate coincidence arising from print timelines, since the book in which Peralta makes his views most clear (Classicism and Other Phobias, Princeton University Press 2025) was likely not in print when Bang finalized his manuscript.

[2] These marriages were in fact encouraged by Classical Roman law, as a means of legitimating offspring. See Katharine Huemoeller: "Freedom in Marriage? Manumission for Marriage in the Roman World", in: Journal of Roman Studies 110 (2020), 123-139.

Zachary Herz