How colonialism shaped the Scottish Enlightenment’s conception of race and humanity

In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical students from the University of 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.

We will also outline our next project which is entitled Science by Instruction: Humanity, Natural History, and Colonisation 1750-1850. Our next book will explain why and how a global trade in skulls and body parts became part of a pan-European and American scientific practice.

Linda Andersson Burnett is a Senior Lecturer and Wallenberg Academy Fellow in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. She is the principal investigator of the Instructing Natural History: Nature, People, Empire programme and convenes three externally-funded projects: Early Citizen Science, Women Collectors of Natural History and together with Bruce Buchan Collecting Humanity.  Andersson Burnett is a member of the Swedish Young Academy and holds a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh. She has published numerous articles on colonial science, natural history travel, ethnographic studies and collecting, and has co-edited special issues of Scandinavian Studies (91:1-2, 2019), History of the Human Sciences (32:4, 2019), Global Intellectual History (8:4, 2023) and The British Journal for the History of Science (Forthcoming, 2026).

Bruce Buchan is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University. His research traces histories of European ideas, focussing on the era of Scotland’s Enlightenment. In recent years he has been awarded visiting appointments at the University of Copenhagen (2016) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (2017), was named a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute (2020), and awarded a visiting fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (2024). His publications include: Empire of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government (2008), An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (with Lisa Hill, 2014), and the co-edited volumes: Sound, Space, and Civility in the British World, 1700-1850 (2019), and Piracy in World History (2021).

For the Zoom link, please email us on instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se