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Every Empire Crumbles. Here's What Comes Next.
Opinion
Guest Essay
What the Definitive Book on Empires Says About America Today
July 13, 2026
Stephen Doyle
By Charles King
Dr. King is a professor at Georgetown and the author of a forthcoming book on “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
The first volume of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was published 250 years ago, in 1776, just a few months before the American Declaration of Independence. Gibbon, who was 38 at the time, would devote the rest of his life to completing what is still the most influential work of history ever written in English: six volumes in all, with the last of its million and a half words heading to the press 12 years later, in 1788, the year George III became manic and delusional and France suspended payments on its huge national debt.
{snip}
To write well about the past is not to mine it for eternal truths, or worse, reduce it to the familiar. Analogies are the first refuge of the bewildered, but they can also be traps. If we’re stuck arguing about whether our current circumstances are more like first-century Rome or fifth-century Rome — or, for that matter, Germany in 1933, the Soviet Union under Stalin, or some other era from our own country’s past — we’ve already gotten the enterprise wrong.
Gibbon was skeptical that history had any definitive lessons. Corpses turned out to be terrible tutors. But knowing about the past, he believed, can help place the here and now in the proper light. Among other things, this knowledge improves our ability to live well by keeping us from mismeasuring the present. Praising our own times as a golden age, or mourning them as uniquely bad, are recipes for either disastrous overconfidence or paralyzing despair.
Because Gibbon has become a universal sage, it is easy to miss this principal fact about him and his great work. He was an honest historian who, in an age of political division, fading empires and revolutionary upheavals, scribbled a long book with a large and surprising message at its core. Gibbon’s singular insight was that the whole point of reading a history book — or writing one — is not to come away with one big truth. The stealthy purpose of studying history is to get you comfortable with changing your mind.
{snip}
All the things we consider normal, dear and true will one day pass away, as they did for the thousands of emperors, queens, citizens, soldiers, philosophers, priests and parents who populated “Decline and Fall.” Yet the possibility of happiness, meaning and a legacy that matters lies not in a disembodied hope for a better future. It lies in the hard evidence — here, let me show you, Gibbon tells us across the centuries — that the dead managed these things, too.
Charles King is a professor at Georgetown and the author of a forthcoming book on “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Corrected on July 13, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated the anniversary that America observed this year. It is the country’s semiquincentennial, not the sesquicentennial.
Guest Essay
What the Definitive Book on Empires Says About America Today
July 13, 2026
Stephen Doyle
By Charles King
Dr. King is a professor at Georgetown and the author of a forthcoming book on “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
The first volume of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was published 250 years ago, in 1776, just a few months before the American Declaration of Independence. Gibbon, who was 38 at the time, would devote the rest of his life to completing what is still the most influential work of history ever written in English: six volumes in all, with the last of its million and a half words heading to the press 12 years later, in 1788, the year George III became manic and delusional and France suspended payments on its huge national debt.
{snip}
To write well about the past is not to mine it for eternal truths, or worse, reduce it to the familiar. Analogies are the first refuge of the bewildered, but they can also be traps. If we’re stuck arguing about whether our current circumstances are more like first-century Rome or fifth-century Rome — or, for that matter, Germany in 1933, the Soviet Union under Stalin, or some other era from our own country’s past — we’ve already gotten the enterprise wrong.
Gibbon was skeptical that history had any definitive lessons. Corpses turned out to be terrible tutors. But knowing about the past, he believed, can help place the here and now in the proper light. Among other things, this knowledge improves our ability to live well by keeping us from mismeasuring the present. Praising our own times as a golden age, or mourning them as uniquely bad, are recipes for either disastrous overconfidence or paralyzing despair.
Because Gibbon has become a universal sage, it is easy to miss this principal fact about him and his great work. He was an honest historian who, in an age of political division, fading empires and revolutionary upheavals, scribbled a long book with a large and surprising message at its core. Gibbon’s singular insight was that the whole point of reading a history book — or writing one — is not to come away with one big truth. The stealthy purpose of studying history is to get you comfortable with changing your mind.
{snip}
All the things we consider normal, dear and true will one day pass away, as they did for the thousands of emperors, queens, citizens, soldiers, philosophers, priests and parents who populated “Decline and Fall.” Yet the possibility of happiness, meaning and a legacy that matters lies not in a disembodied hope for a better future. It lies in the hard evidence — here, let me show you, Gibbon tells us across the centuries — that the dead managed these things, too.
Charles King is a professor at Georgetown and the author of a forthcoming book on “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Corrected on July 13, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated the anniversary that America observed this year. It is the country’s semiquincentennial, not the sesquicentennial.