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The Roman 'Brexit': how life in Britain changed after 409 AD

21 points by briatx 8y ago

slededit 8y ago
Connecting this to Brexit is really distasteful and misleading. The Roman Empire no longer had the will or material to support Britain and left them to their own devices against they’re will. They had no political or military systems in place to replace the Roman support. None of this has any correlation with today.
- barberousse 8y ago
  Not even reasonable to say we're even discussing the same people given the descendants of the people who lived under Roman rule are more indirectly attested to by way of the Welsh, which was the last bastion of Celtic autonomy south of Hadrian's Wall. The modern Englishman is not really related to those Celtic people but is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon invaders mentioned in the article.
georgeecollins 8y ago
The direction of history is not always towards progress. One of the reasons why I think people felt like it was safe to make a protest vote for Brexit is because in general things have gone very well for the Western world for the last fifty years. It doesn't feel that risky to throw a wrench (spanner?) into the works.
- wahern 8y ago
  Not only have we collectively forgotten WWII, we've forgotten that we've forgotten. We all take the post-WWII political order and prosperity for granted. I studied International Politics in undergraduate school at the end of the 1990s in the U.S., when all the institutions (foreign and domestic) were pretty much the same. My European history professor recounted first-hand stories from interwar period France and Hungary. A few years later 9/11 happened and everything changed, even our perspective on history. I have no doubt that curriculums have also changed considerably, and along with them all the unstated perspectives and opinions that weren't (and can't be) adequately articulated in text. The sad part is that rising working-class unrest with the new international order had been presaged in academia for decades. Industry began moving out of Western Europe and the U.S. to Asia in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s. Economists were telling policy makers the whole time that the West would need to prepare for the economic and social changes. Only Germany appears to have taken this seriously, though perhaps their industrial programs were predominately driven by domestic dynamics absent elsewhere in the West.
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    > rising working-class unrest Brexit and Trump is primarily a cultural war, not a class war. While the "poor have risen to overthrow the yoke of oppressive elites" story was perfectly plausible thing to believe in the months after those votes, people have taken a much closer look at this premise and it is simply not supported by the data. Those voters are not poor and haven't had their jobs taken by immigrants (or have even had much contact with immigrants). Their "anxiety" is not over something they've lost, but something they fear losing, which is their dominant social status. I know this is common refrain, but IMHO, people want this to be true because it offers a nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution. Acknowledging that this is a cultural war is quite uncomfortable, because there really isn't any solution. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existent... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-w...
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      It shouldn't even be that hard to spot it as a culture war and not simply a class war. A trust fund billionaire absentee landlord being hailed as some sort of class war symbol of hope for the poor and working class is one of the funniest and saddest (unintentional?) political jokes perhaps of all time. It's a bizarre anti-Dadaism propping up the bourgeoise while pretending like it isn't.
    - wahern 8y ago
      Class and culture are inextricably linked. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Great Society legislation only happened because working- and middle- whites felt comfortable with their economic security.[1][2] The loss of well-paying blue collar industrial jobs may have been partly compensated with cheap domestic goods.[3] But nothing has compensated for the loss of jobs that one could reasonably expect to last for decades, if not for one's entire working life. You're not going to give on cultural issues if you feel that you're losing on the economic front. Quite the contrary, you're going to become extremely defensive and even cynical. I'm not excusing racism and prejudice. Quite the opposite--I'm saying that it never left, its expression in popular politics only temporarily diminished. [1] It helped that the poster children for Great Society legislation were, literally, white Appalachian children. [2] I'm sure the same could be said for immigration in the U.K. It was tolerated or even affirmed by a working class who felt economically secure. Once they felt threatened economically by immigration, and as memories of the Empire faded along with a sense of intrinsic superiority, relatively dormant ethnic animus returned to the fore. [3] As conservatives infamously argued during the 2016 election; that quality of life has remained undiminished or has even improved, notwithstanding stagnant wages, by pointing to A/C and refrigerator ownership rates. That's true to an extent but largely irrelevant to how people perceive equity and fairness.
vondur 8y ago
Silly comparison. Brexit is nothing like when the Romans abandoned Britain. If you want to look anywhere for an example of the "Dark Ages" post Roman Britain is the best example of it. I don't think that will be the case in the post Brexit UK.
- wahern 8y ago
  The Dark Ages never lacked for philosophical or scientific advances. What really defines the Dark Ages is a splintered Europe lacking a relatively cohesive identity and political structure by which ideas and goods could more freely travel. The speed of exchange is what accelerated advancement.[1] The real question is whether and to what extent do shared identity and political structures matter in the Information Age. We're about to find out, not just in Brexit but as conservatives everywhere systematically dismantle the post-WWII order. [1] If it accelerated at all. Again, the Dark Ages seem muddy because there's no singular historical narrative that can be articulated. Because we don't articulate a narrative, we tend to assume the period lacked an historical arc, and in particular lacked an arc of progression.
vertline3 8y ago
I'm an outsider, but I read that there was a feeling of a democracy deficit happening.

