ABSTRACT:
The second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in Scotland between 1778 and 1784,
included an “Historical Chart” purporting to show “at one view” the “rise and progress of the Principal
States & Empires of the known World.” Appearing as it did toward the end of the eighteenth century,
the Chart was one of a range of similar graphic chronologies of human history which began to appear in European publications in these decades. What makes the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s chart notable was that it had been “Designed by Adam Ferguson” the famed “Professor of Moral Philosophy, in the University of Edinburgh.” I will argue in my presentation that Ferguson’s Chart deserves close attention.
What the Chart’s abbreviated, simplistic design accomplished was not simply to offer a chronology, but to produce (borrowing Bakhtin’s term) a chronotope, where time and space are superimposed upon one another. By making space and time visible as imperial and ethnic divisions among humanity, the Chart imprinted race onto the universal history of humanity, and made its dispensations in the modern world visible “at one view”.
Warmly welcome, everyone, to this morning’s seminar to be given by Bruce Buchan. Bruce is a fellow here at SCAS and he’s also a Professor of History at the school of humanities, languages and social science at Griffith University. And he’s going to talk on “Charting Time While Visualizing Race:
How History Became Entwined with Empire and Colonization in Scotland’s Enlightenment.” We are very happy to have Bruce here for this semester, he traveled far to come here. We’re very grateful. And he was in many other places before coming to Uppsala and Sweden. He’s been
Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence in 2021. He was Invited Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in the spring of 2017, and he is, among other places,
Also a frequent visitor to Linnaeus University here in Sweden. As a researcher he’s an intellectual historian whose work traces the histories of European ideas through the experience of Empire and colonization since the early modern period, and with a particular focus on the era of
Scotland’s Enlightenment. A guiding thread in his research is to seek an understanding of concepts by bringing different fields of historical inquiry into productive conversation. Most notably colonial history, histories of sound and noise, the history of science and medicine and
The history of political and social thought. And he has published extensively on these topics. His publications include the book “Empire of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government” published in 2008, and “An Intellectual History of Political Corruption”
That he wrote with Lisa Hill and it appeared in 2014, and the co-edited volumes “Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700-1850” and this appeared in 2019, and “Piracy in World History” appearing in 2021, which is also available in Open Access. Bruce is no stranger to Uppsala and
Uppsala University. He has a long-standing collaboration with Associate Professor Linda Andersson Burnett here at Uppsala University, I believe in the Department of History of Ideas and Science, and they work together on a project that reconceptualizes the early history of the concept
Of race in Scottish enlightenment thought, and they analyze its circulation through a variety of global and colonial settings. And this research has also been widely published in, for example, The Modern Intellectual History, History of the Human Sciences, Intellectual History Review,
Global Intellectual History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, and it will culminate in a jointly authored monograph called “Raising Humanity: Education, Empire and Ethnography in Scotland’s Global Enlightenment”. This will, I believe, appear with Yale University Press. And while he is in
Residence here at SCAS, he will be doing research on how ideas of race framed the conceptualization of historical time in Scottish enlightenment thought. And this, I would like to underline, is a very timely and important topic and Bruce’s research will thus make an important contribution
To the history of enlightenment thought and to scientific racism. Very welcome. Well, thank you. Thank you very much Christina and thanks to the Swedish Collegium for inviting me here to take up this fellowship. It’s a great privilege to be here, to have this opportunity to learn from so many different scholars working across
Different disciplines and fields of knowledge. And I’m grateful for all the support that I’ve received in getting established and getting over jet lag over the last couple of weeks. And of course I’m grateful to you all for being here today. I realized that for some of you this is
Going to be your first and probably only encounter with Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment, so it’s my hope that in what follows I’ll be able to give you enough context and enough variety to make your encounter worthwhile. The second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which
Was published in Scotland between 1778 and 1784, included a historical chart purporting to show, at one view, the rise and progress of the principal states and empires of the known world. Appearing, as it did, toward the end of the 18th century, the chart was one of a wide range of
