The Empire Ball

In the 2008-9 academic year there was a small flurry of newspaper stories about students holding parties with dubious themes. First there was the Oxford Rugby Club, blacking up for a ‘Safari Bop’ and then issuing an invitation to ‘Bring a Fit Jew’; then the organisers of the May Ball at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, entitled it ‘The British Empire’ and invited guests to ‘experience the Pax Britannica and party like it’s 1899’. It was in online discussions of the latter, which generally divided between “it’s political correctness gone mad!” and “amazing how supposedly intelligent young people can be so bloody stupid”, that the Roman Empire was invoked.

You should have just had a toga party instead...oh wait, that would be celebrating the Roman Empire....imperialism boo! (source)

In much the same way that attending a toga party doesn’t mean you support throwing Christians to the lions (or any of the terrible things the Romans did), having the British empire as our ball theme doesn't mean that we think that the British empire was a good thing. (source)

For both these commentators, Rome is clearly a ‘safe’ theme. The Romans may have killed millions and reduced millions more to slavery, but it was so long ago that it carries no real emotional resonance. The odds are that almost everyone in Europe has ancestors who were butchered by the Romans – and probably a fair few had ancestors doing the butchering as well – but this is hardly an open wound. There are few contemporary political nightmares that can plausibly be blamed on the actions of the Roman Empire – I’m going to leave the Romans’ involvement in the history of Israel/Palestine to another time, largely because I suspect most students haven’t the first idea about that bit of history. Toga parties might not be to your taste, therefore, but it would be absurd to start objecting to students dressing up in sheets to get drunk.

However, both the commentators want to do something more with the analogy, and that’s where the example of Rome starts to get slightly dodgier. It’s absurd to feel guilty about Roman atrocities because it was so long ago: isn’t it time that we stopped feeling guilty about things that happened in the nineteenth century? (Yes, I know the British Empire didn’t stop in the nineteenth century, but that’s the widespread perception – and note the implication that the whole controversy is a matter of western liberal guilt rather than the possibility of giving offence). We can detach Roman culture from its atrocities: why aren’t we allowed to treat the British Empire as a source of context-free exotica? The comment of the organising committee, announcing that it was removing the word ‘empire’ from all publicity, was very revealing in this respect:

In choosing this setting for the ball, we have sought neither to excuse or dismiss any historical events, nor to support or challenge any interpretation now placed upon them. (source)

In other words, either they didn’t think or they chose not to think.

Rome is, as ever, the archetypal empire; anything which can be established about Rome is then subtly extended to other empires. Above all, the analogy legitimises the belief that empires can bring peace, prosperity, justice and civilisation to the regions they conquer; ‘what the Romans did for us’ is transferred to ‘what we did/do for the world’. The fact that no one is likely to take offence on behalf of their ancestors to a celebration of Roman power, but will tend to accept its positive image, is precisely why this example is anything but ‘safe’.