ABSTRACT
In 1764, just when the English had established themselves as the major power in North America through the Treaty of Paris, Edward Gibbon was nonetheless moved by the sight of Roman ruins to write a history of the decline and fall of empire. Gibbon, who later served as commissioner of trade and plantations, feared that what had happened to the Romans could happen to the British, so that the English empire would in its turn fall prey to the mutability of power. Already in the sixteenth century, Spenser had written several cantos of The Faerie Queene on mutability, in which he concluded that change was the ultimate force shaping the universe. The idea that the world is in constant flux was certainly appropriate to the start of the European imperial epoch. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientific thinking shifted from seeking to define the stable forms and qualities of the physical universe to studying the laws of its motion. Newton replaced Aristotle. Motion and change came to be seen as fundamental to the universe, and historical process as fundamental to civilization. By Gibbon’s time, the definition of civilization as the product of history, and of history as unceasing and unending change, had become central concepts in the self-definition of Europe as a modern civilization.
