The Circulation of David Hume's Works in Eighteenth-Century America

Mark G. Spencer

This working paper is a fragment of a larger project that aims to describe and analyze the circulation and reception of David Hume's ideas in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America (1740-1830). Part One of this working paper illuminates the dissemination of Hume's works in colonial America, largely by tabulating the hitherto untapped data in early American book catalogues. The image that emerges suggests that more of Hume's works circulated in America earlier, and more widely, than modern scholars have thought. Part Two, by fleshing out the 326 subscribers to the often-overlooked first American edition of Hume's History of England, carries this discussion through to the late eighteenth-century when the circulation of Hume's works in America reached its high-water mark.

[WP # 00011]