Chapter 9: The Material Conditions of American Exceptionalism: Part II

The curious thing about the Roman occupation of Britain is that it almost immediately took on its future cast, in embryo. Because the Britons put up such fierce resistance to Roman occupation, roughly 40,000 troops were stationed there, or one-eighth of the entire Roman army. An albino African-Roman named Clodius Albinus was the governor of Britain when the Pax Romana suddenly ended in 193 AD with the death of the useless chumperor Commodus and the "Year of the Five Emperors." After a complicated power struggle in Rome killed prospective emperor after prospective emperor, the vestigal Senate looked to the largest legionary force outside of Rome that could possibly stabilize the situation: Albinus' Britain.

Albinus, literally white and literally also an African because the dialectic likes to talk shit about Cecil Rhodes (and really, who doesn't?), was the father of the first "British Empire" in recorded history. He assembled his legions in Londinium and declared his intentions to restore the powers of the democratic Senate, and his troops declared that he was the only emperor they knew. That's right, British imperialism was invented by a literally white guy from Africa in the name of parliamentary sovereignty. (That sentence is so British, it shits the Queen.)

Albinus then did the most British thing he could: he assembled a fleet and an expeditionary force to restore liberal democracy to Europe, and D-Day happened in Italy in 195 AD. Unfortunately for Churchill the Early, Septimius Severus and all the powers of literal fascism (the fasces being the symbol of the Roman state) barely prevailed against him, and the western Roman Empire would continue in unreformed slave tyranny until it fell from its own rotten decay not three centuries later.

But until Britain was cut loose, its governors were some of the most powerful men in the Roman Empire, and eternal candidates for the imperial throne. Clodius Albinus was merely the first "British" would-be emperor, not the last. In another demonstration of geography's power over history, one of Churchill's odder ideas was tried from 260-270 AD when Britain and Gaul seceded from the Roman Empire and together formed another "British" Empire until reconquered. In 286 AD, a Roman admiral (!) who rose through the ranks from the working class (!!) named Carousius also declared himself the emperor of Britain, and ruled his settler-colonial America prototype for seven years before the redshields came. Finally in 306 AD, Constantine the Great succeeded in conquering the Roman Empire from Britain. He was crowned emperor in Eburacum (later Jorvik, even later York), legalized Christianity seven years later, and moved the seat of the Empire to the city he built and named after himself, Constantinople. The last Roman emperor would die defending that city over a thousand years later.

From 260-293 AD, Britain was an effectively independent settler-colonial state for 17 of those 33 years, almost exactly half. Its state and institutions may have come from Italy, but it's amazing how much geography can determine which classes come to prominence, and how that in turn causes history to repeat itself. These mostly-forgotten episodes of ancient history curiously strike today's readers with the scent of modernity, with British liberals deploying troops across Europe with advanced naval squadrons commanding the sea, all in the defense of parliamentary sovereignty and democracy.

Eventually the imperial center decided it wasn't worth it to subsidize its own rival power center, no matter how much tin came out of Cornwall, and the legions were evacuated. At the height of the Roman Empire, the legions struck fear into the hearts of its enemies. But Britain, its druids, its resistance, its liberal democracy, struck fear into the hearts of the legions that ruled Europe. It's been that way ever since, from the English Reformation to the Napoleonic Wars to both World Wars and now Brexit. Britain is Europe's Other, an island geologically part of the same rock formation as the Appalachians. Across that narrow channel lay North America's largest island, not another piece of Europe, but nobody realized it at the time.

It's a longstanding observation of geopolitics that the English Channel is the most divisive geography in Europe. Any state that tries to unify Europe despite its many geographical barriers can do it. The Alps? Cross them with elephants if you feel like showing off. The Rhine? Danube? Borders, maybe, but not really barriers to a determined invader. But the English Channel? Lord St. Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty during the Napoleonic Wars, taunted Napoleon in the House of Lords saying "I do not say the French cannot come, I only say they cannot come by sea" (Norman Longmate, Island Fortress: The Defence of Great Britain 1603-1945, 267). They couldn't. Neither could Hitler, and neither could Inbred the Ninth and his Spanish Armada. Rome barely managed it, just to get repeatedly poked in the eye by its own colony. The Norsemen who founded the Danelaw barely managed it for a time, and the Kingdom of Jorvik ended up conquering Norway and Denmark right back to form a briefly-lived North Sea Empire. France's Rent-A-Vikings were the last ones to successfully pull it off, just to give England's kings a valid enough claim to the French throne to fight the Hundred Years' War on their soil. The European Union admitted the United Kingdom, and now Brexit is severely disrupting the place.

The only lasting conquest of what is now England was by the English themselves. Every other conquering power ended up having its British colony turn into a thorn in its side. I believe this is because the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons were the last sufficiently numerous and undivided military invader with nazbols in its governing coalition. And, unlike the Romans, they brought their whole people to settle; Britain was not just one huge military base to them, but a new homeland.

It must be mentioned in addendum that the Norsemen in the Danelaw were also nazbols, but Scandinavia just doesn't have enough people in it to conquer England and make it stick. Besides, Scandinavia was divided against itself, with the arrivistes of Normandy adopting liberal French ways in exchange for privileges at court, and it was William of Normandy who destroyed the North Sea Empire. But the liberal Normans were eventually absorbed into the great mass of England, in a way that Canute's Scandinavian empire might not have been had it survived. For the Vikings came to conquer, settle and farm; the Normans to conquer and rule farmers.

Continue reading Part III