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AbstractThis paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or "civilization" of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The acoustic dimension of political philosophy has rarely attracted serious attention, in part because scholars have tended to assume that political theories, ideas, and concepts, exist as abstract entities that are often noiselessly communicated in written texts. And yet, the noisy communication of political ideas whether in the form of Socratic dialogues, Churchillian orations, or in the hushed tones of focus group conversations treasured by deliberative democrats today, has a rich political history and a continuing relevance. This paper will focus on five performative modes for the communication of political ideas: the monologue, the dialogue, the oration, the interjection, and the noisy crowd. While this list may not be exhaustive, it will be used here as a starting point for further exploration. I will contend that in each of these performative modes, the communication of political ideas is framed by the noise of actual, or textually imagined kinds of political speech designed to underscore the validity of the ideas conveyed. One of the most important reasons for traversing this variable performative and acoustic terrain today is to enable us to hear and to listen to political speech amid the potentially polluting hum of political white noise.

In range of recent articles, Barry Hindess has explored the intellectual foundations of European perceptions of other peoples as different from and in need of European models of government and society. In particular, he has focused on the European "conceit" of superior, more rapid, and more sophisticated historical development or civilization. In this article, I will take up Hindess' view of European civilization as a conceit, and explore its deployment in relation to the influential idea of civilized war in Enlightenment political thought. In particular, I will trace the articulation of this conceit in Voltaire's account of the battle of Fontenoy on May 11, 1745. I will argue that Voltaire's account of the battle shows that the European notion of civilized war was not only a conceit but a fiction.

If political statements and media coverage are any guide, it seems Australians today are dying for security. At no other moment in our history has the spectre of war and terrorism so haunted popular, political and scholarly perceptions of Australia's colonial past and of its geopolitical future. And yet, debates over colonial war or genocide and contemporary terrorism have been conducted in more or less complete isolation. In this article I argue that our contemporary obsession with 'security' is premised on the perennial threat of 'insecurity'. This is the problem of in/security, and it has played a central role in the development of Western political thought. More importantly, its formulation in Western political thought provided a powerful justification for the violence of the early decades of Australia's colonisation during which Indigenous Australians could also be said to have been dying for security.

In recent international relations (IR) literature and foreign policy, the concept of civilisation has enjoyed a surprising revival. Its recent use, however, has had little reference to those who did most to introduce it into modern thought, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. A re-examination of their thought suggests the need for a more nuanced view of civilisation, one that appreciates that the promise of domestic peace that comes with civilisation is also laden with the peril of war and new dynamics of international order. This article will focus on how David Hume (1711–76), William Robertson (1721–93), Adam Smith (1723–90) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) framed their understanding of civilisation and the civilising process in Europe. It will be argued that they were animated by the need to identify the processes at work in reshaping Europe, giving rise to a new international order of civilised societies and mighty sovereign states. Civilisation thus emerged as a process not simply of domestic refinement and pacification, but of the emergence of a new kind of international order between militarily powerful, 'civilised' and 'civilising' sovereign states with enhanced capacities for waging war.

This paper addresses issues arising from the denial by the Australian Government of a Treaty with the Indigenous peoples of Australia. In particular, it attempts to explain why such a Treaty was never signed with the Indigenous peoples during the period of British colonial rule, and why it has consistently been denied by successive post-colonial governments. The starting point of many arguments for a Treaty between the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Australian Government is that such a document would finally consolidate recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. Such sovereignty, it is argued, consists in the fact that this continent was not a terra nullius when it was 'discovered' by white men, but was already occupied, and that the assertion of British sovereignty was based on the denial of a prior Indigenous sovereignty. This sort of explanation however, overlooks the crucial feature of the modern discourse of sovereignty, namely that sovereignty only inheres in those peoples who have formed themselves into a properly constituted society. The 'sovereignty' of the Indigenous peoples of Australia was not recognised, in other words, because it was believed that they had not so constituted themselves, and this belief has continued to shape the administration of Indigenous peoples by both colonial and post-colonial governments well into the twentieth-century. What is significant about this view is that the denial of a Treaty indicates not simply a refusal to acknowledge any Indigenous sovereignty, but an unwillingness to recognise the collective identities, customs, traditions, cultures, and indeed the survival and revival of the Indigenous peoples of this land.