‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract

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 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.