Similar graphic chronologies of human history which began to appear in European publications in these decades. What makes the Encyclopedia Britannica chart notable is, as you can see from the bottom, highlighted here, the bottom of the chart, is that it was said to have
Been designed by Adam Ferguson, the Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Though there’s no definitive evidence, aside from this byline, that Ferguson did in fact design this chart, and though it seems a rather flimsy looking piece of work, almost empty of
Historical detail, I’ll contend here that the chart deserves closer attention, not least because it condenses and makes visible the deepening imprint of Empire, colonization and race in the development of European and Scottish Enlightenment thought on the cusp of the 19th century. The
Accomplishment of the abbreviated, simplistic design of Ferguson’s chart was not only to offer a chronology but to produce, using Bakhtin’s term, a chronotope where time and space are superimposed upon one another. The passage of time was rendered visible on the chart as spatially adjacent, or
Geographically entangled histories, of nations and peoples from the biblical flood to about 1800 A.D. The accompanying note at the bottom of the chart explained that the vertical columns of the chart are intended to be read as geographical divisions evident throughout human history. In that way, the
Note continued, space is here employed to represent time. By making space and time visible as imperial and ethnic divisions among humanity, the chart imprinted race onto the universal history of humanity. For that reason, I argue that we should consider it unequivocally to be the work of Adam
Ferguson, as, indeed, does another curious feature of the chart that echoes Ferguson’s part in one of the greatest literary frauds of all time. I’ll get to that later. At the time he designed his chart, Adam Ferguson was nearing the end of a storied career as a respected scholar, a popular teacher,
Successful writer, a former military chaplain and, briefly, a colonial diplomat. Yet it was as a professor at Scotland’s leading University, Edinburgh, that most contemporaries would have known him, specifically as the holder of the Chair of Moral Philosophy which he occupied
From 1764 till his retirement in 1785. A few years after retirement, he had this portrait painted by Henry Raeburn. Here we see him soberly dressed, seated before a table, bearing several of his publications that won him fame across Europe and beyond. The most prominent among them, however, are
Two enormously thick light-colored volumes. These are his manuscript lecture notes from his moral philosophy course. You might just be able to make out the title on the spine. They contained the full series of his handwritten lectures for each year’s course between about 1774 and
1785. These notes still exist in the archives of the University of Edinburgh. An incredibly rare and, until recently, almost completely neglected resource for understanding how he thought, what he taught and, as we see here, how he wanted to be seen by posterity. Ferguson’s lectures make plain
His contribution to a wider turn, in the later decades of the 18th century and in Scotland in particular, toward the idea of human racial variation and hierarchy. As Scots intellectuals used the term then, race lacked the biological rigidity and determinism of later definitions. Race, in the
18th century, denoted both physical and cultural characteristics, and each were malleable across time. All this can be seen in Ferguson’s lectures, yet we can also detect in them clear evidence of a turn toward using the term “race” in a hierarchical sense, that linked the ascendancy of the “European
Race”, as he described it, with their ability to colonize. To begin, I think it’s worth saying a few words about Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment before introducing the second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So, over the last few decades the historiography of Europe’s
Enlightenment has been thoroughly fractured by a range of new interpretations that have sought to complicate and to diversify the variety of intellectual trends and voices that contributed to the intellectual and political ferment across the 18th century. One of the most important of these
New perspectives has been a move away from an insistence that there was a Pan-European singular enlightenment, “The Enlightenment”, toward an emphasis on distinct and often divergent national and sub-national enlightenments. Among the most distinctive and influential of these is, what is often referred
To as, the Scottish enlightenment. It sprang from a peculiarly Scottish experience of national division between a rapidly industrializing, largely Protestant, increasingly anglo-oriented south, and a more traditional, predominantly Catholic and gaelic speaking north, or Highlands. As Scotland became ever more integrated into the structures of the British State and Empire after 1750, this
Geographical tension, on which were mapped a multitude of economic and political, social and cultural divergences, spurred intellectuals working at, or close to, its remarkably open universities, and predominantly Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, to theorize this condition of a seeming suspension between an archaic past and a bustling, transformative and apparently unstoppable future.
