Empire and Enlightenment in Edward Gibbon's Treatment of International Relations

Abstract

the reception of Paul W. Schroeder's The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (1994) has recently underlined, the nature of international relations in the closing decades of the ancien regime is a matter of controversy, not least because of the question of how best to understand the concept of the balance of power.1 One of the most important discussions of the concept, however, occurred in a work not commonly considered for its discussion of international relations, Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). This article will consider Gibbon's treatment of the subject and will particularly assess his position with reference both to Enlightenment views on international relations and Britain's position in the eighteenth century. For Gibbon, the notion of the balance of power was central to the position of western Europe in the eighteenth century. He argued that a system of states operating in a competitive system of civilized politics was necessary to progress. In his 'General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West', an essay set within Decline and Fall, Gibbon contrasted the centralized government of imperial Rome, with its susceptibility to autocratic abuse, with the multiple statehood of the eighteenth century: