Linda Colley: “Edward Gibbon and Changing Global Orders”
- Date: 11 March 2025, 10:15–12:00
- Type: Seminar
- Web page
- Organiser: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
- Contact person: Mattias Bolkéus Blom
Linda Colley (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study & Princeton University) will give a seminar on the topic “Edward Gibbon and Slaveries: Decline and Fall and Rise. The seminar will be followed by a Q&A session.
ABSTRACT:
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the only work by a historian active in the 18th century that is still widely read today. It has also been one of the world's most translated books. Already by 1900, you could read it for instance in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi. The impact and widening audience of Gibbon's work has sometimes been linked to his human sympathy, especially his opposition to the slave trade. In this seminar, Linda Colley re-examines and complicates Gibbon's position on slavery and focuses on Decline and Fall's persistent attention to varieties of regime change over time as the key factor in this book's trans-national and trans-continental appeal.