ROBERTSON, William.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The History of Scotland; [together with] -- The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V; [and] -- The History of America; [and] -- An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India. A handsome set of the historian's influential oeuvre covering both the Old and New Worlds; here in later editions contemporarily bound in attractive marbled calf. Robertson's "four published historical works brought him considerable fame and wealth, and they helped establish historical writing as one of the foremost literary genres of Enlightenment Scotland" (ODNB).Of the triumvirate of great 18th-century British historians - Robertson, Gibbon, Hume - only Robertson (1721-1793) published more than a single history. Historiographers and anthropologists alike have recognized in Robertson's sustained achievement an early emphasis on "the importance of general ideas in history" and he "possessed the literary skill to write with a sense of the movement of events and social tides" (Hoebel, p. 648). Robertson's contemporaries regarded him as the leading historian of Europe following his histories of Scotland (1759) and Emperor Charles V (1769). The History of America (1777), meanwhile, guided and inspired the historians, poets, novelists, and nationalists of the New World into the early 19th century.Robertson turned to India (1791) for his final publication and investigated the country's cultural and commercial connections with the West up to the 16th century. Chro

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