The sun eventually sets

In 1774, an English newspaper called Lloyd’s Evening Post published a futuristic fantasy. It was set in 1974 and featured two visitors from “the empire of America” touring the ruins of London. These resembled Piranesi’s prints of Roman ruins -- empty, rubble-strewn streets, a single broken wall where Parliament once stood, Whitehall as a turnip field, Westminster Abbey a stable, the Inns of Court a pile of stones “possessed by hawks and rooks,” and St. Paul’s, its dome collapsed, open to the sky. The sun had set on British greatness and, thanks to the immigration of merchants, artisans and workers, it had risen over “Imperial America.”

This fantasy was, of course, far-fetched at the time, but it reflected real concerns. Even before the loss of the 13 colonies, the British feared that their empire, however wide its bounds, was vulnerable to an expansionist America. Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher, had memorably pronounced: “Westward the Course of Empire takes its way.” And that astute commentator, Horace Walpole, prophesied that “the next Augustan Age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic.”

By far the most authoritative harbinger of British imperial doom, though, was Edward Gibbon, the author of “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” According to his renowned account, he was inspired to write it while musing amid the ruins of Rome’s Capitol and listening to barefoot friars singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. No stones in history were more eloquent than those of the Eternal City, recalling as they did the melancholy evanescence of imperial might.

To be sure, Gibbon believed that Europe had so advanced by his own time that it was probably secure from the kind of catastrophe visited on Rome. But he also warned that foes might appear who would carry desolation to the verges of the Atlantic. After all, he said, when the Prophet Muhammad breathed the soul of fanaticism into the bodies of the long-despised Arabs, they “spread their conquests from India to Spain.”

Gibbon published the third volume of his magisterial work, which described the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, a few months before George Washington’s crushing victory over Gen. Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. There were many passages in his book that implied that the British Empire -- overstretched, corrupted by luxury, attacked by barbarians, reliant on mercenaries -- would follow suit.

Most suggestively, Gibbon described the revolt of the “Armoricans” -- inhabitants of Britanny -- against Rome. “Imperial ministers,” he wrote, “pursued with proscriptive laws, and ineffectual arms, the rebels whom they had made.” As a result, the Armoricans (whom he obviously saw as analogous to the Americans) achieved “a state of disorderly independence.” And the Romans (and here he was clearly thinking of the British) lost virtue and honor as well as empire.

This probably represented Gibbon’s true view of the American Revolution. However, the vain little historian, with his chubby cheeks (which a blind woman once literally confused with a baby’s bottom) and his weakness for puce-colored velvet suits and orange zig-zag dimity waistcoats, otherwise paraded his patriotism. He refused an invitation to dine with Benjamin Franklin in Paris because, he said, he could not consort with the ambassador of an enemy country. Franklin riposted by offering “to furnish materials to so excellent a writer for the ‘Decline and Fall of the British Empire.’ ”

The prospect of such a decline haunted the British even as their empire grew to unprecedented size. Finally Britannia ruled not only the waves but a quarter of the Earth, holding sway over India, much of the Middle East and huge swaths of Africa from the Cape to Cairo, an empire seven times larger than Rome’s at its greatest extent. Yet T.B. Macaulay, Gibbon’s only English rival as a historian, classically envisioned a future globe-trotter taking “his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” Winston Churchill, a young subaltern who had spent the hot afternoons in India reading Gibbon and who was returning home in 1897 for the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, paused in Rome’s Capitol to conjure up forebodings of imperial decline and fall.

At the same time, Rudyard Kipling, the unofficial poet laureate of the British Empire, issued his famous warning about current hubris and imminent nemesis:

“Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dunes and headlands sinks the fire;

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.”

Kipling also made his celebrated appeal to Americans: “Take up the White Man’s burden.” This they did, in a sense, the following year. After the victorious war against Spain, the United States annexed its colonies, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

The waxing of the United States indicated the waning of Britain. It’s true that the two countries were allies in both world wars. But no one was more adamant than Franklin D. Roosevelt that the United States was not fighting to save the British Empire, which did, indeed, suffer fatal blows during that conflict. The United States, as Churchill said in his “Iron Curtain” speech of 1946, stood “at the highest point of majesty and power ever attained by any community since the fall of the Roman Empire,” even as the British were preparing to quit India.

Harold Macmillan, a keen student of Gibbon before becoming prime minister in 1957, had long concluded that the British were the Greeks in America’s new Roman Empire and that they must surreptitiously direct their brash masters “as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.” Macmillan scored notable successes, such as speeding up the process of decolonization in Africa, but he carried about as much weight with President Kennedy as Anthony Eden had with Eisenhower, who forced him to make the humiliating retreat from Suez in 1956. Subsequent prime ministers fared little better. Margaret Thatcher was unable to stop Ronald Reagan’s invasion of the Commonwealth island of Grenada. And Tony Blair went along with George W. Bush’s disastrous neo-imperial policy in Iraq.

But if British political influence on the United States is minimal, the British imperial experience may be instructive. All nations look back to find a way forward, and Britain looked back especially to Rome. Britons identified with Romans and anticipated that their own empire would eventually decline and fall -- the Old World being superseded by the New. Needless to say, history does not repeat itself. But neither does it stand still.

The United States, as today’s sole superpower, has achieved an extraordinary global ascendancy. Yet it too is overstretched, corrupted by luxury, attacked by barbarians, reliant on mercenaries. It has suffered terrible setbacks in Vietnam and Iraq. It faces the challenge of a gigantic new rival. Perhaps, therefore, Americans should at least try to imagine the prospect of their nation’s following the British trajectory so that they will be psychologically prepared if and when it happens. It might even be salutary to imagine Chinese tourists, a few centuries hence, taking their stand on a shattered pillar of the White House to sketch the ruins of the Capitol.