William Robertson(1721–1793)

William Robertson was born at the manse of Borthwick in Midlothian, twelve miles south of Edinburgh, on 19 September 1721, the eldest of eight children of the Reverend William Robertson, parish minister of Borthwick and later of Old Greyfriars in Edinburgh, and Eleanor Pitcairn, of the Pitcairn family of mathematicians and physicians. His father moved the family to the Old Greyfriars manse in 1733 and William attended the High School of Edinburgh from twelve, then the University of Edinburgh from 1733 to 1741, where he read divinity, the classics and history under the early figures of what would become the Scottish Enlightenment. He was licensed to preach in 1741 and ordained in 1743 to the parish of Gladsmuir in East Lothian, where he served for fifteen years.

In January 1746 he was one of a body of Edinburgh volunteers who marched out under Henry Erskine of Cardross to help Hawley's army defend against the Jacobite advance; he was present in the rout at Falkirk Muir on 17 January and witnessed the disaster from the centre of the line. He returned to his parish at Gladsmuir, where he served conscientiously through the 1750s, and used the leisure of the country parish to read his way through the available European historical literature in five languages. In 1763 he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and emerged through the Moderate party debates of the next decade as the leader of the Moderates against the strict Evangelical wing on questions of patronage, theatre and the application of the Westminster Confession.

In 1759 he published the History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till his Accession to the Crown of England in two volumes. The book reframed the standard chronicle history of the period into the new narrative form that he, David Hume and Edward Gibbon together were inventing through the late 1750s: a style of historical writing that read sources critically, structured the material by cause and consequence, and gave the reader a sustained narrative of national life rather than a chronicle of events. It sold fourteen editions in his lifetime. On the strength of the book he was elected Principal of the University of Edinburgh on 24 March 1762 at forty, the post he held for the next thirty-one years. The Edinburgh of his Principalship became, by general agreement of contemporary European observers, the most active intellectual centre in Europe.

In 1769 he published The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V in three volumes, the book Voltaire read in 1771 and called the most readable historical work of the century. The volume contained a long preliminary section called A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, which set out an account of the structural change of European society over a thousand years and which Marx, reading it as a student in Berlin, later identified as one of the foundational texts of the modern philosophy of history. In 1777 he followed it with The History of America, two volumes on the Spanish discovery and conquest, written largely from manuscript sources he had obtained through Spanish friends at the court of Madrid. The book treated the pre-Columbian Indigenous societies of the Americas with more seriousness and respect than any previous European general history; later assessments find Eurocentric framings in it, fairly, but in his own time the book was singled out by the Spanish Royal Academy of History for the unusual courtesy of its treatment of native American institutions.

He retired from active university duties in 1791 on grounds of failing health and worked his last two years on the Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India (1791), a smaller scholarly work that became, with its appended account of the religion of the Hindus, the founding text of European Indology. He died at his country house at the Grange, on the southern edge of Edinburgh, on 11 June 1793, aged seventy-one, and is buried in the family vault at Greyfriars Kirk in the city. The Robertson name today carries his memory as the surname of the Edinburgh principal who, with Hume his slightly older friend and Gibbon his slightly younger English equivalent, invented the modern narrative form of European history, and who led the high Scottish Enlightenment as the institutional figure under whom Smith, Black, Hutton, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and Walter Scott all came to maturity.