Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux, I'm told that you might have insight into this question?https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1382220525582307332 …

A complicated question, which is going to vary quite a lot depending on the where and when of the examples chosen. That said, generally, yes, it would seem that the process of being conquered by the Romans, while deeply traumatic, was less so than early modern colonization.

Again, we shouldn't minimize how destructive the Romans could be in the moment of conquest. Polybius' description of Roman city-capture-procedures is pretty harrowing.

But after that, the Romans generally left traditional systems of government and society in place. They generally opted to keep traditional taxes (just redirecting them to Rome) and not to try to make major alterations in local culture or religion.

And while sometimes land was cleared of its inhabitants (again, deeply unpleasant) to make way for new Roman settlements, the amount of land cleared this way as a total of the land area of any given province seems generally to have been small.

This isn't because the Romans were nice people. It's a cynical calculation - the Romans want to get what these folks were already producing (grain, tax revenue, whatever) and the easiest way to do that is to leave those production systems and their social structures in place.