The frontiers of the concept. Are Romanization and Islamization comparable?

Can we productively compare Romanization and Islamization? The answer to this question requires us to think about the way in which two expanding entities generate their borders with what is external to them. In writing these lines, I am not thinking necessarily about Rome and Islam in their sense of physical and geographical social formations, but as historical entities in (distinct) processes of growth not so much across lands, but over numbers of people (and minds). The aim of this exercise is not so much to determine if these processes are analogous. It is very clear that they are different. However, a comparison about what they implied in terms of transformations at the social and cultural level, but also about the ways in which scholars have taken up the challenge to analyse them, may offer valuable lessons to understand them on their own.

Romanization. Islamization. Comparative theory. Borders.