Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and the Political Economy of Imperial Crisis

1776 may be known best for the American Declaration of Independence, but it also marked the publication of two iconic books, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and volume one of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Both authors were concerned with the internal logic that eroded great accumulations of power.  Events of their own day—the crisis of imperial governance in America and India—had forced that question to the center of public debate.  Exploring the less familiar aspects of the complimentary analyses that Smith and Gibbon present offers insight on a central period in the development of political economy. 

The paper will set forth a model of “decline and fall” drawing Gibbon’s account of Roman history from Augustus to Constantine and on Book V of Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Both Smith and Gibbon take a gloomy perspective on the predicament of empire.  Rules necessary to sustain a peaceful and stable order bring economic growth, generate friction as they become more dense and constraining.  The inevitable backlash demands the imposition of force to restore authority, and a constant fluctuation between pacification and the breakdown of internal consensus results.  An expanding commercial society brought prosperity that undermined the martial virtues at a time when distant frontiers became ever more vulnerable to challenge.  The need to assert political authority and stabilize public finance would generate conflict within the empire as the metropole imposed its will upon recalcitrant provinces.  History may have driven the analysis Smith and Gibbon offered, but their exposition of the political economy of the Roman Empire also set out the issues at stake in eighteenth century Britain.