I have increasingly come to suspect that the history books of ...

2026-10-03T09:47:45Z

I have increasingly come to suspect that the history books of William Robertson have purposefully been suppressed by Western elites, as they too thoroughly, and in an almost accidental manner, illuminate the nature of the world and the evolution of civilization over the last 500 years, to a degree not intended for the masses. William Robertson was the principle of the University of Edinburgh during the Scottish enlightenment period (1762-1793) was a friend and colleague of David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, amongst other major writers and thinkers of the time. Nearly all of his contemporaries, including Hume, reluctantly recognized that he was the superior writer and author.

If you go to any halfway serious historical section of a library or bookstore, you can generally find Gibbon, and occasionally Hume, but NEVER William Robertson. This is not a passive accident of his works fading into history. I dare to posit that his books, while not being formally banned by the burgeoning commercial elite of the late 19th and early 20th century, were rather slowly and quietly curated out of circulation after World War 1 as a respository of knowledge reserved only for the new ruling classes.

Robertson's Histories easily rank amongst the top 5 most important works of the last 500 years. Yet hardly anyone in universities, not even professors of history, have heard of him.

You cannot find his books in any major public library in the US, including most university libraries, except in special archives. He was well read and intimately known by all of the educated royalty of Europe, was showered with praised by thinkers as varied as Voltaire, the American founding fathers, Karl Marx, Henry Carey, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others. Yet he is relegated to oblivion in modern univeristies.

Even more significantly, both Karl Marx, the founder of communism, and Henry Carey the chief economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln, and founder of the American system of economics (after Alexander Hamilton), relied upon Robertson's illuminations of history to develop their own schools of political economy. Robertson's histories were not just anecdotal, but rather foundational material in the development of the most significant systems of political economy of the last 300 years.

Robertson's histories are freely available in full on this archive linked below.

I resolve to ensure that these books go back into print and circulation again in the English speaking world, even if I have to do it myself. It is not just a personal ambition but rather a matter of state that his work be available to the next generation of governments in the 21st century and beyond. Their French, German and Russian translations ought also to be restored from obscurity.

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https://oll.libertyfund.org/people/william-robertson

Nostr notes by MarketGarden

I have increasingly come to suspect that the history books of ...