Why Some Tribesmen Weren't So Eager to Become Romans

A History of Mankind (239)

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With political unrest mostly confined to Rome itself since the end of the civil wars, Romanization¹ proceeded at different speeds across the empire, within a general framework of expanding trade and infrastructure.

As Romans littered the provinces with boundary stones and surveyed and redistributed massive stretches of land, Roman culture and the Latin language slowly imposed themselves over earlier traditions and tongues, particularly in the West, but the process was far from homogenous, as evidenced by the persecution of Druidism in northern Celtic areas.

These varying degrees of Romanization mirror the different speeds of acculturation into Han culture in the Chinese empire and, as in China, often were a consequence of power delegation on local authorities. A key distinction was that, while in China noblemen sat at the apex of social arrangements, in the Roman empire power was mostly delegated to the town councils of well over 2,000 cities scattered across the empire, in charge also of collecting taxes and sending them to the center, following the Indo-European preference for assembly politics.