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Racism and the Enlightenment. 2022 Best

Racism and the Enlightenment.

For this week’s assignment we will focus on answering questions about racism and the Enlightenment. QUESTIONS According to Hume, what reasons have people provided to explain differences among peoples and cultures in both the past and the present? Why does Hume give more weight to “moral” than to “physical” causes of difference? What role does nature play in his view, and how does this account for what he describes as whites’ superiority?

Racism and the Enlightenment.

Racism and the Enlightenment.  SOURCES IN CONVERSATION | David Hume, Of National Characters (1754), and Robert Hancock, The Tea Party (1756–1757) The promise of the Enlightenment coexisted side by side with a darker reality: slavery. Foreign trade boomed in the eighteenth century, fueled by the importation of millions of enslaved African people to work the colonial plantations that produced goods for the European market. The British Empire took the lead in the transatlantic slave trade, which had a direct impact on both intellectual and material culture.

Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) was a close friend of Adam Smith, and they both worked to observe and understand the world around them.

Racism and the Enlightenment.

For Hume, this included examining the different “species” of men and variations among them. Following trends in Enlightenment science, Hume believed that nature was an inherently hierarchical system waiting to be discovered, ordered, and classified. The excerpt below is from a 1758 edition of his essay “Of National Characters.” This edition includes a footnote, not found in the first edition, that Hume first added to the second edition in 1754 and retained with slight alterations through subsequent editions. It asserts his view that whites are naturally superior to all other “breeds” of men, notably “negroes,” whom he singles out by name.

Racism and the Enlightenment.

Hume’s belief in white superiority was not unique, nor was it confined to his educated audience. Engraver Robert Hancock’s (1730–1817) image, known as The Tea Party, was the most popular of all ceramic transfer-print designs during the second half of the eighteenth century. Transfer printing was a new and inexpensive way to decorate porcelain, making it affordable to a broader clientele. Hancock perfected the process, and The Tea Party was reproduced on a variety of objects, notably tea utensils, such as the tea saucer here.

Hancock’s design portrays a fashionable couple in a garden seated in front of a table laid out for tea.

Racism and the Enlightenment.

To their left, a black boy wearing a turban bows as he pours water from a kettle into a teapot. To their right, a small dog sits by the woman’s side. As tea from China and sugar from the West Indies became more widely available in England, the practice of tea drinking grew in popularity while remaining intimately connected to the labor of enslaved people and to the new global economy. Of National Characters The vulgar are very apt to carry all national characters to extremes; and having once established it as a principle, that any people are knavish, or cowardly,

or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same character.

Racism and the Enlightenment.

Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgments; though at the same time, they allow, that each nation has a peculiar set of manners, and that some particular qualities are more frequently to be met with among one people than among their neighbors. The common people in Switzerland have surely more probity than those of the same rank in Ireland; and every prudent man will, from that circumstance alone, make a difference in the trust which he reposes in each.…

Different reasons are assigned for these national characters; while some account for them from moral and others from physical causes. https://youtu.be/vnr1WiRiqvY

Racism and the Enlightenment.

By moral causes, I mean all circumstances, which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons, and which render a peculiar set of manners habitual to us. Of this kind are, the nature of the government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbors, and such like circumstances. By physical causes, I mean those qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body, and giving a particular complexion, which tho’ reflection and reason may sometimes overcome.

 

Racism and the Enlightenment.

That the character of a nation will very much depend on moral causes must be evident to the most supersicial observer; since a nation is nothing but a collection of individuals, and the manners of individuals are frequently determined by these causes. As poverty and hard labor debase the minds of the common people, and render them unfit for any science and ingenious profession; so where any government becomes very oppressive to all its subjects, it must have a proportional effect on their temper and genius, and must banish all the liberal arts from among them.

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