ABSTRACT
Scottish cleric and historian William Robertson set out to do for the British Empire what his contemporary Edward Gibbon did for Rome, but with a happier direction and ending. Robertson’s sweeping History of America (1777) begins with the beginning-the Mediterranean world at the historical moment that late eighteenthcentury Europeans considered the dawn of civilization.1 It places the Americas, and North America particularly, at the end of a telos crowning Britain as history’s ultimate victor. While Gibbon explained how Rome declined and fell, Robertson was laying out a rise and apotheosis of the British Empire-with all the religious implications the latter term carries. But American independence ruined Robertson’s design as much as, for the time at least, it ruined Britain’s. He ended up publishing his History unfinished. By 1777 it was clear to him that rather than representing the ultimate achievement of British and European civilization, America was in the process of leaving the empire and Robertson’s world behind.
