Abstract
The publication, in 1774, of the History of Jamaica by Edward Long showed one of the possible political implications of the philosophical and historical debate about the nature of man and the history of humankind. Long quoted Hume’s racial footnote and referred to the speculations of Rousseau and Monboddo on the proximity of Africans to apes to support the utility of slavery as a civilizing tool in the hands of a superior white civilization. Human inequality and power relationships were central topics of debate in the Philosophical Society, or Wise Club, in Aberdeen. The Wise Club consisted of a group of professors from the city’s two colleges, Marischal and King’s, who engaged, from the early 1760s, in a heated debate about Hume’s philosophy. Thomas Reid, James Beattie, John Gregory, and George Campbell criticized Hume’s skepticism from a religious point of view, for its repercussions in society. Ongoing topics of debate included human nature, the civilization gap between peoples, the potential for development, and polygenesis. Their discussions, which inspired Beattie’s Essay on Truth and contributed to the formation of an antislavery movement in Aberdeen, led to the defense of the unity of humankind on the basis of a strong emphasis on environmental and social circumstances.
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Notes
James Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780), II edn. (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell; Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1781), 161–62.
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London: T. Lownudes, 1774; reprint London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1970). On its diffusion, see Peter J. Marshall and Glywndr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982), 227–57. Jamaica—which passed from Spain to England in 1655, during Cromwell’s protectorate—was one of the most important producers and exporters of sugarcane.
David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, New York, and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999), 469–522.
John W. Cairns, “Knight v. Wedderburn,”, The Oxford Companion to Black British History, ed. David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007), 244–46.
Cairns, “Stoicism, Slavery, and Law: Grotian Jurisprudence and Its Reception,” Grotiana (new series) 22–23, Grotius and the Stoa, ed. Hans W. Blom and Laurens C. Winkel (2001–2): 197–232.
Anthony J. Barker, The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807 (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1978), 41–58.
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca and New York: Cornell U. P., 1966), 422–93.
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 33–160.
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 209–33.
James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth; in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1770; reprint ed. Roger J. Robinson, 10 vols. London: Routledge-Thoemmes Press, 1996, vol. X). The Essay was translated into French, German, Dutch, and Italian and had five editions in four years. In 1770 the King’s College in Aberdeen conferred an honorary LLD on Beattie, and in 1773 he received a second one from Oxford, while George III gave him an annual pension of £200 for his defense of Christianity. Sir Joshua Reynolds portrayed Beattie as the champion of Truth in the victorious struggle against Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly (two of these defeated figures have been identified as Hume and Voltaire).
Walter R. Humphries, “The First Aberdeen Philosophical Society,” Transactions of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 5 (1931–38): 203–28.
E. H. King, “A Scottish ‘Philosophical’ Club in the Eighteenth Century,” The Dalhousie Review 50 (1970): 201–14.
H. Lewis Ulman, The Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 1758–1773 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen U. P., 1990).
Stephen A. Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense: The Problem of Authority in the Social Background and Social Philosophy of the Wise Club of Aberdeen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987).
Thomas Reid to David Hume, March 18, 1763, in Philosophical Works, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1895, reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1983), I: 92. See also Hume to Reid, February 25, 1763, in Hume, Letters, I: 376; II: 301.
See David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1982), 192–208.
See Reid, Philosophical Works, I: 52. A few years later, Judge David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, warned Smellie to include, in his translation of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, “a confutation of the atheistical parts of it […]. Without that addition it will do great hurt to an ignorant nation, already too much vitiated by French philosophy […]. Professor Monro, held Buffon in sovereign contempt, and ranged him in the class of the Indian philosophers with their bull and their tortoise.” See Lord Hailes to W. Smellie, July 11, 1779, in Robert Kerr, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of William Smellie, 2 vols. (London: Anderson, 1811), II: 160.
Linnaeus to D. Skene, January 21, 1766, AUL, Ms 483, fol. 119. On Skene’s and Linnaeus’s correspondence, see Alexander Thomson, Esq. of Banchory, “Biographical Sketch of David Skene, MD, of Aberdeen,” The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal new series 10 (1859): 315–26.
AUL, Ms 3101/1/6, September 23, 1760, David Skene, “A Discourse on the Study of Mankind,” fols. 18–22. See Paul B. Wood, “The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Science 27 (1989): 89–123.
