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Bruce Buchan

@brucealexb.bsky.social
7.7K followers 1.5K following 1.4K posts

Scholar. Historian of ideas. Mostly Enlightenment & race, quite a bit on empire & colonisation, plus some corruption and a little piracy for good measure. Co-author of Race and the Scottish Enlightenment (2025). Proud to announce that I despise AI.

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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
When ISIS began televising beheadings, Washington's lines practically wrote themselves. Now the message appears to be "We can be just as ghoulish and our politics just as perverse as yours." It really reinforces who won the Forever War on Terror. It certainly wasn't the USA.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
And these miscreants have the temerity to say that THEY are the faithful defenders of ‘Western civilization’.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
More to the point, when will governments - the only institutions capable of acting for and in the public interest - hold the corporations accountable for the extortion, theft, and impunity we are all being told to accept is necessary for them to make corporate profits?
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
AI corporate executive “apologises” to Australia for a hack of sensitive personal information by an AI agent acting precisely in the way it was designed by the corporation to do - independently of human control. So, exactly why should we regard this “apology” as an apology?
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The intellectual history of scientific instructions shows just how deeply the #history of #science was shaped by the histories of #colonisation and #aesthetics. Here, the letterhead of the Baudin expedition to #Australia 1799-1801, shows the navigator’s instruments paired with the artist’s easel.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Self-regulation of AI by the corporations controlling AI development. What could possibly go wrong?
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
On the 17th of August 1803, Enlightenment speculation on racial variety ran aground on Wreck Reek, just off Australia's north eastern coast. This is just one of a surprising range of unlikely settings in which @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I pursue the intellectual history of race & Enlightenment.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
A betrayal of scholarship.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Today’s class ‘the empire of Enlightenment’ and an opportunity to engage with the iconography of Captain Cook, and reinvention by First Nations artists.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Dawes's description further records that as Patyegarang uttered those words she threw "down the towel as in despair." The portrait above is of an unidentified Gamaraigal woman, possibly Patyegarang, drawn around 1800–1804 by Nicolas-Martin Petit. Below is William Dawes c. 1830. #ColonialHistory
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The first critique of the #Enlightenment idea of #race in Australia was uttered in 1790 by Patyegarang, a young Gamaraigal woman of the Dharug nation. She told William Dawes: "I shall not become white" when he "told her, if she would wash herself often, she would become white". #C18th ...cont.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Two magnificent portraits of Bungaree (1775-1830) by Augustus Earle (c.1826 and after 1830). Bungaree was the first Australian to circumnavigate the entire landmass (as far as we know) in 1801-02. Pictured here as a public figure in Sydney, wearing one of Governor Lachlan Macquarie's dress coatees.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The Trump aesthetic: cliché in place of creation, kitsch imposed on culture.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Our immediate response to the rapidly unfolding existential problems caused by the creation of AI should not be a recourse to ethics, or even regulation. These are both crucial, but they need to be preceded by a public reengagement with histories of enslavement, colonisation, and imperialism.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I learned today that ‘data ingestion’ is the process of scraping up raw data, ‘cleaning’ and storing it to train AI. So I guess the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ needs a new caveat ‘except for AI which can eat as much as it likes and we’ll all pick up the bill.’
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The point has been made so many times, yet our political and corporate elites are impervious to it. Science untethered from ethics, from history, philosophy, literature and art is not a means to progress. It is a tool of oppression. The confirmations of this axiom grow more ominous daily.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Edinburgh sunset.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Johann Zoffany's Death of Captain Cook (1795) is a head spin. It portrays Cook as a Dying Gaul mercilessly killed by neo-classical Hawai'ian Islanders, one of whom looks like a Greco-Roman Discobolus.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
As the century advances we can all watch democracy being killed. Not by populism, nor by extremism of various sorts, and certainly not by terrorism in whichever guise. Democracy is being killed before our eyes by something far more lethal: corruption, aided and abetted by indifference.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
True!
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It’s a pretty stupid question to be fair.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Despite the agro, Australia has an incredibly positive story to tell about immigration. We are predominantly a migrant nation. It is a source of our identity in diversity. Don’t ever let the racists, xenophobes and malignant opportunists in media, politics, or online ever tell you otherwise.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In other words, a majority of Australia’s population now have direct first or second generation migrant heritage. This is (I think) a unique accomplishment among modern nations. That said, migration is a cause of dispute and tension worldwide, as it is here in Australia.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
This is not new, but I still find it remarkable. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of Australian residents who were born overseas (first generation) or had a parent born overseas (second generation) is currently over 51.5% of the total population.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Those books look suspiciously like playing cards.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The nihilism of modern consumerism is being sold the soporific that nothing matters. The bankruptcy of modern politics consists in being told that the we can’t believe anything that is said. The horror of modern geopolitics is being served daily vision of a genocide our leaders will not stop.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Australia's Department of Trade lists our first colonial exports: whaling (1791), coal (1801), & wool (1807). Yet one 'export' predates them: the skulls of First Nations people (1790). Australia's first trade would endure for another 160 years. Read more here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Enlightenment enslavement and the Indigenous dead: trafficking slaves and skulls in the early colonisation of Australia
In 1787, as the First Fleet made its way across the Atlantic to colonise Australia, it traversed an ocean made synonymous with the violently forced mobility of enslavement, then reaching an unprece...
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Why did medicine and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment give rise to a global and colonial science of race? Find out here! @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and me in History of Science, Volume 64 Issue 3, September 2026. Out now, open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.....
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Bravo! www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
theguardian.com
‘We have had enough’: thousands of University of Sydney staff walk off the job over AI and job security
Hundreds of university staff were stationed at picket lines, calling for stronger protections around the use of AI
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Sadly, not this time. Some older phots.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
“Colours are not Qualifications of Light, derived from Refractions, or Reflections of natural Bodies (as 'tis generally believed) but Original and connate properties, which in divers Rays are divers.” - Isaac Newton, 1672. - Leonard French’s windows, National Library of Australia, 1967.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The Australian government is banking on an AI boom ushering in new productivity & wage rises. It’s tragic to survey the wreckage of this former worker’s party, suborned by the career-killing aspirations of AI corporations desperate to debauch human endeavour, & bequeath environmental catastrophe.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
He was indeed. His first aim in writing his history of Nova Scotia (never finished) was to prioritise the sufferings of the Acadians. A very distinctive choice for a conservative Scottish minister at that time.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
How should intellectual historians work with texts that were never completed, and cannot now be reconstructed? What is the value for intellectual historians in piecing together the fragments of failure? Find out here. #18thCentury #IntellectualHistory #ScottishEnlightenment #Colonisation
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I've just come across your great posts on Andrew Brown! I've had a long term interest in Brown's remarkable archive and his intriguing career as a early historian of American colonisation. He is a sadly neglected figure who deserves greater recognition. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
journals.uchicago.edu
Fragments of Failure? An Unfinished History of Colonial America in the Scottish Enlightenment* | The Journal of Modern History: Vol 97, No 1
AbstractThe subject of this article is an unfinished history of colonial America written from within the heartland of Scotland’s Enlightenment. The author of that history was the Reverend Andrew Brown...
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
In light of Earle's caricature and the "Queries" (which, in all fairness probably reflected the interests of his collaborators, James Cowles Prichard and Thomas Hodgkinson, more than Darwin's), did Charles Darwin nevertheless mention personally collecting, keeping, or trading human skulls?
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Several years later Darwin collaborated on a set of "Queries" for "travellers" to provide information on “the different races of men… in an uncivilized state”. The Queries specified: “[t]he head is so important as distinctive of race, that particular attention must be paid to it." So, my question...
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Augustus Earle's wonderful caricature of the young Charles Darwin collecting natural history specimens aboard the Beagle c.1832. There's everything here from fossil tusks to dried fish. The detail shows there's also a human skull. I'm no Darwin scholar but I have a question for those who are...
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
There is a quiet, agonising crisis unfolding across our globe. It’s not visible in riots or battles, but its effects will unfold as remorselessly as war. Whether bees or birds we’re killing billions; sowing graveyards in our wake. What grief will ever encompass the lonely vacancies we are making?
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Anthropocene is a maligned term, yet it encompasses many measurable indexes. There’s another index yet measured. It’s the burgeoning of a new vocabulary to name our polluted precarity, our carbon-hooked anxiety, our burning rage, and the lonely grieving for the species we are hungrily extinguishing.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
A human tragedy, in the truest sense, turned into a festival of cruelty, racism, and inhumanity by media and social media alike.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Andrew Bragg’s interview this morning is the closest thing to self immolation in a radio studio I’ve ever had the misfortune to hear.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Thanks for this. I’ve been worried about it and asked a question of my colleagues via social media just days ago asking for clarification on the wearing of pervert glasses in classes.
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Reposted by Bruce Buchan
Amy Elizabeth @amyelizabeth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I've added a section to my syllabus to address students recording their peers or class with their Meta glasses. I would love to know how other folks are handling this issue in their courses.
- To protect student privacy and maintain an open, respectful learning environment, students may not record, photograph, or otherwise capture audio or video of class without the prior consent of the instructor and all students who may be recorded.

