Paul Newson’s Imperialism and Appropriation in Rural Roman Syria is a welcome and timely contribution to the study of Roman rule in the Near East, distinguished by its consistent focus on the countryside rather than the well-documented urban centers of the province of Syria. Drawing primarily on archaeological and landscape evidence, the book seeks to reassess the impact of the Roman conquest after 64/63 BC on rural societies, arguing for significant, though regionally differentiated, transformations within a new imperial framework. Newson explicitly positions his study against what he presents as a prevailing tendency in scholarship to downplay the effects of Roman rule in the eastern Mediterranean in comparison with the western provinces. While this characterization of current research may be overstated—given the long-standing emphasis on Roman impact and cultural diversity in works such as Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East[1] and others—the book nonetheless offers a valuable synthesis of rural case studies and makes a strong case for viewing the countryside as an active arena of imperial encounter, local agency, and cultural negotiation.
In the first chapter, Newson situates his study within debates on Roman imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial theory, and globalization, while also engaging critically with “new materialist” approaches. Following a current trend in research, he firmly rejects the explanatory adequacy of traditional concepts such as Romanization and, to a lesser extent, Hellenization, highlighting their roots in modern colonial discourse and their tendency to privilege urban, elite, and Romano-centric perspectives. Instead, he advocates a postcolonial framework attentive to power asymmetries, local agency, cultural translation, and hybridity. Newson thus makes a compelling case for the countryside as an agent, rather than a passive recipient of urban-driven change.
Chapter 2 establishes the physical and environmental diversity of Roman Syria, emphasizing that rural settlement patterns, land use, and exploitation varied widely across regions such as the Bekaa Valley, the Hauran, the Limestone Massif, and marginal steppe zones. This regional differentiation underpins the book’s broader argument against monolithic narratives of imperial impact. It is unfortunate, however, that Newson excludes southern Syria south of the Hauran, i.e., the Decapolis, which belonged to the province of Syria under Pompey. This area could have been another micro-regional case study, situated in a fertile landscape on the edge of the desert and crossed by important north-south and east-west routes.
The thematic chapters 3–7 form the analytical core of the book. The discussion of land ownership and exploitation (Chapter 3) highlights the multiplicity of stakeholders in the rural landscape—local farmers, pastoralists, urban elites, Roman veterans, and the imperial administration—and demonstrates how imperial interventions such as colonization, centuriation, and forestry regulation reshaped access to resources in uneven ways. Case studies are Berytus and the Bekaa Valley, Emesa as well as the Hauran with specific forms of local organization and local agency.
Chapter 4 on rural culture shows how material culture—housing forms, village organization, and statuary—was selectively adopted and adapted, producing hybrid practices that cannot be reduced to simple imitation of “Roman” models. In Chapter 5, Newson discusses “consuming cultures,” dealing with the distribution of pottery, including amphorae, as well as infrastructure projects such as water supply. This section sometimes deals with projects that, although located outside cities, are more urban in nature, such as the aqueduct of Tyre. The influence of the Roman army is also evident in infrastructure projects such as road and bridge construction. Overall, it would have been useful if Newson had dealt with the Roman army’s role in rural Roman Syria in a more systematic way, given that this topic pops up several times in his book.
The chapters on ritual and funerary landscapes (Chapters 6 and 7) are substantial. Here, Newson demonstrates that religious architecture and mortuary practices provide some of the clearest evidence for local appropriation of imperial and Graeco-Roman forms. Monumental rural temples such as those at Hosn Niha exemplify how architectural idioms associated with Rome and the Greek world were reworked to accommodate local ritual traditions, spatial practices, and social hierarchies. Similarly, the diversity and longevity of burial practices underline the persistence of deeply rooted local identities, even amid broader imperial transformations. In the context of sacred architecture, I missed the contributions by Klaus Stefan Freyberger published in German, including in particular his important work on early imperial sanctuaries.[2] In connection with Palmyra, the reviewer found it strange that the works of Rubina Raja were not referenced, even though she has published widely on numerous topics covered in the book.[3] The discussion of two funerary monuments, the Niha stele of Q. Vesius Petilianus and the Qartaba funerary column, is interesting. Here, Newson is again able to demonstrate the variety of forms and expressions in Roman Syria using two monuments, but he does not go beyond pointing out that there is great variety. This exemplary approach is typical of Newson’s work, but it cannot replace a systematic and corpus-like examination of material groups, such as Michael Blömer’s work on Roman sculptures in northern Syria.[4]
To conclude: Newson’s monograph ultimately reads less as a fundamentally new interpretation of rural Roman Syria than as a theoretically framed synthesis of selected case studies drawn from an already well-established body of archaeological evidence. Core conclusions—most notably the intensification of settlement, agricultural exploitation, and imperial connectivity under Roman rule, alongside pronounced regional differentiation—have long been recognized in scholarship and are here largely confirmed rather than re-evaluated. The book’s principal achievement lies in its consistent insistence on the countryside as an active space of imperial interaction and local agency, and in its attempt to situate rural material culture within a postcolonial interpretive framework. This interpretive ambition, however, remains only partially realized. In particular, the exclusion of late antiquity (at least in an outlook) is a limitation, since the later Roman and Byzantine periods represent the phase in which many of the processes central to Newson’s argument—rural settlement expansion, monumentalization of the countryside and infrastructural investment—reached their most visible and archaeologically demonstrable form. Without engaging this period, it remains difficult to assess whether the changes attributed to early and high imperial rule were specific to “Roman Imperialism” or instead part of longer-term trajectories that culminated only in late antiquity. As a result, Imperialism and Appropriation in Rural Roman Syria is valuable not for the novelty of its conclusions, but as a point of reference and a starting platform for future studies that combine theoretical reflection with systematic, diachronic analysis of rural life in Roman Syria.
Notes
[1] F. Millar, The Roman Near East. 31 BC—AD 337. Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London 1993.
[2] K. S. Freyberger, Die frühkaiserzeitlichen Heiligtümer der Karawanenstationen im hellenisierten Osten. Verlag Philipp von Zabern: Mainz 1998.
[3] One example is the “hanging curtain” on grave stelai (pp. 189–190); see R. Raja, Reconsidering the dorsalium or ‘Curtain of Death’ in Palmyrene funerary sculpture: significance and interpretations in light of the Palmyra portrait project corpus, in: R. Raja (ed.), Revisiting the Religious Life of Palmyra. Brepols: Turnhout 2019. Pp. 67–151.
[4] M. Blömer, Steindenkmäler römischer Zeit aus Nordsyrien. Identität und kulturelle Tradition in Kyrrhestike und Kommagene. Habelt Verlag: Bonn 2014.