Professor David Peimer
How Empires Fascinate and Fade
Summary
Some writers argue that the history of the world is the history of how empires evolve and fade. Whether that is true or not, it provides a fascinating lens for viewing our collective past. In this talk, David Peimer looks at aspects of the rise and fall of ancient Rome and Britain as examples.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
I guess if we all knew we’d have a long-lasting empire already. The Egyptians might have discovered it, the Jews might have discovered it. The Aztecs, Incas, you know, the Mongols, who knows. I think it’s always going to be, my understanding is that there’s always going to be this kind of creative tension, creative collisions with all these different things that you’ve mentioned. Religions, dictatorship, democracy, monarchy, financial systems, the military, you know, how these states, how these play out and how these are balanced and how these are checks and balances against each other. I think what happens is that if one takes over and becomes too powerful, which is the story of Gibbon’s argument and Mary Beard’s argument, one thing, Christiandom takes over, and that dominates everything in Rome. So then that’s dangerous and tricky because then that will permeate through every aspect of life. Education, in modern terms, education, democracy, health, the military, you know, every aspect of modern life, you know, even who runs the roads. Well, we’ll have religious people deciding who runs the roads. You know, everything will be decided by one group. That’s, I think, when it can be in the Roman context, tricky. That’s Gibbon’s argument and part of hers, but there’s also, it’s a mind thing that takes over then. It’s, as she says, an empire of the mind. And you know, I think I agree with that. But of course I’m using her example of, and this example in Gibbons of the Roman Empire when I say these things.
That’s a really important question, thank you. In the beginning there’s the slaves and then there’s the poor, and then there’s aristocratic upper class, and the army has to draw soldiers from everywhere, including the conquered barbarians. So it’s a mixture. And then of course the merchant class is crucial, and especially with the British Empire, we’ll see. But the merchant class becomes as crucial here in the Greek and Roman Empires as well. Cicero is super rich because he is in an aristocratic family, but because the enormous amount of trade, which I unfortunately haven’t had the time to go into, but with the British Empire, I’m going to focus on trade, because that is driven by trade, and get rich at home. Which is the intelligent, I think, contemporary way of setting up an empire, really. But the Greeks, the Romans certainly had it.