  Burke, like Smith again, wrote ‘philosophical’ history, that is to say gave a view of the key agencies that had shaped human destiny over the long run of human society. Indeed, he casually implied a four-stage theory of socio-economic history at a time when Scottish stadial history, except that in Dalrymple's Feudal Property (1757), was either unwritten or unpublished. But his attention, primarily, lay elsewhere, as appears in An Account of the European Settlements. This work arose from the initiative of ‘booksellers’ alive to the reading public's interest in North America, where Britain was then at war with France, and the work was co-written with Burke's ‘cousin’ and friend William Burke. Edmund's pen is evident in the passages which contrast savagery with civilization. The book emphasized that the coming of Europeans to the New World brought with it a civilizing of savages, who were far from noble, through the agency of institutionalised Christianity. This implicit distance from the cult of the noble savage, and from primitivism in general, provided an identifiable complement to the implied rejections of A Philosophical Enquiry and the satire about 'natural society' in A Vindication.