Wood, “Buffon’s Reception in Scotland: The Aberdeen Connection,” Annals of Science 44 (1987): 171–84.
AUL, Ms 3107/1/3, fol. 1; Ulman, Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 57; Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell et al., 1774; reprint, ed. Bernhard Fabian, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 3.
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: Kincaid and Bell, 1764), 1–2.
Robert Traill, The Qualifications and Decorum of a Teacher of Christianity Considered; With a View to the Temper of the Present Age Respecting Religion, and to Some Late Attacks which Have Been Made upon It. A Sermon Preached before The Synod of Aberdeen, At Aberdeen, April 8, 1755 (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1755), 11–12.
Alexander Gerard, The Influence of the Pastoral Office on the Character examined; with a View Especially to Mr. Hume’s Representation of the Spirit of that Office. A Sermon Preached before The Synod of Aberdeen at Aberdeen, April 8, 1760 (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1760).
George Campbell, A Dissertation on Miracles: Containing an Examination of the Principles advanced by David Hume, Esq. in an Essay on Miracles (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1762), V.
Kathleen Holcomb, “Reid in the Philosophical Society,”, The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, ed. Melvin Dalgarno and Eric Matthews (New York: Kluwer, 1989), 413–20.
AUL, Ms S 145 and 539. The minutes of the Wise Club start with the first meeting in January 1758 and end in March 1773, with few interruptions. The list of questions has been published various times, starting with James McCosh, Scottish Philosophy: Biographical Expository, Critical from Hutcheson to Hamilton (1875) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966), Appendix II, 467–73. More recently: Ulman, Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 189–98; Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense, Appendix, 433–43.
Robert Traill, “An Abstract of a Discourse of M. Rousseau on the Source of the Inequality among Mankind; with some Observations upon it,” AUL, Ms 539: January 12, 1758.
John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World (London: J. Dodsley, 1765); see esp. “Discourses” I and II.
James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1790–93), II: 216.
Beattie alluded here to Mandeville, Monboddo, and Helvetius. Besides the expected names, such as Hobbes or Voltaire, his nightmare also featured Kames, Shaftesbury, and those members of the clergy who were Hume’s friends: Beattie was possibly referring to Robertson, Blair, and Carlyle, while Reid was accused of being overly fascinated by Humean philosophy. See “Beattie’s The Castle of Scepticism: An Unpublished Allegory Against Hume, Voltaire, and Hobbes,”, The Works of James Beattie, vol. X; see also the letters Beattie addressed to Sir William Forbes, January 30, 1766; to Dr Blacklock, January 9, 1769; to Elizabeth Montagu, April 21, 1773; to Dr. Porteus, December 17, 1779, in William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie (London: E. Roper, 1824; reprint London: Routledge-Thoemmes Press, 1996), I: 80–81; 129–38; 251–53, II: 63–65.
Beattie, Essay on Truth, 478–79; Beattie, “On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery, particularly that of the Negroes, Written in the Year 1778,”, Works of James Beattie, X: 7; AUL, Ms 540, item no. 20, fol. 10v. Recent historiography has identified the origins of racism in the capacity of abstraction of Greek philosophy: Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2004).
The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2009).
See Paul B. Wood, “Science and the Pursuit of Virtue in the Aberdeen Enlightenment,”, Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Michael A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 127–49.
Sergio Moravia, La scienza dell’uomo nel ‘700 (Bari: Laterza, 1970), 47–55.
Göttingen vers 1800: L’Europe des sciences de l’homme, ed. Hans E. Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 2010).
Paul B. Wood, “‘Jolly Jack Phosphorous’ in the Venice of the North: or, Who Was John Anderson?,”, The Glasgow Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 111–32.
Ronald L. Meek, “New Light on Adam Smith’s Glasgow Lectures on Jurisprudence,”, Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1977), 57–91, where Meek transcribes and comments on the notes taken by Anderson in Smith’s class.
Ibid., fol. 23. A few years later, Richard Millar reassessed this point in a paper addressed to the Royal Medical Society: “How far can the varieties of the human species that are observable in the different countries of the world, be accounted for from physical causes?,” Archives of the Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, MS Records (1785–86), XIX: 144–77.
John Hunter, “Inaugural Disputation on the Varieties of Man,”, The Anthropological Treatises of Blumenbach and the Inaugural Dissertation of John Hunter on the Varieties of Man, trans. and ed. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman for the Anthopological Society, 1865), 360–66, 372–74, and 387. The original Latin text, published in Edinburgh in 1775, was entitled Disputatio Inauguralis, quaedam De Hominum Varietatibus, et harum Causis, expones.
