Class 11 History Chapter 2 An Empire Across Three Continents NCERT Solutions in English

Q. If you had lived in the Roman Empire, where would you rather have lived – in the towns or in the countryside? Explain why.

Answer: I would rather have lived in a town, and the chapter gives four solid reasons for that choice.
1. Food security. A town was far better provided for in a food shortage than the countryside around it. The physician Galen describes city-dwellers collecting and storing a whole year’s grain immediately after the harvest, carrying off the wheat, barley, beans and lentils, so that the peasants were left with a little pulse and, by spring, were eating twigs, shoots and the roots of inedible plants.
2. Amenities. Public baths were a striking feature of Roman urban life, and entertainment was on a scale the countryside could not match: one surviving calendar records shows, or spectacula, on 176 days of the year.
3. Self-government and status. A Roman city had its own magistrates and its own city council, and a village that was upgraded to city status received that promotion as a mark of imperial favour. Living in the city meant living where decisions were taken.
4. Opportunity. Cities were the bedrock of imperial administration and the point through which taxes from the countryside passed. The local upper classes who ran them collaborated with Rome, and across the second and third centuries it was these provincial elites who supplied the empire’s administrators and army commanders.
The other side, briefly. Town life was not comfortable for everyone. Tacitus calls the plebs sordida, the ‘unkempt lower class’, addicted to the circus and the theatre, and city populations also included large numbers of casual labourers and many thousands of slaves. So the honest answer is that a town was the better place to live if one had some property or a trade; for the poorest, the difference was much smaller.

Q. Compile a list of some of the towns, cities, rivers, seas and provinces mentioned in this chapter, and then try and find them on the maps. Can you say something about any three of the items in the list you have compiled?

Answer: The chapter names places on all three of its continents. A working list, grouped by kind:

Three of them, in a little more detail:
(i) The Euphrates. This one river is the chapter’s dividing line between the two superpowers of the age. Rome and Iran were separated by nothing more than a narrow strip of land along it, and by the early second century CE every client kingdom lying west of it had been absorbed into the empire. Trajan’s one great campaign of expansion, in 113-17 CE, was an occupation of territory across this river, and it was abandoned by his successors as fruitless.
(ii) Alexandria. One of the three biggest cities of the Mediterranean, alongside Carthage and Antioch. It shows what an imperial city actually did: it was a centre through which the government taxed the Egyptian countryside, and it was also an industrial city, since the chapter uses the sealed aprons, masks and body searches of its frankincense factories as its sharpest example of how closely workers were supervised.
(iii) Baetica, in southern Spain. A province with a reputation for exceptional fertility, producing olive oil on estates called fundi along the river Guadalquivir. Its oil, shipped in the container archaeologists call Dressel 20, reached its commercial peak between 140 and 160 CE, and the wide scatter of Dressel 20 finds across the Mediterranean shows that Spanish producers had taken the market from their Italian rivals, almost certainly with better oil at lower prices.

Q. Imagine that you are a Roman housewife preparing a shopping list for household requirements. What would be on the list?

Answer: The chapter tells us what a Mediterranean household actually consumed, so the list can be built from the book itself rather than from imagination.
1. The three staples. Wheat, wine and olive oil. These were traded and consumed in huge quantities across the empire, and they come at the head of any Roman shopping list. The wheat would most likely have come from Sicily, Byzacium in Tunisia or Egypt, the wine perhaps from Campania, which had a name for the best wines, and the oil from Spain or, later, North Africa.
2. Other food. Barley, beans, lentils and other pulses, all named in Galen’s account of what city households stored after the harvest.
3. Containers and household goods. Amphorae, since wine and oil arrived in them, along with ordinary pottery, which survives in such quantity that archaeologists use it to date and place a site.
4. Cloth and dress. The chapter names dress as one of the ways the empire’s cultural diversity showed itself, so clothing bought in the local style belongs on the list.
5. Labour for the household. Uncomfortable as it is to modern readers, slaves were counted as part of the Roman family, so a wealthy household’s purchases could include them, and their food and maintenance had to be provided all the year round.
6. What she would pay with. Denarii, the silver coin of about 4½ grams that carried the empire’s economy for its first three centuries, and in the late empire the gold solidus. Since a wife of the late Republic kept her property under her own family’s authority and became an independent property owner on her father’s death, she could well have been paying out of money that was legally her own.

