The book explores the intellectual and colonial history of race in Scottish Enlightenment thought in the momentous decades between the 1750s and 1820s. Not only were these crucial years in the consolidation and spread of Enlightenment science and ideas, this was also an era of imperial and colonial expansion, enslavement and slave trading, and unprecedented flows of population worldwide. By placing the formation and impact of ideas against this global and colonial backdrop, the authors offer a new history of the widespread influence of the Scottish Enlightenment by focusing attention of a wide array of lesser-known travellers educated at the University of Edinburgh.

In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical students from Edinburgh construed humanity as a subject of both intellectual curiosity and colonial interest. They drew on a shared educational background, blending medicine with natural history and moral philosophy, in a range of encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe whom they began to classify as races. Focusing on a surprising number of these understudied students, this book reveals the gradual predominance of race in Scottish Enlightenment thought.

Teaching provided a toolbox of concepts and theories for students who went on to careers as military and naval surgeons, colonial administrators, and natural historians. While some, such as Mungo Park—who traveled in Africa—are well known, many others such as the long-term residents in the Russian Empire, Matthew Guthrie and his wife, Maria Guthrie, or the Caribbean botanist Alexander Anderson are less remembered. Among this group were those such as the Pacific traveler Archibald Menzies and the circumnavigator of Australia, Robert Brown, who are known primarily as botanists rather than as ethnographers. Together they formed a global network of colonial travelers and natural historians sharing a common educational background and a growing interest in race.

Linda Andersson Burnett is a Senior Lecturer and Wallenberg Academy Fellow in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University.

Bruce Buchan is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University. He was a SCAS Fellow in the spring of 2024.