Edward Gibbon published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. The work traces the history of the Roman Empire from the second century CE through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, covering more than a thousand years of history in approximately a million and a half words. Gibbon began with the conviction that Roman civilization under the Antonine emperors represented something close to human perfection in social organization, and then set about explaining the long process of deterioration that followed. His explanation assigns significant weight to the rise of Christianity and the disruptions caused by Germanic migrations, both of which remain historically contested.
Gibbon's treatment of early Christianity was immediately controversial, his ironic account of the early Church's growth attributed it to natural social causes rather than divine intervention, and his assessment of the theological controversies that occupied Constantine's empire expressed evident distaste for their intellectual content. Behind the specific historical interpretations is a consistent Enlightenment method: the application of rational inquiry and secular causation to subjects that religious convention had placed outside the reach of ordinary historical analysis. His prose is among the finest in the English historical tradition, ironic, balanced, capable of devastating judgment delivered through apparently neutral description.
The specific arguments of the Decline and Fall should be read with awareness of the scholarship that has revised them substantially, but the historical intelligence and the prose remain fully available. As a model of how to approach large historical questions with intellectual seriousness and stylistic precision, it has no equal in English historical writing. Gibbon's organizing question, why do societies that achieve apparent peaks of organization and prosperity decline, and what structural factors accelerate the process, is a question that every subsequent civilization has had reason to revisit with renewed urgency.
The novel's enduring readability owes much to the precision of its construction, the economy of means by which it achieves its effects, and the care with which the author builds a world that is internally coherent enough to generate genuine surprise at the moments of revelation. These are qualities that no amount of time diminishes, and they are why the book continues to find new readers across generations.
Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 100,000 copies in its first three months, equivalent to roughly 30 million today.
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