The Global Enlightenment

Since the eighteenth century, defenders of the Enlightenment have heralded their project as a world-historical event. This colloquium aims to introduce graduate students to the emerging scholarly literature on the global Enlightenment. The field now casts far beyond the cohort of free-thinking European philosophers around which it was initially conceived to encompass the broader cultural, economic, and religious preoccupations of the long eighteenth century—from Paris to Port-au-Prince, from Manchester to Madras, from Nantes to Nanjing. Given these tendencies, how has the significance of the Enlightenment expanded both as a historical period and interpretive framework? In what ways do scholars explicate its origins and outcomes in light of renewed attention to its global reach? In response to such questions, the readings will trace the development of Enlightenment thought and practices in dialogue with interlocutors from around the early modern world: Jesuit missionaries, European colonial trading company officials, French philosophes, African voodoo healers, Scottish political economists, Native American fur traders, Confucian scholars, Brahmin cultural elites, and reform-minded Muslim sultans. Topics to be addressed include the relationship between traditional political and religious authorities to the global public sphere, the search for historical, philosophical, and linguistic origins, entrepreneurial and epistemological innovations made possible by transatlantic and Eurasian encounters, debates surrounding effects of luxury in early capitalist society, and the multiple sites of knowledge production that defined the Enlightenment in word and in deed.