Empire, Status, and the Law

Abstract One phase in the long history of Roman citizenship ended in 212 ce, when the emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free-born residents of the empire. This moment subsequently came to be understood as inevitable, as though the juridical unification of the world had been the project of empire all along—and virtually all subsequent European empires have been implicated in the legacy of that tradition. But the history of Roman citizenship is neither unitary nor continuous. This article interrogates processes of juridification in the relationship between citizenship and empire. Some of these concern the Roman citizen body itself, which on one reading was gradually transformed from a collective of self-ruling agents to a community of economic actors. Others concern the effects on alien political and religious communities of the appearance of Roman tribunals as courts of the second instance. The legacies of Roman citizenship in modern forms of subjectivity should be understood against this complex history.