Q. Why do you think the Roman government stopped coining in silver? And which metal did it begin to use for the production of coinage?

Answer:
1. The reason: the silver ran out. The empire’s monetary system for its first three centuries rested on the denarius, a coin of about 4½ grams of pure silver. That system depended on a steady supply of metal, and the main source was the Spanish mines, worked by hydraulic mining on a scale not matched again until the nineteenth century. Once those mines were exhausted, the government could no longer maintain a silver-based currency, so it stopped coining in silver.
2. The metal it turned to: gold. Constantine founded a new monetary system on gold. Its coin was the solidus, 4½ grams of pure gold, minted on a huge scale, with circulation running into millions.
3. Why the change worked. The solidus was stable enough to outlast the Roman Empire itself. Monetary stability, together with a growing population, stimulated real economic growth in late antiquity: archaeology shows investment in oil presses and glass factories, new technologies such as screw presses and multiple water-mills, and a revival of long-distance trade with the East. Egypt alone paid over 2.5 million solidi a year in tax, roughly 35,000 lbs of gold, in Justinian’s reign, and the late bureaucracy drew most of its salary in gold, which it invested in land.

Q. Suppose the emperor Trajan had actually managed to conquer India and the Romans had held on to the country for several centuries. In what ways do you think India might be different today?

Answer: This question asks for informed imagination, so the answer has to be built out of what the chapter says Roman rule actually did to the places it held.
1. The starting point. Trajan never came close. Cassius Dio, quoted in the chapter through Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East, describes him at the head of the Persian Gulf in 116 CE, watching a merchant ship set off for India and wishing he were as young as Alexander. His actual campaign across the Euphrates in 113-17 CE was abandoned by his successors as fruitless.
2. Cities and administration. Rome ruled through cities, not through anything like a modern government. Indian towns would probably have been reorganised as Roman cities, each with its own magistrates, its own council and a territory of villages under its jurisdiction, and the existing Indian upper classes would have been drawn into collecting taxes for Rome, as local elites were everywhere else in the empire.
3. Language and law. Latin or Greek would have become the language of administration, as they were in the west and the east of the empire respectively. The chapter shows what that could do to a local written language: Celtic stopped being written after the first century CE as Latin spread. Roman law, which by the fourth century was strong enough to act as a brake even on fearsome emperors, might have left a deeper mark on Indian legal ideas than any other single import.
4. The economy. India would have been drawn into the Mediterranean trading system in wheat, wine and olive oil, with its produce shipped in amphorae and its regions competing for markets exactly as Spain, North Africa and the East did in turn. Roman coinage, first silver and then the gold solidus, and Roman banking and commercial networks would have spread the use of money further.
5. Society. Roman social categories such as the equites and the humiliores might have overlaid Indian ones, and Roman family law, in which a wife kept her property under her own family’s authority and either partner could end a marriage by a notice of intent, would have sat very oddly beside existing custom.
6. Religion. After Constantine’s conversion the empire was substantially Christianised, so several centuries of Roman rule would probably have left a much larger and older Christian population in India.
7. What would probably have happened in the end. The chapter’s own evidence suggests the hold would not have lasted. Rome absorbed client kingdoms near its own borders and gave up territory that was too far away or too costly to defend, and Diocletian deliberately abandoned areas of little strategic or economic value. A province at the far end of the empire, beyond the Euphrates frontier that already gave Rome trouble, is exactly the kind of territory the empire found it could not keep.

Q. Go through the chapter carefully and pick out some basic features of Roman society and economy which you think make it look quite modern.

