Enlightenment America and the Hierarchy of Races: Disputes Over the Writing of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica(1768-1788)

Abstract

In the 1780s, the dispute about the New World entered a new phase. Creole voices redesigned the spatial, political, and economic matrix of modern thought about race within an Atlantic framework. By focusing on the changing eighteenth-century entry on “America,” this article considers the successful commercial enterprise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was conceived in Scotland. It examines the intellectual shift in reference from the Scottish Enlightenment of William Robertson to the antiquarian history advocated by Francisco Xavier Clavijero, a Mexican Jesuit, exiled in the Papal States. The new cartography of knowledge endorsed by the Encyclopaedia led to a racial classification associating Scriptures and providential history.