1. William Robertson is certainly the most neglected member of the triumvirate of eighteenth-century British historians. This book is therefore an important starting point for a re-evaluation of the meaning of his work. It should be read alongside other noteworthy studies on Robertson that have recently been published by scholars such as, above all others, David Womersley, Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey Smitten [1]. Although there is not yet any full-length, book-size study on Robertson, we owe a lot to these scholars for throwing light on the context of Robertson's intellectual activity and public career.
The crucial role played by Robertson in the shaping of the Scottish Enlightenment has been further emphasized in the debate over the importance of Scottish historiography in the post-Union ideological context. Robertson was a prominent character in the subversion and re-shaping of the Scottish (and European) past, that led to the endorsement of modern and commercial values by the Anglo-British exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment [2].
Although in this book particular attention is paid to the themes of empire and European expansion, many different aspects of Robertson's intellectual achievements and public career are treated here. It might be helpful to set out four interrelated issues raised by this volume: the theme of Robertson's intellectual career and of the rhetorical strategies deployed by him for the shaping of his authorial identity; the diffusion, influence and reception of his historical works; the ideological meaning of his histories; the historiographical genres and rhetorics to be found in his works.
Robertson's intellectual career is usefully reconstructed in the introductory biographical sketch by Stewart J. Brown [3]. It is here shown how his activity as a Kirk minister was characterised by a commitment to the enforcement of the new patronage law, and how Robertson "was convinced that patronage resulted in the selection of a superior type of minister" (p. 15). Patrons, being educated people, would guarantee the recruitment of a learned and polite clergy. Moreover, Robertson's career as Principal of the University was marked by a commitment to reform and modernization that eventually resulted in the project of the Old College (p. 24). The pivotal goal of all his public activities was his commitment to moderation, embodied in his skill to define a conciliatory course of action which would appeal to good sense. This was true also as far as his historical writing was concerned. Karen O'Brien has accordingly come to the conclusion that narrative history was conceived by Robertson as a "means to conflict harmonisation" [4]. Here also lies the core of Robertson's claim of impartiality: as Jeffrey Smitten remarked, it concerned the dialogical integration of diverging positions into a single narrative. Tightly connected to the development of his public career was Robertson's awareness of the socio-economic dimensions of his work, or as Jeffrey Smitten has called it, of his "life of writing" [5]. An understanding of the extent to which his works were accepted into the cultural fabric was crucial to the construction of his authorial identity. Relying on the bulk of Robertson's unpublished correspondence, Smitten has proved that Robertson campaigned extensively to create a groundswell of approval for his works: the marketing of his books was crucial to the shaping of his public identity and was "an integral part" of his "agenda as a historian" (p. 41).
2. This last point brings us to the second topic of interest raised in this book, i.e. the eighteenth-century diffusion of Robertson's works. The great influence that his historical works came to have on the European reading public was linked to the unprecedented growth of the book trade that took place in the eighteenth century. Richard B. Sher has accordingly reconstructed the publishing history of the History of the Reign of Charles V in four different national contexts, and has maintained that this work was "representative of the shaping, one might even say the making, of the Scottish Enlightenment" [6].
Sher's contention is that Charles V became a different thing in each of his publishing contexts. In London and Edinburgh it was "a work of elegance and splendour" conceived for a polite public and aimed at promoting an impartial and philosophical kind of historical writing. In Dublin appeared much less elegant and expensive octavo editions that suited less affluent readers. Suard's French translation, as well as creating an altogether different work by putting it into a different language, was also preceded by a preface that highlighted some issues, considered meaningful or controversial in the French context. Addressing his Catholic readers, Suard thought it would be expedient to minimize the extent of Robertson's anti-Catholic stand and emphasize his commitment to moderation and his respect for religion in general. Moreover, he underlined the role of Robertson's work in enriching the discourse of sociability. Finally he called attention to Robertson's Montesquieuian defence of nobility and aristocratic parlements as bulwarks against kingly encroachments and despotism. While in France Charles V was adjusted to the local ideological context by pointing out the topics which best suited French public discourse, in America the act of publication itself was to bear an ideological meaning. Sher has shown that subscriptions to American editions of Charles V were sold on patriotic grounds, as a means to promote a native publishing industry and react to the colonial policy of importing British books.