It resulted in a vibrant, often convivial, but also frequently contentious intellectual atmosphere centered on figures such as Ferguson who were genuinely public intellectuals. They were often aspiring and successful writers, well-connected and savvy operators within the networks of social and political patronage, and in many cases were also professors at Scotland’s universities, teaching
Classes of students each year in philosophy or in jurisprudence, in medicine, in chemistry, history, rhetoric or anatomy. Yet, whatever other accomplishments one associates with the Scottish enlightenment, arguably its greatest claim to fame rested on the articulation of what Scotland’s
Greatest philosopher at the time, David Hume, called “the science of man.” The Scottish science of man was premised on the assumption that Hume himself laid out; that all human beings were possessed of the same intellectual, rational and emotional capacities, which were excited and applied in
Different ways in response to the circumstances of climate and geography, history and culture. This was the dynamic force that drove societies across time. Leading Hume, Ferguson and others to conceptualize the historical progress of all human societies advancing through exactly the same stages, though at different rates, from supposedly primitive savagery toward
Advanced civilization. This framework of stadial history provided a kind of master narrative that informed the teaching of just about every field of knowledge and especially moral philosophy. But it was to go on to shape the development of other fields, such as anthropology and ethnology,
And, of course, stadial assumptions were to have a very wide impact on the articulation of colonial policy and law. The idea of a universally shared humanity premised on common psychological, intellectual and emotional capacities, was to have a very positive influence on the articulation of
Abolitionist arguments against slavery, by Olaudah Equiano for example, and on the writing of early feminist texts by Catherine McAuley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Though this largely positive story is undeniable, there is another history, as I’ll explain here today, that has been very largely
Excised from the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment till comparatively recently. To get to grits with this other story, we need to return to stadial history as Ferguson conceptualized it. Stadial history was the key with which Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Ferguson, believed
They could unlock the historical past and begin more confidently to anticipate its future. Stadialism made history into a rational inquiry because the same causes and consequences were common to all human societies. Scottish stadial history was both secular, in that it did not rely on divine
Intervention in human affairs, and universal, in that each people were thought to traverse the exact same stages of history from ancient savagery to modern civilization at their own rates of progress. Hence, the spatial spread of peoples across the globe was simultaneously
Interpreted temporally as stages to be cataloged and classified as either savage or civilized or somewhere between them along a universal scale of human progress. Ferguson adapted and applied this stadial framework in his most famous book, “An Essay on the History of Civil Society”, which was
Published in 1767 and became a hugely popular text. Not only because it explained the stadial progress of humanity from ancient savagery, but also because it warned of the corruption and decay of modern civilization. This tension, in his thought, owes something to Ferguson’s
Unique background as the only one among Scotland’s leading Enlightenment intellectuals to have been born and raised in the gaelic speaking Highlands, then regarded by most Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals as a domain of backwardness and of near savagery. For Ferguson, however,
The Highlands were also home. What’s more, the highlands were the scene of his first career as a regimental chaplain in the black watch, in which his task was to minister to the troops and maintain their morale in battle in their own Gaelic language. The uniquely Scottish experience
Of one nation divided mapped the geographic and linguistic divide between Highlands and Lowlands as a temporal disjunction between the presumed backwardness of the Gaelic speaking Highlands and the assumed modernity of the prosperous Anglo-centric Lowlands. For Scots such as Ferguson,
Stadial history was not just a convenient theory, it was also a reality lived in the tension between sentimental longings for a savage but noble past and stadial anticipations of a civilized modernity. One of the distinctive features of Ferguson’s thought was the argument that the benefits
Of modern civilization had to be secured and could only be secured by integrating them with the most valuable of archaic moral qualities. Especially, he argued, the military virtues he associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans and with his own Highlands. This tension can be found throughout his
Work. In his essay on the history of civil society, in his later three volume history of Rome, and in his teaching of moral philosophy, on which I’d now like to focus. Ferguson’s moral philosophy lectures have been a special study of mine for a few years now, and along with my colleague Professor
Silvia Sebastiani we’ve presented a new reading of Ferguson’s presentation of race in the lectures that was published in the Journal for the History of Ideas in 2021. What his lecture notes reveal, we argue, is a record of engagement with the concept of race and the fate of Empire,
