Why exactly did the Romans bother conquering England? It seems like a huge waste of resources looking back on it now

Why exactly did the Romans bother conquering England? It seems like a huge waste of resources looking back on it now.

There's a ton of tin and lead in Cornwall and Wales.

Legend said there was more gold in Britain than Europe.
Basically, Caesar wanted to go there, just to prove he could and get Senate props.
Then, when the empire had nowhere else to expand that wasn't too German or Persian to conquer, they started looking for the gold.
There was less gold than Gaul though, by a lot.

Lots of metal deposits.

I don't think some metal deposits are worth garrisoning the entire island and dealing with all the civil unrest. The Western Empire might've lasted longer if they did actually abandon it during Nero's reign.

A shit load of grain. British grain sacks have been all along the Rhine, British grain fed the western armies for centuries.

At that point they invaded their neighbors just because they could desu

The eternal Anglo was busy destroying civilization before he even existed.

What civil unrest? The only major rebellion was Bouddica and the Romans kicked over that hornets nest themselves

To the extent that the fucking BABYLONIANS shipped tin from Britain. Not kidding, look it up.

It's not actually known for sure if it was indeed Britain. Tin was also nowhere near as valuable as it was during the bronze age.

It was sent from Britain around the Mediterranean in ~2000BC so it's likely some reached there.

Claudius needed a military victory somewhere to cement his control over the legions (the only real source of power and legitimacy in the Empire). Britain was fairly weak and he had a natural cassus belli in the form of some of the client kings being beaten up by their neighbors.

Because overseas expanding is always strategic important

>overseas expanding is always strategic important

>letting Pompey's great grandson use britain as a naval base for his piracy
tin, britain was the last corner of the known map so it made you look cool by annexing it, stop belgae refugees returning to gaul

To test my abilities...

Memes aside, it was solely because Claudius needed a military victory. He was a stuttering autistic nerd who liked writing books about Etruscan and was going to be butchered by the Praetorian Guard if he didn't notch up some achievements quickly.

Gold was mined alot near me

Romans were Celtic-boos desu

Also this

lol i think this is right

Britain had a disproportionately large amount of troops stationed there. I believe more than 10% of the entire Roman army was in Britain at any one time when there wasn't a massive war on or something. Plus they had a shitton of generals declaring themselves emperor, moreso than elsewhere in the empire.

They wanted to stamp out piracy on their new Gaulish coast but soon had their hands full with way more than it was worth. No one wanted to abandon it after that or else they'd look weak, like some Brythonic savages kicked Rome's ass.

>britain was the last corner of the known map
They knew about Ireland though. Plus if they wanted the edge of the known world then at the very least they would've committed to holding Caledonia.

can you imagine you're a senator's nephew in the army and you fuck up and embarass a general but not to like decimation, but you still fucked up.
just like today, you needed a place to send a fuck-up that you just couldn't dispose of. "I'm shipping your ass to Alaska" or "Send him to Siberia". You got sent to Hadrian's fucking wall.
Didn't archeologists find all those letters from officers' wives to one another complaining about how shit England was?
If I had an ancestor in the legion he sure as hell was a fuck up and probably got sent to the wall.

more like what the FUCK were they thinking in Armenia

The strategic thinking was that to hold Gaul, they needed Britain. Rome always had trouble with holding Northern Gaul because of pirates from Britain. This was the thinking behind the continuing occupation. Then it became a useful place to dump troops in order to insure stability of the interior whilst still having some emergency troops nearby, although this later backfired after generals kept using Britain as a staging ground to seize the Emperorship.

The actual resources generated from the occupation of Britain also paid for themselves, with Tin and other metals, as well as slaves. So really it wasn't that stupid of a decision, in the short term anyway.

proofs?
also britain includes soctland

Yes it is

No it wasn’t

It was there, it was weak and it needed to be civilized

To be honest, conquering England is a recurring pastime among bored people

In 1066, some French duke who felt bored decided it'd be nice to conquer England
Then in 1154, some French count took over England to kill time
Same in 1688, some Dutch noble decided to take the English throne to escape boredom

So yeah, Caesar was probably bored

ITT: mutts who can't tell the difference between Britain and England.

>to kill time
>implying his mother didn't fight a giant civil war for him

William spoke Norman variant of Old French, but he wasn't French.

He was tho
Be it culturally (spoke French, lived as a French noble, fought like the French, worshipped French church), genetically (around 80% French and 20% Danish, after seven generations of interbreeding with locals without renewal of Nordic blood) or politically (vassal of the French king)

>not realising it was to gain an upper hand in the northern french rivalry
one reason the english aristocracy so hated matilda was because they had given money and men to fight the angevins, and now they were to be kings
>England and Wales aren't the only important part of Great Britain
wew lad

>french church
except he was catholic, or is asturias french because they had a 'french religion'

>implying it was England and Wales when the Romans arrived.

>implying you can;t use modern geographic terms for historical regions
i've played too much total war to think of ireland as anything but brittania superior

You know what I mean
Unlike his vikangz ancestors, he worshipped the same God as the French and not Odin