Answer: The chapter itself warns against assuming that “ancient” meant backward, and several of its features would not look out of place today.
1. The nuclear family. Adult sons did not usually live with their parents, and it was exceptional for adult brothers to share one household, so the ordinary Roman household looked much like a modern one, except that slaves were counted as part of it.
2. Married women’s property rights. A wife’s property stayed under her natal family’s authority rather than her husband’s. She remained her father’s primary heir and became an independent property owner on his death, so in law the couple was two financial entities, and the wife was fully independent.
3. Divorce by notice. Ending a marriage needed no more than a notice of intent from either husband or wife, which is closer to modern practice than to most pre-modern societies.
4. A paid professional army. Soldiers enlisted for a minimum of 25 years and were paid by the state, and they agitated for better pay and conditions, sometimes by mutiny, in a way that looks much like organised labour.
5. A salaried bureaucracy. The higher and middle ranks of the late bureaucracy were paid in gold and invested in land, and complaints about corruption were met with laws that tried to curb it.
6. Widespread use of money and banking. The empire had well-organised commercial and banking networks, and money was in use everywhere, so its economy worked through prices and coin rather than only through tribute in kind.
7. Wage labour. Free labour was extensively used on public works at Rome because slaves had to be fed all year round and were therefore dearer, and Anastasius built the city of Dara in under three weeks by attracting workers with high wages. Papyri show wage labour widespread in parts of the Mediterranean by the sixth century.
8. Long-distance trade and branded containers. Wheat, wine and olive oil moved across three continents, with the Dressel 20 container acting almost like a modern brand: its shape and clay identify the producer, and its find-spots show a Spanish industry taking market share from an Italian one on quality and price.
9. Technology at industrial scale. Diversified uses of water power, advances in water-powered milling, screw presses, multiple water-mills, and hydraulic mining in the Spanish gold and silver mines on a scale not matched again until the nineteenth century.
10. Casual literacy and advertising. The walls of Pompeii’s main streets carried advertisements, and graffiti covered the city, including a joke complaining that the wall had to hold up so much boring writing.
11. Urban public services. Public baths, aqueducts and a calendar of shows on 176 days of the year amount to a real municipal life.
12. A legal tradition that limited rulers. By the fourth century Roman law was strong enough to act as a brake even on the most fearsome emperors, and bishops such as Ambrose could confront emperors over the harsh treatment of civilians.
The caution. None of this makes Rome a modern society. It rested on slavery, on debt bondage that let parents sell children into 25 years of servitude, and on a state that was authoritarian and usually met protest with violence.

Q. Try and identify at least five events/processes that would have involved the movement of peoples across regions/continents. What would have been the significance of these events/processes?

Answer: Five such events or processes from Timeline II (c. 100 BCE to 1300 CE):
1. Bananas introduced from Southeast Asia to East Africa through sea routes (100-50 BCE). Sailors and traders crossed the Indian Ocean, and a new food crop became part of African farming.
2. The Han empire in China and the development of the Silk Route from Asia to Europe (100-50 BCE). Merchants, goods such as silk, and ideas moved across Asia to the Mediterranean, linking distant economies.
3. Roman Empire invaded by tribes from North and Central Europe (400-450 CE), and the Vandals from Europe setting up a kingdom in North Africa (429). Whole peoples moved into the empire and across the Mediterranean, the western empire broke up, and new kingdoms took its place.
4. Fa Xian (399) and Xuan Zang (600-650) travel from China to India. Pilgrims and scholars carried Buddhist texts and knowledge between the two lands, and their accounts are important sources for historians.
5. Muslim emigration to Abyssinia (615), the Prophet Muhammad’s move to Medina (622) and the Arab conquest of Sind (712). Movement of believers and armies spread Islam and Arab rule from Arabia to Africa, Spain and South Asia.
Other acceptable examples: Bactrian Greeks and Shakas setting up kingdoms in the north-west of South Asia; Viking raids across western Europe; St Augustine introducing Christianity in England; a Maori navigator from Polynesia reaching New Zealand; the sweet potato, originally from South America, being grown in the Polynesian islands. The significance of such movements is that they spread crops, technologies, religions and languages, built trade links between continents, and often brought about the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires.

Q. Who were the three main players in the political history of the Roman Empire? Write one or two lines about each of them. And how did the Roman emperor manage to govern such a vast territory? Whose collaboration was crucial to this?

