Educational Experience and the Challenge to Empire

1776 was a remarkable year. Most momentously, of course, it witnessed the signing and publication of the Declaration of Independence. But it also saw the publication of two important, sustained works of Enlightenment thinking: the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

These three documents are linked by more than the mere circumstance of date of publication. All these texts, more or less overtly, aligned themselves against the politics of empire and the associated practices of colonialism. Furthermore, the educational experience of both Gibbon and Smith was chequered and anomalous, while that of Jefferson was in some respects unconventional. What might have been the possible affinities between educational disappointment or divergence in the mid-eighteenth century and a mature scepticism about the claims repeatedly made for empire in the later decades of that century?

The political standpoint of the Declaration of Independence is entirely manifest. The former colonies announce themselves to be ‘Free and Independent States’, ‘Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown’, which in the person of George III they characterise as tyrannical and despotic.

The politics of The Decline and Fall, however, are more elusive. Perhaps they are deliberately elusive. Gibbon evidently took pleasure in reporting to his Swiss friend, Georges Deyverdun, that both the ministers of the Crown and committed Whigs such as Horace Walpole believed that the author of The Decline and Fall was secretly of their party.[1] Certainly, one still encounters the view that The Decline and Fall is an elegy for empire. In some respects that is right. Gibbon expresses unfeigned admiration for the achievements of the empire in architecture, civil engineering, and the finer arts. But it is important to understand that recognition of these splendours does not amount to, and is not offered as, a consequentialist justification of empire as a political form. The first sentence of Gibbon’s earliest publication, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, written in French but published in London in 1761, is quite unequivocal in its condemnation:

L’Histoire des Empires est celle de la misère des hommes. (‘The history of empires is the history of the misery of men’). [2]

A few years later, Gibbon was in Italy on the Grand Tour, and he wrote an interesting letter to his father in which it is clear that his state of mind when he first visited Rome was suspended between rapture and censure:

I am now Dear Sir at Rome. […] I have already found such a fund of entertainment for a mind somewhat prepared for it by an acquaintance with the Romans, that I am really almost in a dream. Whatever ideas books may have given us of the greatness of that people, Their accounts of the most flourishing state of Rome fall infinitely short of the picture of its ruins. I am convinced there never never existed such a nation and I hope for the happiness of mankind that there never will again.[3]

Rapture at the architecture, even in its ruined state; but censure for the politics of empire, and its suppression of human flourishing – the ‘happiness’ the pursuit of which the Declaration of Independence would specify as an unalienable human right.

Gibbon’s youthful commitments were carried over into The Decline and Fall, which narrates and explains the enormously complicated process whereby the Europe of Gibbon’s day (which, following Hume, he describes paradoxically as a republic of Christian monarchies) had emerged from the ruins of empire. A crucial contributor to this process had been the boisterous liberty of the northern barbarians: ‘the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent of taste and science.'[4] The implication is plain. Had the Roman Empire somehow managed to sustain itself, modern taste and science would never have been born. It is significant that, towards the end of his great narrative, Gibbon levels a simple but devastating indictment against the practice of empire: ‘There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.'[5] It is worth pausing for a moment over that word ‘interest’, with its implication of economic detriment, as it hints to us about the influence that Adam Smith’s critique of the economics of empire had come to exert over Gibbon by the time he published the third instalment of The Decline and Fall (from which that last quotation is taken) in 1788.[6]

For, turning to The Wealth of Nations, here again we find an anti-imperial tendency. Gibbon admired this book extremely, as he explained to Adam Ferguson: ‘What an excellent work is that with which our common friend, Mr Adam Smith, has enriched the public! – an extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language.'[7] For Smith, the modern European imperial project was rooted in a vulgar error concerning the nature of wealth. Moreover, the pursuit of empire further spread in the minds of men fatal confusions about both economics and politics.

In the first place, the spur to the acquisition of empires in the Americas had been the mercantilist confusion of wealth with the heaping up of bullion:

Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.[8]

In addition, the inverted order of European economic history, in which natural manufactures ‘have generally been posterior to those which were the offspring of foreign commerce’, meant that European commerce had become perversely linked to aggressive warfare, and this unnatural connection had further stoked imperialist energies. Thirdly, the reliance of England’s colonies on slave labour had distorted the economic judgement of the plantation owners, and had led to repeated mis-allocations of capital:

A gentleman who farms a part of his own estate, after paying the expence of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. The greater part of our North American and West Indian planters are in this situation. They farm, the greater part of them, their own estates, and accordingly we seldom hear of the rent of a plantation, but frequently of its profit.[9]

The confusion is significant, because in a ‘natural’ business rent is normally set against profit. Rent is properly understood as a ‘deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon land.'[10] But in the colonial operation, rent is not deducted from profit but rather is rolled up indistinguishably within it. And this exaggeration of the profitability of plantations tends also to exaggerate the economic benefit of slave-labour. Smith is determined to re-iterate the economic truth about slave labour that this exaggeration of colonial profit disguises:

It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.

The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.[11]

The result is that, in a true perspective, and as the colonies are currently managed, ‘Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.'[12]

So for Smith the acquisition of colonies had its origin in economic error, and the commercial activity typical of a colony encourages the spread of yet further economic error. The final element in Smith’s attack on imperialism came when he turned his attention eastward and considered the East India Company and its government of large areas of the Indian subcontinent. The importance of this further element in Smith’s economic analysis of empire is that he goes beyond statements of the inhumanity of colonialism towards the population that has been colonised (not, even at that time, an unusual point of view or opinion), to show that, in addition, empire is more subtly harmful to the colonisers themselves. It is economically irrational as well as inhuman.

