Dugald Stewart and Racial Theory in the Late Scottish Enlightenment

This article recovers the racial theory that Dugald Stewart taught as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1785 until 1810. In the third, political, segment of his lecture course Stewart presented various racial theories and offered his own opinion that non-European races were not naturally inferior to Europeans. Slavery, he concluded, was therefore unnatural in all its forms. However, though he believed all races were equally perfectible, Stewart nevertheless presented a picture of the world's peoples arranged along a civilizational scale with "civilised" white Europeans at the top and darker-skinned "savage" races at the bottom.