The historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment has had an unparalleled influence on the way history has been understood in the United Kingdom, North America and throughout the erstwhile British Empire. It is to the Enlightenment that we owe the ideas of historical progress, of state development through time and, ultimately, the whole teleological apparatus which for many years sustained what was known as the school of Whig history: the analysis of the past not on its own terms, but in the light of what it could contribute to an account of progress towards the present. In the last century historiography has diversified from this model, but the teleological vision still exercises a hold on both the popular imagination and some areas of historical scholarship, particularly in the narrative history still dominant in media programmes and school textbooks. When, for example, some of the new British History traces the past foundations of our country 'for the sake of the present' and its contemporary anxieties over Britishness rather than 'making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century', then in Herbert Butterfield's words, we are partaking in 'the subordination of the past to the present', and this vision was central to the Enlightenment. When in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), Butterfield argued of the past that 'their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us' he was striking not only at posterity's condescension, but at issues which lay at the heart of the complex world of the historiography of David Hume (1711-76) and William Robertson (1721-93) among others.