Monday,
November 05, 2007
The
ANNOTICO Report
It
doesn't take a genius to predict that which goes up must come down.
Edward
Gibbon, the author of "The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire."
was inspired to write it while musing amid the ruins of
Gibbon published the third volume of his magisterial work, a few months before
George Washington's crushing victory over Gen. Charles Cornwallis at
T.B. Macaulay, and Rudyard Kipling predicted it.
Winston Churchill in 1946, and Anthony Eden in
1956 confirmed it.
The
And,
It faces the challenge of a gigantic new rival,
Americans
would do well to heed the history of the British and Roman empires.
By Piers Brendon
November 4, 2007
In
1774, an English newspaper called Lloyd's Evening Post published a futuristic
fantasy. It was set in 1974 and featured two visitors from "the empire of
This fantasy was, of course, far-fetched at the time, but it reflected real
concerns. Even before the loss of the 13 colonies, the British feared that
their empire, however wide its bounds, was vulnerable to an expansionist
By far the most authoritative harbinger of British imperial doom, though,
was Edward Gibbon, the author of "The History of the Decline and Fall of the
To be sure, Gibbon believed that Europe had so advanced by his own time that it
was probably secure from the kind of catastrophe visited on
After
all, he said, when the Prophet Muhammad breathed the soul of fanaticism into
the bodies of the long-despised Arabs, they "spread their conquests from
Gibbon published the third volume of his magisterial work, which described
the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, a few months before George
Washington's crushing victory over Gen. Charles Cornwallis at
Most suggestively, Gibbon described the revolt of the "Armoricans" -- inhabitants of Britanny
-- against
This probably represented Gibbon's true view of the American Revolution.
However, the vain little historian, with his chubby cheeks (which a blind woman
once literally confused with a baby's bottom) and his weakness for puce-colored
velvet suits and orange zig-zag dimity waistcoats,
otherwise paraded his patriotism. He refused an invitation to dine with
Benjamin Franklin in
The prospect of such a decline haunted the British even as their empire grew
to unprecedented size. Finally Britannia ruled not only the waves but a quarter
of the Earth, holding sway over India, much of the Middle East and huge swaths
of Africa from the Cape to Cairo, an empire seven times larger than Rome's
at its greatest extent. Yet T.B. Macaulay, Gibbon's only English rival as a
historian, classically envisioned a future globe-trotter taking "his
stand on a broken arch of
At the same time, Rudyard Kipling, the unofficial poet laureate of the British
Empire, issued his famous warning about current hubris and imminent nemesis:
"Far-called, our navies melt away; On dunes
and headlands sinks the fire; Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with
Kipling also made his celebrated appeal to Americans: "Take up the White
Man's burden." This they did, in a sense, the fo llowing year. After the
victorious war against
The waxing of the United States indicated the waning of Britain. It's
true that the two countries were allies in both world wars. But no one was more
adamant than Franklin D. Roosevelt that the
Harold Macmillan, a keen student of Gibbon before becoming prime
minister in 1957, had long concluded that the British were the Greeks in
But if British political influence on the
The
It
faces the challenge of a gigantic new rival,
Piers Brendon is the author of "The Decline and Fall
of the British Empire," to be published in the
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