Forthcoming in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, ed. Stefan Berger. The following essay introduces Gibbon and offers context within which to read an extended extract from Gibbon’s work, which I’ve drawn from Chapter LII (Gibbon 1994: iii.323–353). Please do not cite without the express permission of the author. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Tim Stuart-Buttle (Department of Politics, University of York, UK) Keywords: Ancient Greece; Ancient Rome; Christianity; Islam; Enlightenment historiography; global history Introduction Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), declared Thomas Carlyle in 1823, “is a man whom one never forgets – unless oneself deserving to be forgotten; the perusal of his work forms an epoch in the history of one’s own mind” (Carlyle 1886: ii.180). In the judgment of a more recent historian, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes, 1776–1788) is “probably the most majestic work of history ever written”, unrivalled for its combination of vision, style, and erudition (Trevor-Roper 1966: 50). The title of Gibbon’s masterpiece conceals the extent of its ambition, for four reasons. The Roman Empire in the West fell in AD 476: Gibbon might have stopped here, and considered doing so. Determining that he had the requisite strength, however, he pressed on, to the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Empire in the East, in AD 1453. Gibbon selected his title because of its flexibility: “the final aera might be fixed at my own choice” (1896: 326). Second, on Gibbon’s account the causes of the Empire’s decline and fall were irreducibly complex, and myriad; to be understood, one had to enlarge one’s gaze far beyond the (contracting) territories of the Empire itself. Gibbon’s history adopts a near-global perspective: traversing Asia and Africa as well as Europe, and considering the encounters between empires, peoples, cultures, and religions in the plural (Osterhammel 2018). Third, if the great theme of Gibbon’s history is civilization, then the work is not merely a story of decline, but of regeneration. As Carlyle observed, the Decline and Fall “is a kind of bridge that connects the antique with the modern ages” (Carlyle 1886: ii.180): its main narrative concludes in AD 1453, but Gibbon repeatedly gestures towards the emergence of a modern form of liberty enjoyed by the denizens of eighteenth-century Europe. This brings us to a fourth point. If contemporaries turned to Gibbon expecting a mournful paean to the glorious civilization ‘we’ Europeans have lost – a widely-shared nostalgic reverence for the classical world which his title appears to endorse – they found only partial satisfaction. Gibbon considered his subject with profound ambivalence: not least because, as a “sociologist of empire” without rival, he was attentive to the repressive and asphyxiating tendencies of this form of political organization (Brown 1977: 39). Gibbon’s Roman Empire was ‘awful’, in both senses – as awe-inspiring as it was terrifying. His marked preference for modern European civilization was predicated on the conviction that extended empire on the Roman model was unrealizable in the modern age: a comforting thought that Gibbon, had he lived to witness Napoleon’s apotheosis (or, indeed, Hitler’s), might have been induced to reconsider (Robertson 1997). Even here, however, a note of caution is audible. The continued vitality of a civilization depends as much on the historical consciousness of its members as on the durability of its social and political institutions. This makes it an inherently precarious achievement: an insight Gibbon shared with those historians, from Tacitus to David Hume, whom he most admired.