Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

Hello, and empires built on many things powerful arm is good administration sometimes strong leadership

But perhaps its secret weapon lies in its culture culture governs or at least influences our language our art and architecture

Our education law and philosophy and even our dress sense and manners to govern the culture is perhaps to govern the world

What was the role of culture in the Greek Roman and British empires?

How did these empires impose their cultural influence and how much did they absorb from the places that they colonized and if America controls the cultural gender today

What is it and should we accept it or be resistant to it?

With me to discuss cultural imperialism is Linda Colley school professor of history at the London School of Economics

Philip Dodd director of the Institute of contemporary arts and Mary Beard reader in classics at Cambridge University an author of a new book

The path and on Philip Dodd. Could you give us a definition of what you understand by cultural imperialism?

Words and phrases have histories and what's interesting about the phrase cultural imperialism as at least from what I can see

It's a early sixties word our an early sixties phrase and the reason it's that it seems to me is that that was the moment of kind of national liberation in Africa

It's the moment of kind of anti

Colonialization

Which meant that we had to everyone had to understand how power was exercised when direct sovereignty

Wasn't necessarily exercised by our bicolonial powers nor was economic power as simply exercised as it used to be so cultural imperialism

Was an attempt as a phrase to understand how power was exercised through values beliefs

Ideas and institutions. So a comically

Popular version of this at least to my children is the asterisk stories where some poor

Gaul as it were becomes a Roman, you know, he wears a toga. He says are they everywhere?

He's always wanting to build bridges. He's wanting to kind of swim in

...