Themes to which he was drawn intellectually and professionally between about 1775 and 1785. In those years, he was chosen as a secretary to the Carlisle Commission which was sent to Philadelphia to negotiate an end to the hostilities between the Empire and its then rebellious 13 American
Colonies. In those years also, he worked on his three volume “History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic”, published in 1783. Between each of these events he produced his historical chart for the second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The EB itself
Started life in 1768 as a relatively modest affair of three volumes, the work of one man. But the second edition stretched to an incredible 10 volumes, which was the work of another single author. Both the first and second editions of the EB were written by those connected to, but on the
Fringes of, the University of Edinburgh. Its authors were not salaried professors, but were conversant with scholarly debates going on within the institution and at others across the country. The EB thus tended to reflect the authority of scholarly knowledge and was intended to
Be a public facing expression of the intellectual ambition of Scotland’s scholarly Enlightenment, aimed at fueling optimism in the innovations and the achievements of a distinctly British civilization. The second enlarged edition of the EB was published by subscription and printed in
Installments, which could be subsequently bound at the owner’s expense, and to this day it remains the rarest of all the additions of the EB. Now, as I mentioned before, nothing is known of the circumstances of Ferguson’s commission to design his historical chart, which appeared along with an
Extensive entry on the term “History” in volume five of the EB which was published in 1780. The only scholar to have written on the chart is Silvia Sebastiani and she speculates that it may have started out as a teaching aid for his classes in moral philosophy. This is certainly
Possible, but we don’t know for sure. What we can say with some confidence though, is that Ferguson’s choices in designing it are characteristic of his thought expressed in his moral philosophy lectures, in his History of Rome and especially after his brief experience in America. Visually,
Ferguson’s chart looks pretty conventional in its presentation of time, according to an explicitly biblical dispensation. The key events of the past are recorded in columns corresponding to, what he considered, the most influential nations of Europe and beyond. Nonetheless, some of Ferguson’s design
Choices do appear to be distinctive. The most obvious of these is that, in Ferguson’s chart, time descends as a stream from above that flows down from the divine creation of humanity, through a graphically condensed but boldly advertised “period of 1656 years before the flood”, as you
Can see on this slide. The structure visually represents time flowing gravitationally like water over a vast cataract, which tumbles chaotically into the crowded spray of more recent history at the bottom of the chart. The visual effect is to suggest that historical events are beginning
To unfold more rapidly as we approach modernity at the foot of the chart. The series of perpendicular columns, 12 in number, into which the history of humanity is divided, are matched by the recording of centuries, “Anno Mundi” and “Anno Domini”, in scales along either side of the chart.
This prioritization of a biblical temporal dispensation was consistent with Ferguson’s fame as a moral philosopher, which rested on his integration of biblical orthodoxies with the dynamics of historical progress that reached beyond revealed religion toward the natural history of humanity. He assumed that his historical vision was universal in
Scope, encompassing not just the development of Europe but of the human species as a whole. Other previous charts also sought to present a universal view by offering a crowded field of historical events and personages named on their charts. Ferguson’s chart, by contrast, had
A much simpler and more abbreviated design. In his explanatory note, Ferguson wrote that his aim was not to provide a comprehensive chronology, as the detail would crowd the clearness and the simplicity of taking the principle events and nations at one view. This abbreviated design had
The advantage that the parts of the same Empire, as Ferguson wrote, could be placed together, allowing the chronological and the geographical spread of influence to be represented by solid patches of color across adjacent columns rather than being broken up into separate streams of time. In common
With other historical charts, Ferguson’s gave primary historical agency to the peoples of Europe, as you can see on this slide. Along the top of his chart are the names of Germany, British Islands, which is broken into three smaller columns for Scotland, Ireland
And England. Then there’s Gaul or France, Italy, Spain and Greece. Grouped in one final column on the far right are Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Unusually, Ferguson also included two empires in his division, those of Carthage and Egypt, each with their own columns. And then the remaining three
Columns were continental in scope; Asia, Africa and America. Each of the columns were shaded with distinct colors to symbolize the historical and geographical influence of particular Nations or Empires represented by suedes of color that reach into and across other columns.
