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It is evident that the pervasive and gendered rhetorical contrast between public and private worlds was put to many different purposes in eighteenthcentury Britain, as it was in the following century. I want to say immediately that this is of course not an entirely British issue; it is one which in different and specific ways characterised the literature of most Western societies. However, I shall concentrate mainly on Britain and hope that this will stimulate comparative discussion.The contrasts can be illustrated. To the patriot Reverend Richard Brewster in 1759, 'a Race of Men, who prefer the public Good before any narrow or selfish Views -who choose Dangers in Defence of their Country before an inglorious safety, [and] an honourable Death' was to be contrasted with 'the unmanly pleasures of a useless and effeminate life'. 1 To Gilbert Stuart writing from Scotland, public power for women testified to the qualities of a past golden age: 'what evinces their consideration beyond the possibility of a doubt, is the attention they bestowed on business and affairs. They felt, as well as the noble and the warrior, the cares of the community … They went to the public councils or assemblies of their nations, heard the debates of the statesmen, and were called upon to deliver their sentiments.' 2 The historian of women, William Alexander, writing in 1779, contrasted the absence of women from all forms of public employment with the private influence they might exercise:In Britain, we allow a woman to sway our sceptre, but by law and custom we debar her from every other government but that of her own family, as if there were not a public employment between that of superintending the kingdom, and the affairs of her own kitchen, which could be managed by the genius and capacity of woman. We neither allow women to officiate at our altars,

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It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India, which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of men's life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.