Fragments of Failure? An Unfinished History of Colonial America in the Scottish Enlightenment

The subject of this article is an unfinished history of colonial America written from within the heartland of Scotland’s Enlightenment. The author of that history was the Reverend Andrew Brown (1763–1834), a Scottish Presbyterian minister, a former student at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, one-time colonist in Nova Scotia, and holder of the Regius Chair in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Edinburgh. Brown’s career took shape under the patronage and guidance of William Robertson (1721–93), Historiographer Royal and Principal of the University of Edinburgh. It was Robertson who directed Brown to Nova Scotia and to a life’s work in pursuit of a history of colonial America. Throughout his career, Brown struggled with what he learned, wrestling with the moral and historical implications of colonization. At his death, his monumental history was incomplete. It remained unpublished and lies today in a fragmentary and highly disorganized state. Despite that, I will argue here that the archive allows valuable insight into the struggles of a historian schooled in Scottish stadial history who sought to do what others of his kind did not: to confront directly the brutal realities of colonial violence. For that reason, his archive affords a rare opportunity to trace the ideological and colonial limits of Enlightened history in its own time and place.