Sometimes columns are divided by curved or tapering lines to suggest a narrow or a widening influence, a waxing or a waning of geographical sway. The shading allowed the origins and termini of particular Empires to be pinpointed. More importantly, it allowed for the
Spread or extent of Empire to be visually represented. The chart is dominated by the presence of the Roman Empire, which is here denominated by this kind of khaki green color. You can see that Rome’s Empire is visualized as beginning narrowly in the Italy column around
748 A.M., much as Ferguson described it in his “History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic”. From this narrow and inauspicious beginning Rome’s Empire reaches across Ferguson’s historical chart to a wide variety of neighboring columns. The visually dominant presence of Rome on
The chart was a representation of what Ferguson described in his history of Rome as “the steps by which the Romans ascended to Empire”. Rome similarly occupies almost the longest duration of any Empire or Nation on the chart. Rome’s decline was marked by the corresponding rise of Islam
Which was emphasized on Ferguson’s chart by the mention of Caliphs, Tamerlane or Moguls and Ottoman Empire. The complicated intersection of, and mixing between, columns visually exemplified the ubiquity of change throughout time, or in Ferguson’s terminology; revolutions in the history of
The world. The accompanying article on history in the EB attributed historical change to the mutual action of two main causes. The interconnection between nations and competition between them driven by the different characters of the people and their different genius or dispositions. History
Was understood as the process by which the physical situation of peoples, vis-à-vis one another, provides the canvas on which their innate genius and national character is displayed. In conquests, empires, wars, religions or the manifold accomplishments of arts and science, letters and philosophy. The division of humanity into separate columns in Ferguson’s chart shows
Some columns with a complete absence of any history, others with a marked continuity, while yet more are overwritten by a succession of peoples and empires suggesting that some nations pass out of history’s record all together by blending with others. Here, a crucial feature
Of Ferguson’s idea of history asserts itself; that the complicated interplay between natural genius and physical circumstances and, especially for Ferguson, climate, favored the peoples of Europe and the empire of the Romans above all others. As he described it in his history of the Roman
Republic: “Rome’s Empire seemed to comprehend within itself all the most favorable parts of the Earth, at least”, Ferguson went on, “those parts on which the human species, whether by the effects of climate or the qualities of the race have in respect of ingenuity and courage, possessed a distinguished
Superiority.” Race, as I’ve said before, in the 18th century was understood as a malleable product of the interplay between physical circumstances and the moral or social qualities of peoples. This was how Ferguson comprehended the term and integrated it into his
Teaching of moral philosophy. In 18th century Scotland, moral philosophy stood at the nexus of the narrative structure of human history and what was then construed as the scientific methods of natural history. Natural history can be understood as a scientific endeavor to explain
The natural world by means of descriptive and comparative analyses, along with taxonomies aimed at providing accurate classifications of all natural phenomena and species. Ferguson harnessed these methods of natural history in order to comprehend the physical structure and the natural capacities of human beings, but he also drew on his understanding of stadial
History to instruct his students on how human beings were fitted and equipped by nature for moral and historical progress from animality toward flourishing civilization. Inherent in that process, he argued, was the diversification of the species of humanity into distinct races. Now,
Ferguson’s earliest extant lecture notes from the mid 1770s indicate that, initially, he simply taught his students to reflect on the problem, as he put it, of the varieties of the human race. This variety was reflected in differences in the temperament and genius of different races, and in their
Shared manners or morals or habits, but also in common physical features such as complexion and stature. All of these varietal differences, or inequalities as Ferguson described them, were ultimately attributable to the effects of climate on the human form, on individual temperaments and
On collective ways of life over very long periods of time. Yet, he still argued that the principal honors, as he put it, the greatest distinctions of the human species were only attainable in what he described as the temperate zone between climatic extremes. In the torrid zone adjacent to the equator
Or in the frigid polar regions the active range of the human soul, Ferguson wrote, was unable to fully develop. And yet despite that, he viewed the human species as universally adaptable thanks to the progressive nature of our species. Our problem solving abilities, our use of reason and ingenuity.
