The Cycladic islands, which lie scattered in the centre of the Aegean (Map 1.1), have had periods of outstanding achievements, as in the Bronze Age and Hellenistic periods, which have put into sharp relief the supposed dispiriting lows in the Roman and Late Antique periods. Investigating the veracity of these assumed low periods is made challenging by a dearth of historical or literary evidence pertaining to the islands during these periods. When they are mentioned, it is largely in terms of their insularity – as havens for pirates, places of exile or targets for invasions. Islands are often the first to experience change and, while this can be both positive and negative, the positives tend to be overshadowed by the negatives. Furthermore, scholarship on the islands has commonly taken a top-down approach, in which they are viewed through a lens of passiveness and as pawns in wider machinations rather than as decision-making entities in themselves. However, as Baldacchino (2008) warned, it is important not to overcompensate in attempting to move away from the top-down approach to the islands and place too much emphasis on their roles and importance in the broader context of study.

The most significant impact on the Cyclades in the first century bce was the demise of Delos and, contrary to common view, the inclusion of the Cyclades in the Roman Empire provided opportunities for these resilient islands to recover and develop. The collapse of the Delian economic and religious networks reverberated around the Cyclades. Islands such as Tenos that had flourished through phase transition, with renowned sanctuaries and elites, bankers and traders, began to fall to the side lines. As new smaller networks grew out of the splintered Delian one, islands such as Melos and Thera, which had been out of the Delian sphere, began to come to the fore. Without exception, the islands show remarkable resilience in the face of significant external threats – from loss of income livelihood to attacks by pirates. It is through this diachronic perspective that the success of the Cyclades become obvious.

Finally, the analysis turns to forces of resistance and rebellion. World history may be suspected of occluding the life of ordinary people and forces that could resist the ruling imperial elites and cultures so far discussed. This is a misunderstanding. World history has revealed a broad range of forms of resistance. These insights yield crucial tools for the Roman historian. The Greco-Roman literary record is teeming with references to rebellious activities, but most are very brief. By using the perspective of world history, these brief references may be brought to life and tell us about rebellions fuelled by millenarian prophecies, banditry and other forms of resistance. A world history perspective will also confirm the impression that peasant risings rarely succeeded in turning over the agrarian order. If we want to look for ‘revolution’, it more often came from frontier regions of the empire and usually arrived in the form of a new conquering force overturning the old imperial rulers. This was how the Roman world was brought to heal, both by its so-called Germanic federates and by the rise of the Arabs and foundation of their new empire on the basis of both Rome and Persia.

This chapter locates the emergence of the Greco-Roman city state within a process that saw the expansion of sedentary peasant populations across the Afro-Eurasian world. This was a process accompanied by a wider range of epidemic diseases, the spread of militaristic ‘warring’ states and intensification of slavery. Too often, the rise of the Greeco-Roman city-state has been studies in isolation. This chapter presents the city-state and its ability to mobilize the peasantry for war as one response to the dynamics and constraints of sedentary peasant society and urbanization that increasingly manifested as the dominant form of social organization in a band stretching from East to West across the Afro-Eurasian world from the beginnings of the Iron Age. The chapter starts with demographic growth and the ecological constraints of peasant agriculture, including discussion of Ester Boserup, James C. Scott and the recent work of Graeber & Wengrow. It then moves on to state formation, war-making and military mobilization before analyzing ancient slavery within a continuum of varieties from the early-modern Caribbean to the Islamic world.

With state formation, however, came competition and conquest by rivals. The culmination of antiquity was not the small city-states of the classical Greek period but their amalgamation into a vast universal empire, first pioneered in history by the Assyrians and Achaemenids, but kicked into an even higher gear by the Romans and the Qin-Han dynasty. At the beginning of the common era, this type of polity dominated Afro-Eurasia in a band stretching from its Eastern to its Western extremes. Sometimes historians have looked to the nomads of the Central Asian steppe as a connecting element of pre-colonial history. But for most of the time, they were too feeble and ephemeral a presence to determine the shape of world history. Looking for immediate long-distance connections, the inspiration of modern globalization, has made ancient historians overlook the major parallel development across Eurasia: universal empires. This chapter situates the formation of the Roman empire and its driving dynamics within this wider arena of universal imperial monarchies, ruled by ‘divine’ kings of kings, governed by aristocratic and gentrified elites and based on a fiscal logic of low protection costs.

At the end of the book, the conclusion revisits the current debate among world historians whether to favour comparative approaches or search for cultural connections. Based on the themes analyzed in the current volume, this chapter argues in conclusion that ancient world history will have to combine both. Macro- and micro-perspectives should be seen as complementary; the former makes it possible to identify broader patterns while the latter enables the study of cultural exchanges. The latter, however, has often been preoccupied with marginal phenomena while the former sometimes has been too teleological, subsuming everything to a developmental logic ending in Europe. The view of ancient world history developed here seeks to identify a set of global patterns that combine both the population majority and the most central social, political and cultural developments of the period into a unified whole while exploring how these phenomena interacted across ancient Afro-Eurasia. Roman historians can gain a lot from intensifying the dialogue with students of other premodern Afro-Eurasian societies.

The analysis now comes to the question of world trade and current discussions about globalization in the Greco-Roman world. However, globalization is a modern phenomenon, tracing its roots back to the sixteenth century, but only really coming into its own during the long nineteenth century. So, if modern globalization is unsatisfying as a model, the chapter turns to C. A. Bayly’s concept of ‘Archaic Globalization’. Instead of the modern capitalist world system, it focuses on the demand of aristocratic and priestly elites for numinous goods and rare collectors’ objects, brought from afar to enhance their lifestyles. Roman urban and imperial society fostered such a culture celebrating the consumption of exotic diversity. Building on a recent surge of work on Greco-Roman trade from the Red Sea to Arabia and India, bringing pepper, frankincense, silk and other exotic substances into the Mediterranean, the chapter locates the Roman Mediterranean as one end of an interconnected chain of regional trading worlds extending from the Indian Ocean that serviced the need for numinous and spicy goods to enhance the rituals and conspicuous lifestyles of complex agrarian societies across Afro-Eurasia.

This chapter introduces the growing field of world history and its intellectual predecessors to make the argument why Greco-Roman society needs to find its place within this fast evolving discourse. Recontextualizing the classical experience within a wider world history will allow Greco-Roman history to be aligned more closely with the global norm, rather than remain an anomaly in European history. But ancient history does not simply have to be at the receiving end of the putative dialogue. The field has a long prior record of engaging in a creative dialogue both with anthropology and historical sociology. The former favoured the study of culture; the latter promoted societal comparison. Currently, world history is torn between a focus on cultural connection and on historical comparison. Building on the past experience of classics, this chapter will equally show how a glance at Greco-Roman society may help the field of world history both to overcome this division. An Afro-Eurasian arena is identified as the context for parallel and interconnected developments of peasantries and slavery, universal empires, literary cultures, world trade in charismatic goods and rebellions.