21 points by briatx 8y ago

Connecting this to Brexit is really distasteful and misleading. The Roman Empire no longer had the will or material to support Britain and left them to their own devices against they’re will. They had no political or military systems in place to replace the Roman support. None of this has any correlation with today.

barberousse 8y ago
Not even reasonable to say we're even discussing the same people given the descendants of the people who lived under Roman rule are more indirectly attested to by way of the Welsh, which was the last bastion of Celtic autonomy south of Hadrian's Wall. The modern Englishman is not really related to those Celtic people but is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon invaders mentioned in the article.

georgeecollins 8y ago

The direction of history is not always towards progress. One of the reasons why I think people felt like it was safe to make a protest vote for Brexit is because in general things have gone very well for the Western world for the last fifty years. It doesn't feel that risky to throw a wrench (spanner?) into the works.

wahern 8y ago
Not only have we collectively forgotten WWII, we've forgotten that we've forgotten. We all take the post-WWII political order and prosperity for granted. I studied International Politics in undergraduate school at the end of the 1990s in the U.S., when all the institutions (foreign and domestic) were pretty much the same. My European history professor recounted first-hand stories from interwar period France and Hungary. A few years later 9/11 happened and everything changed, even our perspective on history. I have no doubt that curriculums have also changed considerably, and along with them all the unstated perspectives and opinions that weren't (and can't be) adequately articulated in text. The sad part is that rising working-class unrest with the new international order had been presaged in academia for decades. Industry began moving out of Western Europe and the U.S. to Asia in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s. Economists were telling policy makers the whole time that the West would need to prepare for the economic and social changes. Only Germany appears to have taken this seriously, though perhaps their industrial programs were predominately driven by domestic dynamics absent elsewhere in the West.
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  > rising working-class unrest Brexit and Trump is primarily a cultural war, not a class war. While the "poor have risen to overthrow the yoke of oppressive elites" story was perfectly plausible thing to believe in the months after those votes, people have taken a much closer look at this premise and it is simply not supported by the data. Those voters are not poor and haven't had their jobs taken by immigrants (or have even had much contact with immigrants). Their "anxiety" is not over something they've lost, but something they fear losing, which is their dominant social status. I know this is common refrain, but IMHO, people want this to be true because it offers a nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution. Acknowledging that this is a cultural war is quite uncomfortable, because there really isn't any solution. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existent... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-w...
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    It shouldn't even be that hard to spot it as a culture war and not simply a class war. A trust fund billionaire absentee landlord being hailed as some sort of class war symbol of hope for the poor and working class is one of the funniest and saddest (unintentional?) political jokes perhaps of all time. It's a bizarre anti-Dadaism propping up the bourgeoise while pretending like it isn't.
  - wahern 8y ago
    Class and culture are inextricably linked. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Great Society legislation only happened because working- and middle- whites felt comfortable with their economic security.[1][2] The loss of well-paying blue collar industrial jobs may have been partly compensated with cheap domestic goods.[3] But nothing has compensated for the loss of jobs that one could reasonably expect to last for decades, if not for one's entire working life. You're not going to give on cultural issues if you feel that you're losing on the economic front. Quite the contrary, you're going to become extremely defensive and even cynical. I'm not excusing racism and prejudice. Quite the opposite--I'm saying that it never left, its expression in popular politics only temporarily diminished. [1] It helped that the poster children for Great Society legislation were, literally, white Appalachian children. [2] I'm sure the same could be said for immigration in the U.K. It was tolerated or even affirmed by a working class who felt economically secure. Once they felt threatened economically by immigration, and as memories of the Empire faded along with a sense of intrinsic superiority, relatively dormant ethnic animus returned to the fore. [3] As conservatives infamously argued during the 2016 election; that quality of life has remained undiminished or has even improved, notwithstanding stagnant wages, by pointing to A/C and refrigerator ownership rates. That's true to an extent but largely irrelevant to how people perceive equity and fairness.

vondur 8y ago

Silly comparison. Brexit is nothing like when the Romans abandoned Britain. If you want to look anywhere for an example of the "Dark Ages" post Roman Britain is the best example of it. I don't think that will be the case in the post Brexit UK.

wahern 8y ago
The Dark Ages never lacked for philosophical or scientific advances. What really defines the Dark Ages is a splintered Europe lacking a relatively cohesive identity and political structure by which ideas and goods could more freely travel. The speed of exchange is what accelerated advancement.[1] The real question is whether and to what extent do shared identity and political structures matter in the Information Age. We're about to find out, not just in Brexit but as conservatives everywhere systematically dismantle the post-WWII order. [1] If it accelerated at all. Again, the Dark Ages seem muddy because there's no singular historical narrative that can be articulated. Because we don't articulate a narrative, we tend to assume the period lacked an historical arc, and in particular lacked an arc of progression.

vertline3 8y ago

I'm an outsider, but I read that there was a feeling of a democracy deficit happening.