Answer: The three main players were the emperor, the aristocracy (the Senate) and the army.
The emperor: from Augustus (27 BCE) he was the sole ruler and the only real source of authority, though he kept up the fiction of being only the Princeps or ‘leading citizen’; succession went by family descent, natural or adoptive.
The Senate: a body representing the aristocracy, the wealthiest families of Roman and later Italian descent, mainly landowners; most surviving Roman histories were written by senators, and emperors were judged by how they behaved towards it.
The army: a paid professional army with a minimum of 25 years’ service, the largest single organised body in the empire (600,000 by the fourth century), which could decide the fate of emperors; a divided army usually meant civil war.
How the empire was governed: there was no government in the modern sense, so the answer lay in the urbanisation of the empire. The great cities along the Mediterranean (Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch) were the bedrock of the system, and it was through the cities that government taxed the provincial countryside. The collaboration of the local upper classes was crucial: they actively helped the Roman state to administer their own territories and raise taxes from them, and in the second and third centuries the provincial upper classes supplied most of the administrators and army commanders.

Q. How independent were women in the Roman world? Compare the situation of the Roman family with the family in India today.

Answer: Legally, Roman women were quite independent. By the late Republic the typical marriage did not transfer the wife to her husband’s authority: she kept full rights in her natal family’s property, her dowry went to the husband only for the duration of the marriage, she remained a primary heir of her father and became an independent property owner on his death. In law the couple were two financial entities, and divorce needed only a notice of intent by either partner. In practice there was inequality: men married in their late twenties or early thirties and women in their late teens or early twenties, marriages were generally arranged, and women were often dominated by their husbands; Augustine says his mother was regularly beaten by his father. Fathers had great legal control over children, even a power of life and death over unwanted infants.
Comparison with India today: the Roman family was a nuclear family, with adult sons living separately, while many Indian families are still joint or extended, though nuclear families are now common in towns. Indian law today gives daughters equal rights in their parents’ property and allows divorce, but through a court process rather than a simple notice. Arranged marriages and a gap in the ages of husband and wife are common in India too, and fathers do not have any power of life and death over children, which Indian law forbids. So in property rights a Roman wife was ahead of her time, but in daily life she often faced inequality, as many Indian women still do.

Q. Archaeologists who work on the remains of pottery are a bit like detectives. Can you explain why? Also, what can amphorae tell us about the economic life of the Mediterranean in the Roman period?

Answer: Like detectives, they reconstruct a whole story from small clues. From broken fragments of pottery they work out the precise shapes of the containers, what they carried, and exactly where they were made, by examining the clay and matching it with clay pits throughout the Mediterranean. The sheer number of fragments helps (Monte Testaccio in Rome is said to hold the remnants of over 50 million vessels).
What amphorae tell us: wine and olive oil, traded in huge quantities, were carried in amphorae. The distribution of a container type shows how far a product travelled: Spanish olive oil, at its peak in 140-160, was carried in the ‘Dressel 20’, and wide finds of it show that Spanish producers captured the oil market from their Italian rivals, which could only have happened if they supplied better oil at lower prices. Amphorae also show that North African producers then dominated through most of the third and fourth centuries, and that after 425 the Aegean, southern Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine became the major exporters of wine and oil. So they reveal a competitive commercial economy in which regions rose and fell according to how well they organised production, transport and quality.

Q. The text has referred to three writers whose work is used to say something about how the Romans treated their workers. Can you identify them? Reread the section for yourself and describe any two methods the Romans used to control labour.

Answer: The writers are Tacitus (whose account of the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus shows how slaves were treated), Columella and Pliny the Elder. The section also uses a letter of Augustine on parents selling their children into servitude.
Two methods of controlling labour:
1. Close supervision. Employers believed no work would get done without it. Columella advised keeping twice as many tools as needed so production never stopped, and grouping workers into squads of ten so that it was easier to tell who was working. In the frankincense factories of Alexandria, described by Pliny the Elder, workers’ aprons were sealed, they wore masks or close-mesh nets on their heads, and they had to take off all their clothes before leaving.
2. Branding and debt bondage. A law of 398 referred to workers being branded so that they could be recognised if they ran away, and many private employers cast their agreements with workers as debt contracts so that they could claim the workers were in debt to them and control them more tightly.
Other methods in the section: slave gangs chained together by the feet (condemned by Pliny the Elder).