See The Anthropological Treatises of Blumenbach, 98 and 163–64. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (Göttingen: Typis Frid. Andr. Rosenbuschii, 1775).
Peter Camper, “Account of the Organs of Speech of the Orang Outang,” Philosophical Transactions LXIX (1779): 139–59. On his hypothesis of identifying human races on the basis of the facial angle, see The Works of the Late Professor Camper, on the Connexion between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting, Statuary, &c &c in Two Books … Translated from the Dutch by T. Cogan, M.D. (London: C. Dilly, 1794), 9.
See Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722–1789) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
Monthly Review 80 (1789): 678–90. The review of Zimmermann’s Geographical History of Man and Quadrupeds continued in the following issue: 81 (1789), 633–41.
See also Monthly Review, 70 (1783): 243; The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany X (1789): 96–102, which again presented part of the review that had appeared in the Monthly Review. See Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850, ed. Hannah F. Augstein (Bristol: Thommes Press, 1996).
Pietro Moscati, Delle Corporee differenze essenziali, che passano tra la struttura de’ bruti, e la umana (1770) (Brescia: Giammaria Rizzardi, 1771). Through a comparative analysis of the body of men and animals, Moscati asserted that the upright posture was not a distinctive human characteristic, but the “product of art,” and cause of much physical harm. A German translation, edited by the Göttingen professor Johann Beckmann, was published in Göttingen in 1771. Moscati was criticized by Blumenbach (The Anthropological Treatises of Blumenbach, 84–86), while a detailed review, attributed to Kant, was published on August 23, 1771, in the Königsberg journal, Gelehrten und politiche Zeitungen.
See Luigi Belloni, “Echi del Discorso accademico di P. Moscati sull’uomo quadrupede: La recensione di Kant,” Physis: rivista di storia della scienza 3 (1961): 167–73.
Frank W. P. Dougherty, Commercium epistolicum J. F. Blumenbachii. Aus einem Briefwechsel des klassischen Zeitalters der Naturgeschichte, Katalog zur Ausstellung im Foyer der Niedersächsischen Staat- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (Göttingen, 1984).
Dougherty, “Buffons Bedeutung für die Entwicklung des anthropologischen Denkens im Deutschland der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,”, Die Natur des Menschen: Probleme der physischen Anthropologie und Rassenkunde (1750–1850), ed. Gunter Mann and Frantz Dumont (Stuttgart and New York: Fischer, 1990), 221–79.
Ibid., fols. 31–38. Between the 1770s and 1810s the question of human diversity was central to a significant number of dissertations at the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh, most of them adopting a monogenetic stance against Kames. Colin Kidd has counted 13 interventions in this period, of which only two supported polygenesis. See Kidd, Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005), 93ff.
Eberhardt August Wilhelm von Zimmermann, Geographische Geschichte des Menschen (Leipzig: Weygandschen Buchhandlung, 1778–83), translated into French by Jacob von Mauvillon as Zoologie géographique: Premier article, l’homme (Paris: Cassel, 1784).
Georges-Louis L. de Buffon, “Additions aux variété dans l’espèce humaine,”, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, 36 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749–89), IV, Suppléments (1777), 525–538.
See Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (1971), Postface Claude Blanckaert (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 265–67. In the same year, de Pauw reassessed his denigratory image in the article “Amérique,”, Supplément à l’Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts & des Métiers par une Société de Gens de lettres (Amsterdam: M. M. Rey, 1776–77), I: 343–62.
See Richard Switzer, “America in the Encyclopédie,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1481–99.
To bring out more clearly the divergence between this version and that of 1753–54, I have included here the passage with the deletions and additions in italics: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never scarcely ever was a civilized nation of any other that complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.” See David Hume, “Of National Characters,”, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (I ed. 1742; 1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 208. Small variations in language and rhetoric emerge by comparing the 1768 with the 1770 edition.
Robert Palter, “Hume and Prejudice,” Hume Studies 21 (1995): 3–23.
This is John Immerwahr’s hypothesis: “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 481–86.
Aaron Garrett, “Hume’s Revised Racism Revisited,” Hume Studies 26 (2000): 171–77.
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1774), 4 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Creech; London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1778), I: 64–65.
