Key figures: Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Edward Eliot (parliamentary patron), Richard Watson (Bishop of Llandaff, critic)
Summary
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its first volume published February 17, 1776, by London publishers Strahan and Cadell, dominated English intellectual conversation in 1777. The initial printing of approximately 1,000 copies sold out within weeks; a second edition followed within the month of publication, and by 1777 the work was in its third printing — an extraordinary commercial and critical success. Gibbon (1737–1794) earned roughly £1,000 from the first volume alone, and his publisher Thomas Cadell eventually recouped many times that figure from subsequent editions and translations.
The work’s exploration of Rome’s gradual collapse — attributed to a combination of military overextension, political corruption, economic decay, and the enervating effects of Christianity’s other-worldly values — resonated profoundly with 1777 readers witnessing the British Empire’s military struggles in America. As the Continental Army held on at Valley Forge and France weighed whether to enter the war, Gibbon’s meditation on imperial decline felt urgently contemporary.
Composition and Publication
Gibbon conceived the project during his Italian tour (1763–1764), visiting Rome on October 15, 1764. He later wrote that it was “in the close of the evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol,” that the idea first struck him. He drafted sections throughout the late 1760s and revised extensively during his service as a Member of Parliament (1774–1780), representing Liskeard in Cornwall under the patronage of Lord Eliot.
The first volume, running to more than 700 pages, carried a vast apparatus of footnotes drawing on a wide range of Greek, Latin, Byzantine, and early Christian primary sources, alongside substantial engagement with modern scholarship by Montesquieu, Tillemont, and Muratori. The British historian David Hume, then in his final months of life, wrote immediately to congratulate Gibbon: “Dear Sir: I have been immediately informed of your success, and you may allow me to congratulate you upon that.” Hume died in August 1776; the Decline and Fall was among the last great works he read.
Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared the same year (March 9, 1776), privately told friends that Gibbon had produced the age’s finest historical work. The simultaneous appearance of the two books — one a history of civilization’s fall, the other a theory of civilization’s growth — struck contemporaries as a remarkable intellectual coincidence of 1776.
Themes Resonating in 1777
By 1777, as Britain sustained expensive campaigns in America and European powers reconsidered the global balance of power, the Decline and Fall’s central thesis invited direct contemporary application:
The cost of military overextension — Gibbon documented how Rome’s distant garrison armies drained the treasury through pay, supply, and the logistical infrastructure of empire. Britain’s North American campaigns consumed millions of pounds annually, a mounting burden on a national debt already swollen by the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Parliamentary critics of Lord North’s ministry cited the analogy explicitly.
The corruption of Republican virtue — Gibbon’s portrait of Rome’s transformation from a republic of civic virtue into a corrupt autocracy chimed with Country Party Whig anxieties about corruption in George III’s Parliament and Edmund Burke’s warnings about the influence of the Crown. These themes circulated in coffee houses and in the political pamphlets of 1777.
The civilizational decline as gradual process — Most significantly, Gibbon portrayed Rome’s collapse not as a single catastrophe but as an accumulation of small deteriorations over centuries. This model of “slow decline” — more unsettling than dramatic fall — gave 1777 readers a framework for interpreting the American crisis as possibly symptomatic of deeper structural rot in the British system.
Religion and political stability — Chapters XV and XVI of the first volume, which argued that Christianity’s spread had weakened Rome’s martial culture and civic cohesion, provoked immediate and sustained controversy. Here Gibbon deployed his characteristic method of “ironical compliment” — praising Christianity’s moral virtues while systematically documenting their political costs — a rhetorical strategy sophisticated enough to expose him to counter-attack without providing clear grounds for prosecution.
The 1777 Controversy
The religious controversy surrounding Chapters XV and XVI intensified in 1777 as clerical respondents published formal refutations. Richard Watson, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later Bishop of Llandaff, published his Apology for Christianity in 1776 — directly targeting Gibbon’s implied deism. The Reverend Henry Davis published An Examination of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of Mr. Gibbon’s History in 1778, prompting Gibbon’s sharp Vindication (1779). This pamphlet war widened the work’s audience: readers drawn by the controversy encountered a 711-page work of sustained historical analysis they might otherwise have avoided.
Gibbon’s subsequent volumes — published in 1781 (volumes 2–3) and 1788–1789 (volumes 4–6) — would elaborate his critique of Christian influence, but the foundation of that argument, and the controversy it ignited, belong to 1776–1777.
Historical Method and Intellectual Context
Beyond its provocative theses, the Decline and Fall established new standards for English historical scholarship. Gibbon’s method — systematic deployment of primary sources, comprehensive footnoting, explicit acknowledgment of uncertainty, and the integration of social, economic, and religious factors alongside traditional political-military narrative — built on but substantially exceeded the precedents set by David Hume (History of England, 1754–1762) and William Robertson (History of Scotland, 1759; History of the Reign of Emperor Charles V, 1769).
Gibbon situated himself explicitly in the tradition of the French philosophes — particularly Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), which he had read intensively at Lausanne as a young man — but combined philosophical inquiry with an empirical rigour that French historians of the era rarely matched. His synthesis of Enlightenment philosophy with Germanic philological scholarship (via his engagement with German classicists) marked a methodological turning point in historical writing.
Intellectual Reception Abroad
By 1777, translations of Gibbon were already under way on the Continent: a French translation of the first volume (begun by Leclerc de Septchênes) appeared that year, carrying the work — and its treatment of Christian history with the same critical apparatus applied to pagan sources — into French intellectual circles. In Edinburgh, where the Scottish Enlightenment was still at high tide, figures such as Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair admired the work within a milieu that also produced Hume and Robertson.
Significance for 1777
Gibbon’s work appeared at the exact moment when questions of imperial overreach, political corruption, religious authority, and the cyclical nature of civilization had ceased to be abstract historical puzzles and became pressing political questions. In 1777 — the year of Valley Forge, of British setbacks at Saratoga, and of France’s imminent entry into the war — the Decline and Fall’s success represented not merely a literary triumph but a cultural event: the crystallization of Enlightenment historiography’s capacity to speak simultaneously to the past and to the present. See also Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for the concurrent Enlightenment intellectual achievement that appeared the same year, and Benjamin Franklin in Paris for the transatlantic dimension of 1777 intellectual exchange.
Sources
- Edward Gibbon — Britannica
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Wikipedia
- Pocock, J.G.A. Barbarism and Religion: Volume One, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Womersley, David. The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
- O’Brien, Karen, and Brian Young, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Related
- Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations — concurrent 1776 Enlightenment intellectual achievement, published the same year
- Benjamin Franklin in Paris — Gibbon’s contemporary at the intersection of Enlightenment letters and political crisis
- Leonhard Euler — parallel figure of Enlightenment polymathy and late-career productivity in 1777
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1777 Tour — concurrent cultural achievement reshaping European arts in 1777