This was the secret of humanity’s success in adapting themselves to all environments and climates across the globe. It was not that he regarded humans as a species set apart from nature, but rather fitted by nature for universal progress and mastery over nature
But at different rates and scales according to the physical circumstances, climates and geographies inhabited by each nation or race. Although he considered racial variations were connected with climate, Ferguson struggled to explain it. Climate was not destiny, as the recent history
Of Europe’s global colonization indicated, and he used this example in his lectures to argue that Europeans had been able to adapt to, and therefore to colonize, in both tropical and polar regions. As Ferguson saw it, this was a demonstration of what he was to refer to in later lectures as
The “superiority”, his term, of the European race. Their supposed superiority was both physical and intellectual, moral as well as anatomical. This explicitly hierarchical formulation seemed to emerge and to sharpen in Ferguson’s lectures over the course of years, but especially after
His absence from the University in 1778 and 1779 while he served on the Carlisle Commission. After this time, Ferguson began to qualify his account of the universal adaptability and ingenuity of humanity by reference to a concept of race that began to incorporate the idea of inherited
Characteristics. This first becomes apparent after 1779 when he explicitly recommends, for the first time, taxonomies of racial variation. This not only enabled Ferguson to emphasize starker differences between the races, but to describe these as both inherited and as hierarchical distinctions. In
Particular, he presented for his students an image of the European race, as he described it, as the standard to which we must refer in describing all the other races in both human beauty and intellectual accomplishment. As Ferguson now presented it, the appearance of the geographic
Spread of the European race was explicitly tied to the fate of empires and colonization. And here I want to juxtapose a quotation from Ferguson’s lectures from 1780 with a map of the Roman Empire that you can see on this slide, that appeared in the first volume of his history of Rome’s Empire
Which was published in 1783. “From Scandinavia to the Senegal”, he declared to his students, “from the Atlantic to the Indus, with all the colonies that have gone out from this extensive tract, consisting of many nations and tongues that have changed within the compass of history.
Although the state of nations and the seats of empire have changed and the fortunes of men have fluctuated, here the species has appeared with the greatest advantage.” Here Ferguson designated the home range of what he called “the European race”. And, as he represented it on this map, that
Home range corresponded almost directly with a supposedly temperate climate and with the extent of Rome’s colonizing and civilizing influence. It was here, Ferguson supposed, that humanity had attained its greatest distinction, not just in physical features but in the use of reason. It’s therefore
Especially telling that Ferguson’s historical chart gives such a decisive role to the European nations. The Egypt and Asia columns show a very venerable ancient history, but in each case the history of those regions is subsumed by later conquests. But a more telling sign of Ferguson’s
Geographical chauvinism is that both the Africa and America columns on his chart remain entirely blank until around the year 1500, as you can see on this slide. In each case, the commencement of historical significance begins with a European imperial presence. In the America column in
Particular, history unambiguously begins with the insertion of a single name on the chart; Columbus. The explicit message of the abrupt commencement of African and American history on Ferguson’s chart around 1500 reinforced the widespread assumption in European Enlightenment thought that this was a
Universal turning point, or watershed, at which point the parochial history of Europe becomes genuinely world history. The importance of that Watershed in Ferguson’s thought is that Europe was not only where the human race had attained its principal honors, as he put it, but that the
European race, as he also described it, were now the drivers of world history, in command of the further development of the human species by means of empire and colonization. After 1779 Ferguson taught his students that, although humans were universally adaptable in different climates, their capacity to
Thrive depended on the degree to which they could secure their communities through colonization. What Ferguson called “the security of settlements” involved, in his words, the formation and settlement of families that underlay the rate of propagation or reproduction of the human species. Ferguson’s
Use of “settlement” in his lectures after 1779 was echoed in his history of Rome, where the same term, “settlements”, denoted the process by which the empire spread by means not just of conquest, but the consolidation of urban communities, the spread of agriculture and the growth of