With unfortunate timing, given the publication a few months later of the Declaration of Independence, Smith introduced his critique of the East India Company with a comparison:

The difference between the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries.[13]

The East India Company added a further twist to the pattern of economic distortion Smith associated with empire, because within itself it confused to harmful effect two quite different public functions – the function of rule, and the function of trade:

No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign. If the trading spirit of the English East India company renders them very bad sovereigns; the spirit of sovereignty seems to have rendered them equally bad traders. While they were traders only, they managed their trade successfully, and were able to pay from their profits a moderate dividend to the proprietors of their stock. Since they became sovereigns, with a revenue which, it is said, was originally more than three millions sterling, they have been obliged to beg the extraordinary assistance of government in order to avoid immediate bankruptcy. In their former situation, their servants in India considered themselves as the clerks of merchants: In their present situation, those servants consider themselves as the ministers of sovereigns.[14]

So, for Smith, whether one looked west or east, and notwithstanding significant variations in the administration of the different provinces of the British Empire, the prospect afforded by empire was equally depressing. Empire fed off, and in turn reinforced, the most vicious tendencies in human nature; and it then, with a surprising even-handedness, took a subtle revenge on its apparent beneficiaries by blinding them to the true principles of their own economic and political prosperity.

Might the educational experience of Jefferson, Gibbon, and Smith have encouraged them to adopt a jaundiced view of empire? George Tucker tells us that Jefferson’s education, before he attended William and Mary, had been initially entrusted to ‘a Mr. Douglas, a Scotch clergyman, at whose school he was instructed in the Latin, Greek, and French languages’. At William and Mary, Jefferson had again fallen under the influence of a Scotsman, Dr. William Small, who introduced him to ‘general science . . . mathematics, ethics, and belles-lettres.’ Tucker drew a clear connection between ‘that diversity of knowledge . . . which characterizes the Scotch system of instruction’ and Jefferson’s inclusion on the ‘committee that drew the Declaration of Independence’.[15]

Gibbon’s education followed the classic pattern for the gentry of his day: Westminster (where he was bullied and unhappy), followed by early admission as a Gentleman Commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford. It was a disaster. At Magdalen Gibbon fell into habits of idleness, and converted to Roman Catholicism. At that point Gibbon’s father decided to send him to Lausanne, where he was entrusted to a clergyman, Daniel Pavilliard. Pavilliard recognised his pupil’s innate abilities and took charge of his education. In his Memoirs Gibbon records that, under Pavilliard’s firm but kindly care, his ‘love of reading, which had been chilled at Oxford’ began to revive; and he generously acknowledges that ‘I owe my creation to Lausanne: it was in that school, that the statue was discovered in the block of marble; and my own religious folly, my father’s blind resolution, produced the effects of the most deliberate wisdom.'[16]

Adam Smith’s education blended elements of those of Jefferson and Gibbon. Like Jefferson, he was exposed to the Scottish prizing of diversity of knowledge, learning geometry and mechanics at his local parish school, as well as making a start with Latin and Greek. But like Gibbon, translation to Oxford was a disappointment. Between 1740 and 1746 Smith was a Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College, and he was dismayed by the negligence shown by his tutors, as he recorded in The Wealth of Nations: ‘in the University of Oxford the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.'[17] Gibbon was so gratified by this echo of his own experience that he quoted it in his Memoirs.[18]

We must not push the argument too far. We can find determined critics of empire whose educational experience was comparatively unproblematic. For instance, Samuel Johnson had dyspeptically condemned the Seven Years’ War, in which the French and English had contended for mastery of North America, as ‘only the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger’.[19] And this disenchantment with empire and the conflicts it entailed was in Johnson’s case unrelated to any educational disappointments. But even if the connection does not work mechanically and necessarily, the examples of Gibbon and Adam Smith are perhaps sufficient to suggest that a curdled or imperfect experience in the grandest educational institutions of Hanoverian England might incline its survivors to look at other elements of that regime, including its imperialism, with disenchanted eyes.

[1] 7 May 1776 (The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols [London: Cassell and Company, 1956], vol. II, p. 107).

[2] Essai sur l’étude de la littérature [1761], p. 1.

[3] Gibbon to his father, 9 October 1764 (Letters, vol. I, p. 184).

[4] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols [London, Allen Lane: 1994], vol. I, p. 84. The role of Christianity in undermining, sustaining, softening, and refining the culture of the empire, is too complex to be summarised here.

[5] The Decline and Fall, vol. III, p. 142.

[6] The first volume of The Decline and Fall had been published on 17 February 1776, a month before The Wealth of Nations. Although Gibbon had known Adam Smith before March 1776, and counted him as a friend, there is no evidence that either author had taken the other into any pre-publication confidence about the detail of the book they were about to publish.

[7] 1 April 1776 (Letters, vol. II, p. 101).

[8] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], IV.vii.b.59, p. 588.

[9] Wealth of Nations, I.vi.20, p. 70.

[10] Wealth of Nations, I.viii.6, p. 83.

[11] Wealth of Nations, I.viiii.41 and III.ii.9, pp. 98-99 and 387-88.

[12] Wealth of Nations, IV.vii.c.65, p. 616.

[13] Wealth of Nations, I.viii.26, pp. 90-91. The Wealth of Nations had been published in March 1776. The Declaration of Independence would be published on 4 July 1776.

[14] Wealth of Nations, V.ii.a.7, p. 819.

[15] George Tucker, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 2 vols (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1837), vol. I, pp. 21-23.

[16] The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London: John Murray, 1896), pp. 134 and 152.

[17] Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.8, p. 761.

[18] Autobiographies, p. 70.

[19] Observations on the Present State of Affairs, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol X, Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 188.