Silvia Sebastiani

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment

A great deal of thinking in Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century was devoted to the problem of the diversity and differences among peoples of the earth. The idea of ‘progress’, which has been considered the specific contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to the European Enlightenment, was one result.1 Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, John Millar and Lord Kames all contributed to a new historical approach, which shifted attention from chronology to manners, and from kings and heroes to the path of peoples towards civilization. Through the comparison of different societies, progress was shown to emerge from changes across economic, political, social and cultural spheres. Differences between peoples were explained within a scheme of historical development: from simple, rough and lawless to refined, polite and commercial societies.2

Forum: Closeness and distance in the age of enlightenment introduction

According to Michel de Certeau, distance is the indispensable prerequisite for historical knowledge and the very characteristic of modern historiography. The historian speaks, in the present, about the absent, the dead, as Certeau labels the past, thus emphasizing the performative dimension of historical writing: “the function of language is to introduce through saying what can no longer be done.” As a consequence, the heterogeneity of two non-communicating temporalities becomes the challenge to be faced: the present of the historian, as a moment du savoir, is radically separated from the past, which exists only as an objet de savoir, the meaning of which can be restored by an operation of distantiation and contextualization. In Evidence de l’histoire: Ce que voient les historiens, Francois Hartog takes up the question of history writing and what is visible, or more precisely the modalities historians have employed to narrate the past, opening up the way to a reflection on the boundaries between the visible and the invisible: the mechanisms that have contributed to establish these boundaries over time, and the questions that have legitimized the survey of what has been seen or not seen. But, as Mark Phillips points out, it is the very ubiquity of the trope of distance in historical writings that has paradoxically rendered it almost invisible to historians, so that “it has become difficult to distinguish between the concept of historical distance and the idea of history itself.”

Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic World

In 1810 Samuel Stanhope Smith, Presbyterian reverend, professor of Moral Philosophy, and president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), gave to print the second American edition of An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. Originally published in Philadelphia in 1787, the year of the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, the Essay was reprinted in London two years later, while a new edition appeared in Edinburgh in 1788, introduced and annotated by the American medical student Benjamin Smith Barton. This was, according to John C. Greene, “the most ambitious and the best known American treatise on physical anthropology” in the eighteenth century.1

WHAT CONSTITUTED HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF THE NEW WORLD? CLOSENESS AND DISTANCE IN WILLIAM ROBERTSON AND FRANCISCO JAVIER CLAVIJERO

According to Gerbis classical study, the “dispute of the New World” entered a new phase in the 1780s, one marked by voices coming from the Americas. New questions were then raised about the writing of history, its method, scope and proofs. This essay pursues a dual-track enquiry, confronting the History of America (1777) by the Presbyterian minister William Robertson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, with the Storia antica del Messico (1780–81) by the Mexican exiled Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero. The two works, one written from the centre of the worlds commercial expansion, the other from the Pontifical States, were engaged in a sophisticated dialogue, which yields two alternative, competing conceptions of history and of humankind. To Robertsons philosophical history, which developed from a long-distance perspective, characteristic of Enlightenment, Clavijero responded by reassessing the Jesuit and antiquarian tradition, based on closeness, local expertise and direct observation.

Enlightenment America and the Hierarchy of Races: Disputes Over the Writing of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1788)

In the 1780s, the dispute about the New World entered a new phase. Creole voices redesigned the spatial, political, and economic matrix of modern thought about race within an Atlantic framework. By focusing on the changing eighteenth-century entry on “America,” this article considers the successful commercial enterprise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was conceived in Scotland. It examines the intellectual shift in reference from the Scottish Enlightenment of William Robertson to the antiquarian history advocated by Francisco Xavier Clavijero, a Mexican Jesuit, exiled in the Papal States. The new cartography of knowledge endorsed by the Encyclopaedia led to a racial classification associating Scriptures and providential history.

National Characters and Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate

“Character” is a spacious term, encompassing at once the whole human species, each distinct nation, and particular individuals. As David Hume put it as early as his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), this complex jeu d’echelles2 creates a constant and unresolved tension between the general and universal course of human nature and the various peoples of the earth, differentiated in external appearance and internal constitution, as well as in customs, manners, and civility. The question is how to reconcile uniformity and diversity, regularity and singularity. The aim of this chapter is to set out a debate that was central to the philosophical histories produced by the Scottish Enlightenment, where characters—and national characters in particular—appeared as a product and mirror of different stages of civilization and manners. The account of diversity took a historical form in Scotland from the 1750s through the 1780s. While the Scottish literati followed Hume in rejecting climate theory as an explanation for the variety of national characters, they had different ways of reshaping Hume’s argument. My strategy is to draw out contrasts and discontinuities as much as parallels and similarities in their discourses.