is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test is a useful exercise in opening up key themes in our book that connects the effervescent history of ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment during the middle to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to intensifying European colonial engagements across the globe. Ours is a different kind of history of ideas attuned to the resonance of concepts, and especially race, beyond the familiar canon of published works by leading intellectuals, and outside the lecture theatres where they were first imbibed. Page 99 of our book presents one such study of how Scottish Enlightenment ideas travelled, within the walls of the university and far beyond to the islands of the Pacific ocean.Learn more about Race and the Scottish Enlightenment at the Yale University Press website.
On page 99 we discuss the travels of a little-known naval surgeon and naturalist, William Anderson (1750-1778), with James Cook on two of his momentous expeditions to the Pacific between 1772 and 1780. What brought the two men together, and it seems Cook respected Anderson so much he made use of his journals to write up his own, was the nexus linking the study of medicine at the University of Edinburgh to the practice of natural history (the systematic observation of nature and humanity) aboard vessels of the Royal Navy, or in other imperial and colonial expeditions across the globe.
Our book traces a surprising number of lesser-known figures such as Anderson who exemplified these connections. What was particularly notable about this group of men was that they studied at one of the intellectual powerhouses of the Scottish Enlightenment, and in its famed medical school. At the University and in the city of Edinburgh itself, these students imbibed Enlightenment thought from many of its leading exponents (such as David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Alexander Monro, and others). Their education equipped them not just with medical and scientific knowledge, but also with ideas drawn from studying history, literary style, and moral philosophy. Anderson was no exception. On page 99 we explore his personal library which included key texts on anatomy and medical practice, as well as the latest French natural history, and an eclectic mix of Scottish thought such as Hume’s philosophy and history, Lord Kames on literary criticism, and Lord Monboddo’s speculations on the origin of language.
In microcosm, Anderson and his reading represent a far wider intellectual, social, and professional network. Running through it was a disposition cultivated in Edinburgh to employ the methods of Scottish Enlightenment thought to study nature, and humanity as part of nature, to identify the causes of what was called the “varieties of the human species”. Those varieties were both physical and social, corporeal and historical, but each was understood to have material causes subject to rational explanation, careful comparison, and systematic classification. By these means, men such as Anderson paved the way for the gradual emergence of the notion of race and the supposed separations and hierarchies of racial classification. The knowledge these men compiled on various travels, to America, Africa, Asia and far off Australia, was often communicated back to their professors and mentors at Edinburgh. Anderson sent specimens to his former teacher of anatomy, Monro. Anderson’s story thus opens a window into a little-known, and often fragmentary, but vivid trace of the genuinely global impact and colonial imprint of Scottish Enlightenment thought.
--Marshal Zeringue
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