Population. That association between historical progress of the European race and the security of their settlements appeared to arise first in his lectures after 1779. And one reason why, I want to suggest, is that Ferguson’s brief foray into colonial military policy in 1778 and 1779, when he
Was selected as secretary to the Carlisle Commission, sent across the Atlantic to America, exercised a decisive influence. Now, in retrospect today, the commission can only be seen as a monumental farse. The commission’s aim was to negotiate a return of the colonies, then in rebellion, to the British
Imperial fold. Therefore, the commissioners were explicitly instructed not to recognize any claim to American independence. The American Congress for its part, however, refused to negotiate with any representatives who did not first concede that very fact; America’s independence from Britain’s Empire. So, faced with this embarrassing impass, the commissioners, through their secretary
Ferguson, rapidly made things worse by seeking to force the hand of the Americans to come to the negotiating table. And this they did by issuing a proclamation, bearing Ferguson’s signature as the commission secretary, threatening the extremes of war would be unleashed on the civilian population
Of America if they did not open negotiations forthwith. So, this proclamation, needless to say, went down like a lead balloon. But I think Ferguson played a key role in developing it. As a former military chaplain, known to many Scots officers then serving in America, Ferguson was able
To serve as a conduit for military intelligence on the conduct of the war to the commissioners. And it’s likely that he played this role, not only because he dined with officers of his former regiment, which he did, but because he was very closely connected to one particular Scots
Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Ferguson who, though sharing the same surname, was not related to Adam Ferguson. And here I should just explain that while the commissioners were cooling their heels in New York in late 1778, Patrick Ferguson was setting up his own independent command in
The Backwoods of North Carolina. Patrick commanded a militia of colonial guerillas and he led them in a nasty little campaign of small skirmishes, burning of farms and homesteads and other bitter reprisals against the supporters of independence. Patrick and Adam, who were closely tied by bonds
Of friendship and social obligation, exchanged a number of letters in 1778 and 1779 while Patrick was preparing his troops for this vicious warfare. At this time, Patrick distinguished himself as the chief proponent of the strategic purpose behind this guerilla warfare: To deplete the sentiment
For independence among the southern colonies by drastically escalating the personal costs to the civilian population. In other words, Ferguson saw firsthand – indeed he was intimately connected to – a military strategy aimed at destroying the security of settlements in America that he
Identified in his lectures as an integral feature of the historical and moral progress of the human species. He returned to Britain, I suggest, with a new appreciation not just for the historical role of colonial settlement but for its fragility as well. This was a lesson he drew
In an abstract sense from the historical study of Rome, but directly from colonial military strategy in America. Now, it might seem extraordinary that a moral philosopher like Adam Ferguson could see the brutality of irregular warfare waged by his friend Patrick Ferguson as being morally defensible, but
There was another motivation at work here. Long years after Adam Ferguson’s retirement from public life, and many years after Patrick Ferguson’s death in battle in 1780, the former professor of moral philosophy wrote his final text. That text, published posthumously in 1817, was a short
Biography of his long dead friend Patrick Ferguson. Adam’s biography celebrated his late friend’s unconventional waging of war in America as a vibrant affirmation of what he saw as a Scottish genius for heroic warfare. Patrick Ferguson was lionized as the very embodiment of Scottish
Warrior virtues, and it is this sentimental attachment to a tradition of Scots warriors that brings me to the final element of Ferguson’s chart that I’d like to comment on before finishing, and here is where we enter the realms of literary fraud. Now, as you can see on this slide, on the
Far left of Ferguson’s chart are the yellow and blue columns representing Ireland and Scotland. The Irish were given the distinction on the chart of a genuine antiquity, only preceded by the Egyptians, the Assyrians and the archaic Greeks. The Scots were depicted as a much younger nation,
Yet still originating before Rome’s conquest of Carthage. These anciently twinned Gaelic nations symbolized long preserved origins and independence until both were absorbed into the British Islands column at a comparatively recent date. The idea of long preserved Gaelic antiquity was close to
The heart of the Scottish Enlightenment. Not just as a seemingly rational historical explanation for the supposed backwardness of the Highlands, but also as a seat for a uniquely Scottish sentimentalism for a primitive but heroic past. It was that supposedly heroic
