Philosophical history at the cusp of globalization: Scottish enlightenment reflections on colonial Spanish America

Abstract

This article contributes to the evaluation of how historical philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment reflected upon incipient processes and forces of globalization. Drawing upon assessments of colonial Spanish America by late eighteenth-century Scottish philosophical historians, including William Robertson, Lord Kames, John Millar, Adam Smith and David Hume, the article considers the challenges Enlightenment-era thinkers encountered in balancing universal accounts of mankind with extensive human difference in a context particularly defined by European-managed trade and migration flows. By emphasizing the challenges that individual philosophical historians confronted in narrating processes of cultural and national change in the Americas during the early modern period, this article reveals a core tension between two basic components of Enlightenment-era historiography: national character and progress.