This project studies how humanity was taught in university curricula by figures in Scotland’s Enlightenment, and then became a focal point for a remarkably wide field of learned speculation and conjecture in colonial encounters in the years between c. 1770-1820.  We focus on a large number of widely-travelled and under-studied former students of the University of Edinburgh who imbibed a distinctive blending of Linnaean natural history with moral philosophy and medicine at this educational heartland of Scotland’s Enlightenment. We study how these students, who travelled and worked extensively throughout Britain’s empire as naturalists and physicians, reflected on human diversity in colonial contexts and how they constructed humanity as a domain with variable boundaries. By avoiding an exclusive focus on canonical authority we trace the more provisional, uncertain, and contested contexts in which colonial knowledge was formed and communicated. Hence the humanity we explore was both universal and inherently variable, and shaped by charged moments of colonial encounter. Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. 

Image: A fortified town or village called a hippah (Pā), built on a perforated rock, at Tolaga in New Zealand by Thomas Morris and Herman Diedrich Sporing, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.