ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together three disparate groups from the transatlantic Enlightenment-era world: Five social theorists and historians who were leading contributors to the Scottish Enlightenment, two French clerical writers who provided key accounts of the history and peoples of the French empire in Canada, and members of several American Indian tribes who were the objects of attention and study by all the aforementioned. The writings to be considered form a chapter in the reception of America and its peoples into European culture, a process that needs to be broken down into the varying ways in which America and the Indians were comprehended in the different intellectual discourses of Europe, which inescapably shaped images of the Americans and predisposed European thinkers to understand them in particular ways.1 The social-historical theory of the Scottish Enlightenment was one such discourse, but the reception problem is complicated by the fact that the Scots needed intermediaries to supply them with information. Important among these were the French Jesuits, who, however, had intellectual projects of their own involving the reception of the Indians.
