William Guthrie's geographical grammar , the Scottish enlightenment and the politics of British geography

Abstract

This paper analyses William Guthrie's best‐selling Geographical Grammar (1770). Guthrie's text is shown to be far more than mere hackwork, as it introduced into British geographical discourse key themes from the Scottish Enlightenment, most importantly stadial theories of social development. Guthrie's intellectual positioning as a Scot led him to question the Anglocentric and Anglican political and religious assumptions which had pervaded geographical texts by seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century English geographers. The Geographical Grammar, then, amounted to a significant intervention in the politics of British geography from a Scottish perspective.

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