"...Efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline."

From The Dublin Review of Books, May 29, Issue 161, Summer 2026:

Messy versus Tidy
The shadow of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith hangs over two contemporary efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline.

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp Viking, 592 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978-0241741238

Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages, by Johan Norberg Atlantic Books, 512 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1838957315

The year 1776, whose quarter-millennium we mark this year, was a good vintage for documents that would last. Almost four months before the publication on July 4th of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), the publishers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in the Strand published, on March 9th, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. A few weeks before that (sources disagree about the exact date), the same publishers launched the first volume of a projected six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It’s surprising that subsequent historiography has drawn few explicit comparisons between the second and third of these documents, almost as if the chronological coincidence were an embarrassment for serious scholars, like a form of astrology. The disciplinary separation between history and political economy is doubtless part of the story. One of the rare books to treat both works together, Harold James’s The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton) is by a scholar unusually at home in both traditions.

Smith and Gibbon certainly knew each other, at least through correspondence. In a letter dated November 26th, 1777, Gibbon writes to Smith: ‘Among the strange reports that are every day circulated in this wide town, I heard one today so very extraordinary that I know not how to give credit to it. I was informed that a place of commissioner of the customs in Scotland had been given to a philosopher who for his own glory and for the benefit of mankind had enlightened the world by the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or in any country. But as I was told at the same time that this philosopher was my particular friend, I found myself very forcibly inclined to believe what I most sincerely wished and desired.’

Gibbon probably knew Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s hard to read Smith’s ironic account in 1759 of the social function of religion (‘That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches’) without wondering whether it influenced what may be Gibbon’s most famous sentence: ‘The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.’ Smith had begun writing The Wealth of Nations in 1764 in my home city of Toulouse. This was just a year after Voltaire (whose interest in universal history was certainly an influence on Gibbon) had published his Treatise on Toleration in response to the terrible miscarriage of justice in that city in the Calas affair. It makes sense to think of these two writers as exercised by a common set of preoccupations, even if neither framed them in the same terms.

Smith’s ostensible subject is what makes nations wealthy, while Gibbon’s is what makes empires decay. But each of them is fascinated by the mirror image of their focal question. For Gibbon, what made the Roman empire decay was not a single cause but an accumulation of political, fiscal and religious trends, themselves the fruit of prosperity, that together undermined both civic virtue (especially through luxury consumption) and institutional capacity. For Smith the qualities that made nations wealthy were precisely the qualities that could be blocked by the short-sightedness of opportunistic political leaders. These included not just environmental and technological qualities – the division of labour, mechanisation, the absence of constraints on trade. He also believed in the importance and fragility of civic virtue (trustworthiness, prudence, a sense of justice), albeit in a more sober and less martial version than Gibbon’s, and as a supporting condition rather than a central motor of historical change....

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