... the Roman Empire... is now regarded in spite of all the barbarism, all the superstition, and all the misery, as one of the most interesting of all historical phenomena.

Sir John Robert Seeley (1883), The Expansion of England; Two Courses of Lectures

On 1 March 1936, The New York Times published a letter to the editor which ended with the following words:

Into our hands fate has put the power to insure the peace of the world: that each nation in its own good time, shall develop its own political genius...

In the same year and month, The Times of London published a similar letter, which stated: ‘like them [the Romans], we interfere as little as possible with established customs and traditions. The only thing on which we insist is that the Pax Britannica should not be broken.’² Members of the American and British public were thus both invoking the Roman Empire as an exemplar to their international activities. Whereas the concept of the Pax Americana extending beyond its national frontiers may have been a departure from the way in which the United States public viewed their obligation of ‘manifest destiny’, it nonetheless foreshadowed the hegemonic shift from British to U.S. international primacy that would be consolidated after the Second World War. The United States and Britain were not, however, the only powers that sheltered under the long shadow of Roman imperialism. France, in its western corner of the southern Mediterranean lands, also evoked Rome as the precursor to its colonial ‘oeuvre’.³ In fact, in the modern period, the pinnacle of Western imperium, whether it was that of Germany, Italy, France, Britain or the United States, echoed Rome, either in its emblematic trappings—as in the cases of Italy and Germany—or in its ideological discourses, or both.

This chapter will examine the discursive use of the Roman Empire by three nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial powers, Britain, France and the United States, in an endeavour to unravel the ideological differences that shaped their vision of the similarity between the Roman imperial past and their imperial present. The concept of Pax Romana, adapted by each power as Pax Britannica, Pax Gallica or Pax Americana, suggests a similar imagined end-product of pacification and peaceful co-existence but, as will be demon­strated below, the conceptual underpinnings of each were different.

French and American politicians, civil servants and officiating imperialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were all educated men, well versed in the Classics, analogies to which were inevitable and quotations from which were deemed an indication of a fine education. But the habit of comparison is still evident today, having persisted beyond the framework of a classical education and having produced an extraordinary range of scho­larly and popular books on the subject.⁴ At this juncture, it is important to stress that references to the Roman past, particularly in the case of Great Britain and the United States, have been used as often to caution about as to endorse imperial ventures. Analogies to Rome, then, form a shorthand for what the new imperia should not be as much as for what they should. This is not to imply that there were two clear-cut camps of analogy: one against and one in favour of empire. The imperious attitudes and practices that the appeal of national assertiveness engenders can produce cautionary rhetoric among even the staunchest imperialists. In the cases of Britain, France and the United States, references to the Roman past seldom are outright equivalences; rather they are loose correlations formulated not only to suit the originator’s political or intellectual agenda but also to respond to the events of the moment.