On the evening of 24 February 1801, atwenty-one-year-old Francis Horner walked from hisfamily home in Edinburgh's New Town to a meetinghall at the University. He was attending a debateorganised by the Speculative Society. The society'smembers – mostly Edinburgh University students andalumni – used the meetings to practise publicspeaking and rhetoric, and to learn how to constructand win an argument. It was an institution forplaying at being statesmen and for acquiring theconfidence to intervene in politics. On thisFebruary evening, as Horner recorded in his diary,the debate was about ‘one of the most interestingsubjects which can engage the attention of apolitical philosopher’, namely ‘the consequences ofa free commerce and intercourse between China andthe rest of the civilised world. There cannot be amore splendid prospect, than that of this new worldbeing unfolded to the curiosity and the observationof European science.’ Indeed, from a ScottishEnlightenment perspective, China remained mysteriousand little understood even in the early nineteenthcentury. Horner's school geography textbook (seeChapter 13) contained barely half a page on China,including the comment that ‘the Europeans are butvery little acquainted with’ the countries of EastAsia. Summarising the Speculative Society'sdiscussion, Horner wrote in his diary that a morecomplete understanding of China would represent ‘animmense accession to the science of humannature’.

‘Accession’ was an interesting choice of word. It meansan addition to acollection. It also means the acquisition of a position ofpower. These two meanings were broughttogether by the philosopher Dugald Stewart, whohimself had been a member of the Speculative Societyin the 1770s and who lectured at EdinburghUniversity in the 1790s. In his Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793;expanded second edition published 1801), Stewartdescribed ‘every addition that is made to the stockof human knowledge’ as an ‘accession of evidence’ tobe used by ‘those individuals who devote themselves… to the pursuit of science’. Each ‘accession ofevidence’, for Stewart, would lead to an increase inpower for the institution or individual collectingthe evidence. Owning the collection and managing theaccessions was crucial: ‘The idea of power is,partly at least, the foundation of our attachment toproperty.