Robertson's books were not only widely diffused, but also favourably received in a number of eighteenth-century contexts. John Renwick's paper tells the story of Robertson's reception in the most important of those contexts, France [7]. According to Renwick, the success of Robertson's works was due to the extent to which Robertson's historiography sounded familiar and congenial to the French philosophes. They found there the same "historical accuracy unencumbered by secondary data", the same "concern with causality and human agency", the same "language of philosophical gravity" and the same endorsement of "the spirit of toleration and the idea of progress" to which they were committed (pp. 158-60). It is here impossible to make any detailed remark about this most important topic of the reception of Robertson's works in the eighteenth century. Let us only consider that Renwick's contribution should be read alongside the studies that have been carried out on the fortune of Robertson in eighteenth-century Italy, Germany, and America [8].
3. Let us now turn to the issues of Robertson's work mostly concerned with his political thought and historiographical practice. We owe to Colin Kidd a discussion of the ideological meaning of the History of Scotland [9]. According to Kidd this work amounted to an "act of patriotism" in giving Scotland a "philosophical history, albeit a critical one" (p. 123). Robertson's main achievement was to advance a "latitudinarian and cross-partisan account of Scotland's past" (p. 124). Robertson rejected the Buchananite aristocratic ideology and set forth a modern Whig account of the constitution. Similarly, he substituted a philosophical and moderate account of the Scottish Reformation for the more traditional, again Buchananite, Presbyterian approach. Kidd has demonstrated that none of these enterprises was completely original and that Robertson could rely on a variety of sources and models. His constitutional history depended on Father Thomas Innes' undermining of the Scottish ancient constitution and on the feudal jurisprudence of Kames and Dalrymple, while his ecclesiastical history was much indebted to a number of Scottish authors, among which Gilbert Burnet stands out with his History of the Reformation. The ideological message of the History of Scotland decoded by Kidd consisted in a redefinition of patriotism: Robertson accommodated an account of Scotland's past in the new Whig-Presbyterian ideology, and claimed that patriotism did not consist in the maintenance of old prejudices, but in an effort to improve the condition of Scotland. Historical writing was a crucial tool to defeat those ancient prejudices and to accomplish that project of improvement.
It would certainly be correct to say that Kidd's findings about the History of Scotland are confirmed by Karen O'Brien wider perspective, aiming at locating Robertson's historiography within the Enlightenment cosmopolitan history. The "narrative imperative" that is to be found in his historical works is linked to that strategy of "conflict harmonisation, often across religious divides" that, according to O'Brien, often led Robertson to the taking of a larger perspective in order to achieve a "regulation of local disputes" (pp. 74-75). This is the rationale of his moving away from Scottish history to European history (with Charles V) and finally to American and colonial history (with the History of America and the Historical Disquisition concerning India). As a result, Robertson's work took the shape of a grand narrative of the origin and development of the European and colonial early-modern political order. Karen O'Brien has elsewhere emphasized the relevance of this unified, latitudinarian, and cosmopolitan account of the growth of civil society, not only for Robertson's, but for the whole Enlightenment historiography [10]. O'Brien has gone a long way to demonstrate that historiographical rhetoric was crucial to the accomplishment of such a purpose. She has maintained that Robertson utilized the language of sentiment to appeal to his public in the context of Scottish political history (pp. 84-88), and that he replaced it with conjectural history when he wrote his later works (p. 88). The concern for narrative style and rhetoric implies that it was not originality, but rather, plausibility and eloquence that gave acclaim and influence to the work of Robertson (p. 89). We should notice that Kidd and O'Brien agree that Robertson was not a very original historian, and that he managed to conceive a very powerful and influential historical account of civil society. To fully appreciate this point we should now turn to the last issue treated in this book, that is the kind of historiographical genres to be found in Robertson's works.
