Abstract
According to Colin Kidd, Kames’s polygenist speculations, John Hunter’s study of physical anthropology, together with the racial geography of the historian and antiquarian John Pinkerton, “constituted the eighteenth-century Scottish legacy to nineteenth-century racism.”1 It is a claim that is hard to dispute; yet a number of specifications are required. Of the names mentioned by Kidd, there was, at least between the two historians Kames and Pinkerton, a profound divide in terms of intellectual perspectives, and of political and social contexts—although they published their works just a few years apart.
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Notes
Colin Kidd, “Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880,” The Scottish Historical Review LXXIV, 197 (1995): 45–68.
Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005), 79–167.
Voltaire derided Kames’s Elements of Criticism, which had criticized his Henriade, in the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, April 4, 1764. See Helen Whitcomb Randall, The Critical Theory of Lord Kames (Northampton: Department of Modern Languages of Smith College, 1944), 76.
Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 285–86.
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), 44, 148.
Arnaldo Momigliano, Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 3–45, 294–327.
Mark S. Phillips, “Reconsideration on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996).
David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754–62), ed. by William B. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), I: 2.
William Robertson, History of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1759), I: 1–2.
Robertson, History of America (1777), V edn., 3 vols. (London: W. Strahan, 1788), book IV, II: xvi–xvii.
Robertson, Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India; And the Progress of Trade with that Country prior to the Discovery of the Passage to it by the Cape of Good Hope. With an Appendix, containing Observations on the Civil Policy, the Law and Judicial Proceedings, the Arts, the Sciences and Religious Institutions of the Indians (London, 1791), 1–2. See Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2001), chap. 1.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997).
Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1931), ed. Johnson Kent Wright (Yale: Yale U. P., 2003).
Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,”, What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 382–98.
Se Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault-Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keit M. Baker and Peter H. Reill (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2001).
From a growing literature on counter-Enlightenment thought, see Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2001).
Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
For a feminist criticism: Naomi Schor, “French Feminism Is a Universalism,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7 (1995): 15–47.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 3.
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1994).
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask, Introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2003).
Carlo Ginzburg, “Tolleranza e commercio. Auerbach legge Voltaire,”, Il filo e le tracce. Vero, falso, finto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006), 112–37.
John Pinkerton, Ancient Scottish Poems, Never Before in Print. But Now Published from the MS., 2 vols. (London: C. Dilly, 1786), I: xxiii.
Pinkerton, Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths: Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (London: J. Nichols, 1787), 102.
Ibid., 17, 69. See also Pinkerton, An Enquiry into the History of Scotland. Preceding the Reign of Malcolm III or the Year 1056. Including the Authentic History of That Period, 2 vols. (London: John Nichols, for George Nicol, 1789).
See George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
John W. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian England,”, Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson, ed. Robert Robson (London: Bell, 1967), 180–204.
William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1998), 245.
See also Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Gibbon’s Last Project,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 355 (1997): 405–19.
Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689–1830 (Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 1994).
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1774), 4 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Creech; London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1778), book I, I: 460–61.
John Pinkerton, Modern Geography. A Description of the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Colonies; with the Oceans, Seas, and Isles; in all Parts of the World, 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan, 1802).
See Silvia Sebastiani, “Race and National Characters in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: The Polygenetic Discourses of Kames and Pinkerton,” Studi Settecenteschi 21 (2001): 265–81.
What Enlightenment thinking did not develop, instead, was a coherent politics designed to harmonize the world with the hierarchical theory of race. See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (1989), trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1993), 90–106.
Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), ed. René Pomeau, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1963), II: 379–80.
Miriam C. Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
Benjamin Smith Barton, “An essay toward a natural history of the North American Indians. Being an attempt to describe, and to investigate the causes of some of the varieties in figure, in complexion etc. among mankind,” (1788–90), Archives of the Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, XXIII, 1–17, esp. 11–13, 16.
Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To Which are Added, Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on the Original Diversity of Mankind. A New Edition with Some Additional Notes, by a Gentleman of the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: C. Elliot, 1788), 108, note h (emphasis in the original).
David Doig, Two Letters on the Savage State Addressed to the Late Lord Kaims (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792). Quoting Doig, Samuel Stanhope Smith developed a strong argument against the idea of a primordial savage stage in the greatly enlarged 1810 edition of his Essay, where he addressed the new challenges of racial classifications: see An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species … (New Brunswick: J. Simpson, 1810), 15–29.
Silvia Sebastiani, “Conjectural History vs. the Bible: Eighteenth-Century Scottish Historians and the Idea of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Storia della Storiografia 39 (2001): 39–50.
Sebastiani, “L’Amérique des Lumières et la hiérarchie des races. Disputes sur l’écriture de l’histoire dans l’Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1788),” Annales HSS 67 (2012): 327–61.
Beattie, “On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery.” I refer here to possible convergences between Aberdeen literati and the group contributing to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, on which more study is required. To date, only one book has been devoted to the eighteenth-century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: The Early Britannica. The Growth of an Outstanding Encyclopedia, ed. Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009).
John Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks: Or, An Enquiry into the Circumstances Which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members of Society, 3rd ed. corrected and enlarged (1779), in William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1960), 322.
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Sebastiani, S. (2013). Conclusion. In: The Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137069795_7
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