Charting Time While Visualising Race: How History Became Entwined with Empire and Colonisation in Scotland’s Enlightenment

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”.