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell, London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1788), 437.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Lewis A. Selby-Bigge, III edn. rev. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 183–204.
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (I edn. 1759; VI edn. 1790), ed. David D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 136–37; 82–83.
On these aspects: Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996), 200–205.
Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1981), 17–21, 31, 41–44, 100–103.
David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Sympathy and Approbation in Hume and Smith: A Solution to the Other Rational Species Problem,” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 331–349.
Hume, “Of the Origin of Government,”, Essays, 37–41; Reid, Active Powers of Man, 437ff. See Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, 210–13; Dario Castiglione, “Variazioni scozzesi su contratto ed opinione: Una teoria per non mescolarsi con i novatori,”, Passioni, interessi, convenzioni: Discussioni settecentesche su virtù e civiltà, ed. Marco Geuna and Maria Luisa Pesante (Milan, Franco Angeli: 1997), 103–27.
John Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779).
William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1960), 254–55.
Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688. To which are subjoined, some Dissertations connected with the History of the Government, from the Revolution to the Present Time, ed. John Craig and James Mylne, 4 vols. (London: Mawman, 1803), IV: 291–93.
See Christopher J. Berry, The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1997), 23, 104–7, 129–31.
Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Ronald L. Meek, David D. Raphael, and Peter G. Stein (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1978), 192–93; Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 308, 316–19.
Hume, “Popolousness of Ancient Nations,”, Essays, 390, in footnote. See also Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Roy H. Campbell, Andrew S. Skinner, and William B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), II: 388; Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 227.
See Margaret Forbes, Beattie and His Friends (1904) (Altrincham: Stafford, 1990), 219–20, 234–35, 246–60;
Charles Duncan Rice, “Abolitionist and Abolitionism in Aberdeen: A Test Case for the Nineteenth-Century Anti-slavery Movement,” Northern Scotland 1 (1972): 64–87.
More recently: Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2006), 50–62, 74–78, 113–17.
On the parliamentary debate about abolitionism: Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 281–85.
Grayson M. Ditchfield, “Repeal, Abolition and Reform: A Study in the Interaction of Reforming Movements in the Parliament of 1790–6,”, Anti-slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 101–18; Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 131–60.
Norman S. Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 195–218.
David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 1–46.
Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 109–37.
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), part IV, 331ff.
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics, or the Science of Universals, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Balfour; London: Cadell, 1779–89; reprint Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), III (1784): 185, in footnote.
See Aaron Garrett, “Human Nature,”, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2006), 195–97.
Dunbar, “The Inequality among Mankind,” speech given on March 13, 1770: AUL, Ms 539.
Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind, 441. See Christopher J. Berry, “James Dunbar 1742–1798: A Study of His Thought and of His Contribution to and Place in the Scottish Enlightenment” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 1971).
Ibid., 409–10. On the Histoire des deux Indes, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2003), chap. 3.
AUL, Ms 3107/5/2/6; James Dunbar, Institutes of Moral Philosophy, ed. Hiroshi Mizuta (Tokyo: Hitotsubashi Daigaku, 1996), 39.
Ibid., 446–48. See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale: Yale U. P., 2004), 89–90, 108–10.
See Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1990).
Dalphy I. Fagerstrom, “Scottish Opinion and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 11 (1954): 252–75.
John G. A. Pocock, “Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton,”, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1985), 125–41.
Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1985), 262–76.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992) (New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2005), 132ff.
Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, II: 358–60 and 432–33. Kames sent a “Plan of consolidation and union by fair and equal representation” to Benjamin Franklin, on which the American agreed, in a letter that never reached the Scottish judge. See William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 76, 123.
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807), II: 75ff.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, II: 625–26; Smith, “Thoughts on the State of the Contest with America” (February 1778), in Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest C. Mossner and Ian S. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 377–85; Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, II: 269–70.
See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2000), 70–198.
Guido Abbattista, Commercio, colonie e impero alla vigilia della Rivoluzione americana (Florence: Olschki, 1990), 45–108.
Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 35–71.
James Dunbar, De Primordiis Civitatum oratio in qua agitur de Bello Civili inter M. Britanniam et Colonias nunc flagrante (London: T. Cadell, 1779).
Christopher J. Berry, “James Dunbar and the American War of Independence,” Aberdeen University Review 45 (1974): 255–66.
Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247–64.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
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Sebastiani, S. (2013). Universal Prerogatives of Humankind. In: The Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137069795_5
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