- This policy applies to recordings made with phones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches, or 
any other device.

- Respecting the privacy and participation of classmates is an essential part of our classroom expectations. Unauthorized recordings may not be shared, posted, or distributed in any form.

-Any recording for an academic accommodation must be approved in advance by the instructor and handled according to school policy.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Necropolitics in action.
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
If we want to sincerely weigh #Enlightenment’s #legacy in #Australia or #globally, we should begin here in tracing the global flows of peoples, bodies, and ideas in the era #colonisation and #ScientificEnslavement. muse.jhu.edu/pub/275/arti...
yalebooks.yale.edu
Race and the Scottish Enlightenment
How colonialism shaped the Scottish Enlightenment’s conception of race and humanity   In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical st...
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Three-fingered Jack was Jack Mansong, killed in 1781 while resisting slavery in Jamaica. His own #head and hand was #preserved in spirits “for the satisfaction of the curious”. #Pemulwuy and #JackMansong were enslaved in perpetuity because they resisted. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
So, when the English artist James Ward drew “2 heads of Botany Bay Men” in London’s Royal College of Surgeons in 1818, one of whom was probably Pemulwuy, he could describe him as a “chief of marauding predators, a kind of Three-fingered Jack of Botany Bay.” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
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Bruce Buchan @brucealexb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The #resistance to colonisation, and the violence of colonial repression, demonstrate the same agency historians identify among the enslaved. Their resistance to the prerogatives of white colonial power however, was frequently characterised as ‘savagery’ illustrative of imposed #racial designations.
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