Travels in Space and Time: Progress, War, and the Historical Mobilities of Scotland’s Enlightenment

Abstract

In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) voyaged across space and time. Drawing on ancient fable and contemporary colonial testimony, Ferguson sought to explain the moral implications of historical progress. Although embedded in human nature, progress was subject to almost infinite variation depending on geographical and environmental circumstances. Humanity therefore, was a vast tableau of different stages of human progress, each one in the course of their own development, that would unfold according to the same universal scheme of development. Hence as Ferguson saw it, to travel across the globe and encounter other nations and peoples deemed more or less civilised, was to travel simultaneously in space and in time. What made Ferguson’s navigation of these voyages unique were the circumstances of his Highland origins, and his life-long interest in war. By considering these two aspects of Ferguson’s thought, I will argue that we should regard Ferguson’s Essay as an ‘avatar of Enlightenment’. Avatars of Enlightenment, I contend, embodied simultaneous mobility in space and time, making the global diversity of humanity comprehensible in a universally applicable scheme of historical progress from savagery to civilisation.