WI Hadrian had abandoned Britannia

[Carter I'm Yog]

Resurrecting this to share something I read recently. Based on the discussion I think we determined that on the balance of things Britannia was not a really productive province for the empire, and was maybe even a net drain, requiring four legions to garrison.
However what I read is, in the hundred years after Caesar's conquest of Gaul, Britannia was a hotbed of revolt against Rome. A refuge for fugitives, the new center of Druidic thought and Celtic culture, and very able to make quick and expensive raids across the Channel. Possibly conquering and holding Britannia, at least until Gaul was mostly Romanized, was worth it considering the now lower cost of peacefully governing Gaul.

So instead of a "Count of the Channel", the Romans get a tin mine.

The GoT reference is deliberate.

 

[Shogun]

The best time to abandon Britain would have been after Queen Boudicca's revolt.

 

[Dagoth Ur]

The best time to abandon Britain would have been after Queen Boudicca's revolt.

You mean just before. Take everything of value and book it. After means you just wasted a ton of resources and some soldiers' lives for nothing, because you're leaving.
However Boudicca succeeding could be just as expensive as the Romans staying. It will show all "unsophisticated", "barbarian", tribal peoples that Rome can be made to give up, if you try hard enough.

 

[cloistered scholar]

Was one of the reasons Brittania was conquered, was to put an end to british piracy?

 

[Shogun]

You mean just before. Take everything of value and book it. After means you just wasted a ton of resources and some soldiers' lives for nothing, because you're leaving.
However Boudicca succeeding could be just as expensive as the Romans staying. It will show all "unsophisticated", "barbarian", tribal peoples that Rome can be made to give up, if you try hard enough.

Hadn't that last point already been demonstrated after the disaster at Teutoburger Wald? After all, Rome never permanently reoccupied Germania in the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe.

 

[Diego]

Hadn't that last point already been demonstrated after the disaster at Teutoburger Wald? After all, Rome never permanently reoccupied Germania in the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe.

I think that the romans coming back years later to raze the German villages to the ground and anihilating the opposition helped to dismiss that feeling.

 

[Galba Otho Vitelius]

They would have needed those three legions to garrison the southern coast of the Channel, both from any ambitious British king and from piracy elsewhere, so abandoning the island doesn't provide much benefit.

Dacia was abandoned as soon as the mines ran out, but couldn't really be used as a base to attack other provinces, since it was always semi-detached. Britain could be used as a base to attack Gaul, and was in fact used as such by Roman usurpers. They held on until they had started losing control of northern Gaul anyway.

 

[SlyDessertFox]

Dacia was willingly abandoned by Aurelian, out of strategic considerations, after well over a century of Roman rule. In other words, this is not inconceivable, although it is worth noting that Roman Britain was far more defensible than Dacia.

Dacia needs to have a huge asterisk next to it. After almost a century of nonstop warfare in the region, it's hard to say how much control Rome even had over Dacia by the time Aurelian officially abandoned it. Rome fought tooth and nail for Dacia before Aurelian formally abandoned it, and that represents, outside of the Agri Decumates, the only instance of Rome abandoning long-held provinces at their relative height. Both came following the crisis of the third century, when Rome had become functionally incapable of successfully defending those areas.

Abandoning Britain at the height of Rome's powers in the second century would be an entirely different proposition.