Scottish Enlightenment thinkers also pivoted social theory on American Indians

Evidence

This is also the case with the Scottish Enlightenment. In Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759), American Indians are used as the pivot for elaborate contrasts between “civilized nations” and “savages and barbarians.” They are also pivotal in Henry Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774), John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), and Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 664

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the same ‘Other-as-grounded-baseline’ mechanism to the Scottish school, naming the specific works that operationalize the savage/civilized contrast.