4. Nicholas Phillipson introduces in his paper an innovative usage of the phrase "philosophical history" in an eighteenth-century context by referring it to the humanist historiography of Machiavelli ad Guicciardini, that was rooted on its turn in the ancient example of Tacitus, Livy and Cicero [11]. He traces Robertson's first encounter with philosophical history to the teaching of Charles Mackie, an undeservedly neglected figure of eighteenth-century historical thought, whose influence on Robertson has been underlined also by Stewart J. Brown (p. 8). While reconstructing the genealogy of the Robertsonian philosophical history, Phillipson carefully distinguishes it from "conjectural history", defined as an idiom mainly concerned with the material foundations of society (pp. 56-57). It may well be the case that not all the scholars would agree with this terminology. In this very volume John Renwick and Richard B. Sher make use of the concept of philosophical history to mean a typically eighteenth-century, and tendentially stadial and materialistic kind of historical writing, opposed to the older narrative history (pp. 157, 168). Phillipson on the contrary seems to deliberately conflate philosophical history with what Arnaldo Momigliano used to call "political history". Other categorizations may probably be proposed, but I believe that Phillipson has been able to grasp an eighteenth-century usage of philosophical history that has so far escaped the attention of the majority of the scholars. We are dealing with a philosophical history that is not embodied in stadial theories of society, but is accommodated within narrative histories. It is the same historiographical idiom endorsed by Gibbon when he greeted Tacitus as the first philosopher-historian. Conjectural history and a stadial theory of society were added by Robertson to this more traditional core of historiography. Robertson discovered this new tool mainly in the work of Montesquieu, and made use of it to emphasize the cultural chasm which separate peoples living in different civilizations (p. 59). Phillipson does argue that the endorsement of conjectural history became a crucial feature of Robertson's historical thinking, to the extent that the History of America may rightly be said to be the first true historical test for the stadial theories of sociability put forward by Hume, Millar, Kames and Ferguson (p. 64). Having said this, I believe that the most important contribution of Phillipson's interpretation lies in his idea that the philosophical history of Robertson, however refined and transformed by conjectural history, is compatible with narrative history. This in turn is compatible with the great cosmopolitan narrative reconstructed in the Enlightenment culture by Karen O'Brien. Given the undeniable importance of pure stadial theories in the Scottish Enlightenment, and the habit of many scholars to conflate the notion of philosophical history with that of conjectural history, any alternative meaning of philosophical history has so far been neglected. We should therefore welcome all the attempts like that by Nicholas Phillipson, who has given us a more genuinely historical picture of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophical history, and of its relationship with conjectural and narrative histories.
5. The status of narrative and philosophical history in the work of Robertson brings us to the problem of his debt to Voltaire. This is a crucial and controversial issue. How much did Voltaire influence Robertson? A great deal, according to Karen O'Brien. In the pioneering combination of narrative and philosophy achieved by Voltaire, Robertson (and his Scottish fellow-historians) could find a model to link "social analysis" and "narrative causal explication". Voltaire's historiography provided the Scots with the example of "an establishment-oriented kind of history which legitimated the existing order in broad cultural terms, rather than in narrowly legalistic terminology". Differently from what scholars have often said, O'Brien thinks that Voltaire's influence has been more important for the Scots than that of Montesquieu (pp. 79-83). We should welcome a reconsideration of Voltaire as a historian and of his influence on eighteenth-century historiography.
Many scholars would not share this view. Owen Dudley Edwards recalls and restates Denis Hay's opinion that Voltaire appeared to Robertson as a brilliant but old-fashioned historian [12] (p. 120). John Renwick maintains that Robertson has reached a number of broadly comparable conclusions quite independently of Voltaire. This latter seems also to have considered Robertson as a threat to his historiographical supremacy (pp. 161-63). The core of the problem lies in what Arnaldo Momigliano remarked long ago. Robertson explicitly stated that Voltaire's failure to quote his sources allowed his readers to consider him an "entertaining and lively", but not a "learned and well-informed historian" [13]. Robertson had learnt the value of archival research from Charles Mackie, and accordingly he considered unreliable any historical work that did not show a good scholarly standard. We should remember that he criticized Raynal for the same reason (p. 45, n. 31).
