It is in the final section, Part IIC, that we find the beginnings of a more developed sense of human social evolution, ideas that were contemporaneous with the fraught encounters with a wider world that were taking place in America and the Pacific. This was the ‘stages’ – or ‘stadial’ – theory of human development that was principally worked out by thinkers of the French and Scottish Enlightenments. For reasons of space, we have been unable to represent the full range of these developments by Turgot, Helvetius, Goguet and others in France, and in Scotland the work of Kames, Robertson and Adam Smith among others. Instead we have attempted to encapsulate the basic outline of the theory in its most developed form in one short document by the Glasgow‐based historian and legal theorist John Millar. In the words of Ronald Meek, the historian of these debates, ‘Millar’s great achievement was to transform the four stages theory and the more general ideas associated with it into a true philosophy of history’ (Meek, Social Science, 1976, p. 161). The legacy of the ‘stages’ theory is ambiguous. On the one hand, it represents an attempt to respond within a secular rather than a religiously validated framework to undeniable facts about material progress and complexity of social organization. On the other, however, it can be seen to lay the ground for later, nineteenth‐century ‘evolutionist’ accounts of humankind, which joined with ‘scientific racism’ to underwrite the ideology of the ‘civilizing mission of empire’.
It falls, however, to certain other statements by European philosophers of the period to bear out more fully Said’s thesis about Orientalism; and indeed to provide traction for the wider attack on the hypocrisy of ‘Enlightenment for some but not for others’ that has come to be the defining feature of so much radical scholarship since the 1970s. It must be said that not all are equally culpable. Smith and Millar are not nineteenth‐century ‘scientific racists’. Even more so, Denis Diderot offers a glimpse of imaginative insight into the deleterious consequences of European expansion. But the aberrant reflexes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant remain shocking, whether these lapses are or are not taken to disable their wider views on the significance and desirability of reason, enlightenment and progress. The present anthology is premised on the belief that they do not. However, by the same token, the philosophy of Enlightenment seems neither to have been as enlightened as its protagonists thought themselves, nor as their successors systematically made them out to be through the institutions of education and other forms of cultural reproduction over the next two hundred years.
But at the same time, some other voices can, by contrast, be seen to be beginning the long haul of breaking out of a restricted, solely Graeco‐Roman sense of the lineage of European culture. One of the key instances of this in respect of art, in the then‐emergent field of art history, can be found in the interchange between Winckelmann and Herder: the former doing much to establish the conventional sense of a specific and independent European tradition rooted in the example of classical Greece; the latter, in his posthumous ‘memorial’ to Winckelmann, disputing that account and introducing an early example of cultural relativism into the history of art.
In similar fashion to the situation we noted in the Introduction to Part I, the registration in eighteenth‐century European art of all these changing ideas is manifold, but subordinate. Explicit images of the wider world are relatively few. The work of William Hodges and other artists of the Cook voyages to the Pacific, notably Sidney Parkinson and John Webber, is exceptional. But none of them have loomed large in the canon, at least until recently when Hodges has received some of his due. India is the site of the majority of such representations, which are for the most part profoundly inflected by the presence of the East India Company, and behind it, the shadow of the British state. Apart from individual portraits, some of the most complex representations of these cross‐cultural encounters can be found in the work of Johann Zoffany and the Irish painter Thomas Hickey.
In a different register, the world also leaks into representations of life in the metropolis, in instances such as the presence of black servants. Within the normative family portrait or conversation piece, however, such figures are for the most part as marginal within the image as Hodges and Hickey have been to the canon.
The experience of today’s post‐colonial, multicultural societies ill‐prepares one to understand a Europe in which people of non‐European descent formed only a small minority. It is true, of course, that during the eighteenth century there were considerable numbers of black servants to the well‐to‐do, some of them freed slaves, some of whom achieved prominence. In Britain, these included Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, as well as Samuel Johnson’s manservant Francis Barber. Some, though few, made it into art. Hogarth’s representations of black people, mostly servants, are famous, and many other aristocratic portraits feature black retainers. But people of non‐European heritage were less evident than they are today, and those who achieved notice, even more so. A figure such as ‘Dido’, the daughter of an English sea‐captain and an African slave woman, came to enjoy the status of cousin to Lady Elisabeth Mansfield, niece of the Lord Chief Justice, whose later judgement in the Somerset case proved such a benchmark for race relations in Britain. Dido is represented in an enigmatic portrait as being on apparently equal status with her cousin. Anyone of ‘rank’, or even patronized by a person of rank, could become a temporary celebrity. The Polynesian Mai (‘Omai’), who came to England with Joseph Banks after Cook’s first voyage, was one such, and had his portrait painted by no less a figure then Joshua Reynolds. The Chinese artist Tan Chit Qua, who maintained a successful career as a ‘face‐painter’ to the fashionable in places like Bath, was included by Zoffany in his collective portrait of the Royal Academicians.
Beyond the genre of the portrait, European landscape painting also registered, to a degree, the impact of the world beyond Europe. In particular, a sub‐genre of the ‘colonial picturesque’ has been recently canvassed, which seems to have functioned as a way of normalizing strange and often threatening landscapes, as well as the alien presence of Europeans in them, for an audience at home in the imperial metropole. On the whole, however, both the burgeoning colonies and the people in them, on whom the primitive accumulation of metropolitan wealth in large part depended, are a presence but yet do not loom large in eighteenth‐century European art.
Arguably, the most significant and widespread images of the wider world occur in the form of allegorical representations of the Four Continents. No English country house is complete without its female busts of Europe – classically robed and helmeted – Asia, America and Africa, distinguished by exotic headdresses and, in the case of the last at least, not infrequently bare‐breasted. The culminating image of this subject is surely, however, not a sculpture but the enormous ceiling painting by Tiepolo in the palace at Würzburg: a teeming depiction of exotic animals, equally exotic foreign merchants, and a cornucopia of trade goods that threatens to spill down the walls into the viewer’s own space. It is, furthermore, not just ‘fine art’ that