Joseph Knight, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Indigenous Critique

This article examines the freedom suit Knight v. Wedderburn (1778) as an instance of what David Graeber and David Wengrow call the "Indigenous critique." Transported into slavery at about age 13, Joseph Knight was a native of West Africa. He had married a local Scotswoman, Anne Thomson, and begun his family by the time he sued for the right to wages and freedom from enslavement in the Scottish courts. The case went all the way to the Court of Session (the high Scottish court), where Knight's arguments pondered over a period of almost four years by a panel of jurists that included some of the most prominent philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Lords Kames, Hailes, Monboddo, and Auchinleck. Knight won in a 10-4 decision. An investigation of this legal episode reminds us that, during the intellectual movement that we call the European Enlightenment, energizing pleas for egalitarian treatment came from petitioners and plaintiffs not born and raised in Europe; and Knight v. Wedderburn offers an example of a complex use of stadial theory (conjectural history) in Knight's favor, before racial ideologies had fully stabilized.