The problem of Voltaire's influence on Robertson mirrors a wider issue
concerning the development of eighteenth-century historiography. To emphasize
the efforts made by Robertson to achieve a more accurate scholarly narrative
helps us understand how, for instance, the ground was prepared for the
work of Gibbon. He reiterated Robertson's unease with Voltaire and brought
historiography to an incomparably higher standard of source criticism.
The continuity of Enlightenment historiography should however not be neglected:
between Robertson and Voltaire - and we could add Montesquieu, Hume and
Gibbon - there are striking similarities in the scope and discursive underpinning
of their historical works. Karen O'Brien has for instance grasped one
of these similarities by reconstructing what she calls the great cosmopolitan
narrative of the Enlightenment. Other similarities could be reconstructed.
Phillipson's notion of philosophical history could certainly, and indeed
should, be tested against the works of all Enlightenment historians.
This volume teaches us that an understanding of the work of William Robertson
lies at the heart of any attempt to reconstruct Enlightenment culture
and historiography.
[1] - R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment. The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, Edinburgh 1985; Id., "1688 and 1788: William Robertson on revolution in Britain and France", in P. Dukes and J. Dunkley, eds., Culture and Revolution, London and New York 1990, pp. 98-109; J. Smitten, "Impartiality in Robertson's History of America", Eighteenth-Century Studies, XIX (1985), pp. 56-77; Id., "Moderatism and history: William Robertson's unfinished history of British America", in R. B. Sher and J.R. Smitten, eds., Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, Edinburgh 1990, pp. 163-79; Id., "The shaping of moderation: William Robertson and Arminianism", Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, XXII (1992), pp. 281-300. D. Womersley, "The historical writings of William Robertson", Journal of the History of Ideas, XLVII (1986), pp. 497-506.
[2] - C. Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past. Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-c.1830, Cambridge 1993.
[3] - "William Robertson (1721-1793) and the Scottish Enlightenment", pp. 7-35. After the first quotation of each article, every subsequent reference will be given directly in the text by reporting the page number.
[4] - K. O'Brien, "Robertson's place in the development of eighteenth-century narrative history", pp. 74-91, p.75.
[5] - J. Smitten, "Robertson's letters and the life of writing", pp. 36-54.
[6] - R. B. Sher, "Charles V and the book trade: an episode in Enlightenment print culture", pp. 164-95, p. 174.
[7] - J. Renwick, "The reception of William Robertson's historical writings in eighteenth-century France", pp. 145-63.
[8] - Compare: G. Tarabuzzi, "Le traduzioni italiane settecentesche delle opere di William Robertson", Rivista storica italiana, XCI (1979), pp. 486-509; L. Kontler, "William Robertson's history of manners in German, 1770-1795", Journal of the History of Ideas, LVIII (1997), pp. 125-44 (emphasizing the untranslatability of Robertson's vocabulary of manners in German). On America see Sher's contribution in this volume.
[9] - C. Kidd, "The ideological significance of Robertson's History of Scotland", pp. 122-44.
[10] - K. O'Brien, Narratives of the Enlightenment. Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, Cambridge 1997.
[11] - N. Phillipson, "Providence and progress: an introduction to the historical thought of William Robertson", pp. 55-73.
[12] - O. D. Edwards, "Robertsonian Romanticism and Realism", pp. 92-121, p. 120. Compare D. Hay, Renaissance Essays, London 1988, pp. 91-94; Id., Annalists and Historians. Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries, London 1977, pp. 172-73.
[13] - W. Robertson, The History of the Reign of Charles V, 3 vols., London and Edinburgh 1769, vol. II, pp. 392-93.