Past that takes us to Ferguson’s role in one of the greatest literary scandals of his age and perhaps of all time: The Poems of Ossian. The poems were sensationally published in the early 1760s by a young Highlander by the name of James Macpherson who was well known to Adam Ferguson. The
Poems themselves were said to be fragments of a long lost cycle of orally transmitted Gaelic epics that Macpherson pieced together from the few remaining Highland bards. The poems were homeric in style and scope, supposedly the work of a blind third century Scottish bard called Ossian. The poems
Celebrated the heroic doings of sentimental Gaelic warriors, animated by intense feelings of honor and pride and chivalry, who battled against all odds to maintain the independence of Irish and Scottish tribes against rather mysterious, possibly Roman, invaders. Publication of the poems rapidly became a Europe-wide phenomenon. Diderot and Jefferson admired them, Voltaire satirized them,
They were translated into French, Italian, German, Danish and other languages, Napoleon was said to have carried Ossian on his campaigns, and a king of Sweden was named for one of the main characters in the poems. To Scots such as Ferguson, the poems of Ossian were a dramatic affirmation of a long
Tradition of Highland military virtues. For that reason, Ferguson became one of the great public champions of the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian even after most observers concluded that there was no Ossian. Indeed, the poems were an elaborate, even a brilliant, literary fake. By the
Time of the chart’s publication in 1780, Ferguson was still a champion of Ossian’s authenticity as we have seen so fancifully Illustrated on his chart. The clear implication of the very long Ireland and Scotland columns on Ferguson’s chart is that they not only symbolize Gaelic antiquity
But also revealed the historical role of race as a lineage based on common descent, national character or, in Ferguson’s terminology, national genius. The Highlanders were literally a race apart. So to conclude then. It was this concern to substantiate race and to explain racial variations that became
A distinguishing feature of Scottish thought from the 1770s as campaigns against slavery gathered momentum in Scotland and elsewhere. This, indeed, is the subject of my forthcoming book with Associate Professor Linda Andersson Burnett. Our book examines the context of the emergence of race
In Scottish thought, not just in Scotland but in an extremely wide variety of global and colonial settings. Central to this spread of Scottish ideas was the growing importance of race as a subject of both scholarly debate and curricular at the University of Edinburgh. The Encyclopedia
Britannica was a primary means for communicating these learned and scholarly speculations on the global and historical significance of race to a curious British audience beyond the universities. So it is especially significant that, in designing his chart for that public readership, Ferguson
Explicitly prioritized the racial and historical agency of Scots and Europeans more generally. The triumph of Scottish stadial historical thinking in Scotland’s Enlightenment did not necessarily lead to an inevitable drift toward modern racism, but it did cement racial hierarchy as a material
Factor in the natural history of humanity and the civil history of peoples and nations across the globe. Ferguson never admitted any contradiction between supposing humans were all of one species but also divided into races exhibiting marks of superior or inferior genius due primarily to
Climate. For Ferguson, the anatomical markers of race coincided with the geographical distribution among nations and with the historical borders separating peoples into varying degrees of savagery, barbarism or civilization. As Ferguson’s historical chart illustrated, America and Africa were now subject to the colonial and imperial presence of the European race and the security
Of their settlements. Ferguson’s use of that phrase in the final series of moral philosophy lectures he delivered after his brief involvement in colonial policy in America is suggestive of an advocacy for Britain’s right to forge, as he put it, new settlements, new plantations, new conquests.
This was the crucial implication of his historical chart and also of the history of Rome’s success in doing just the same. Ferguson’s chart was literally a palimpsest. It was inscribed and then reinscribed with multiple layers of thought and sentiment, pedagogy and politics, fact and fiction. We can use use it to
Unravel these tangled schemes, but we can also use it to gauge the role it played in the wider story of the colonial and racial dispensations that Europeans were asserting over places, locations and peoples across the globe. Integral to the assertion of those dispensations was the supposition
That they were merely a fact of world history, derived from the passage of historical time. As shown so vividly on Ferguson’s chart, history’s relentless cascade into modernity left little doubt that the civilization of the world was the colonial destiny of the European race. Thank you.