CONRAD, Sebastian. Enlightenment in Global History

Enlightenment in Global History:
A Historiographical Critique
SEBASTIAN CONRAD
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/117/4/999/33183 by guest on 03 August 2021

THE ENLIGHTENMENT HAS LONG HELD a pivotal place in narratives of world history.
It has served as a sign of the modern, and continues to play that role yet today. The
standard interpretations, however, have tended to assume, and to perpetuate, a Eu-
rocentric mythology. They have helped entrench a view of global interactions as
having essentially been energized by Europe alone. Historians have now begun to
challenge this view. A global history perspective is emerging in the literature that
moves beyond the obsession with the Enlightenment’s European origins.
The dominant readings are based on narratives of uniqueness and diffusion. The
assumption that the Enlightenment was a specifically European phenomenon re-
mains one of the foundational premises of Western modernity, and of the modern
West. The Enlightenment appears as an original and autonomous product of Eu-
rope, deeply embedded in the cultural traditions of the Occident. According to this
master narrative, the Renaissance, humanism, and the Reformation “gave a new
impetus to intellectual and scientific development that, a little more than three and
a half centuries later, flowered in the scientific revolution and then in the Enlight-
enment of the eighteenth century.”1 The results included the world of the individual,
human rights, rationalization, and what Max Weber famously called the “disenchant-
ment of the world.”2 Over the course of the nineteenth century, or so the received
wisdom has it, these ingredients of the modern were then exported to the rest of the
world. As William McNeill exulted in his Rise of the West, “We, and all the world
of the twentieth century, are peculiarly the creatures and heirs of a handful of ge-
niuses of early modern Europe.”3
This interpretation is no longer tenable. Scholars are now challenging the Eu-
rocentric account of the “birth of the modern world.” Such a rereading implies three
I am grateful to Arif Dirlik, Andreas Eckert, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Sheldon Garon, Stephen Kotkin,
Stefan Rinke, Antonella Romano, Martin van Gelderen, Eric Weitz, and the anonymous reviewers for
the AHR for helpful and stimulating comments on earlier versions of this article. I am particularly
indebted to Christopher L. Hill and Gagan Sood for several rounds of very constructive criticism, and
to Rob Schneider for a set of final clarifications. This work was supported by the Academy of Korean
Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2012-DZZ-3103).
1 Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge,
2010), 4.
2 Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds.,
Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/17: Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919 / Politik als Beruf 1919 (Tübingen,
1992), 9.
3 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963),
599.
999
1000 Sebastian Conrad
FIGURE 2: The opening page of Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is En-
lightenment?” Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784, 481.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2012

Enlightenment in Global History 1001
analytical moves: First, the eighteenth-century cultural dynamics conventionally ren-

dered as “Enlightenment” cannot be understood as the sovereign and autonomous
accomplishment of European intellectuals alone; it had many authors in many
places. Second, Enlightenment ideas need to be understood as a response to cross-
border interaction and global integration. Beyond the conventional Europe-bound
notions of the progress of “reason,” engaging with Enlightenment has always been
a way to think comparatively and globally. And third, the Enlightenment did not end
with romanticism: it continued throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Cru-
cially, this was not merely a history of diffusion; the Enlightenment’s global impact
was not energized solely by the ideas of the Parisian philosophes. Rather, it was the

work of historical actors around the world—in places such as Cairo, Calcutta, and
Shanghai—who invoked the term, and what they saw as its most important claims,
for their own specific purposes.
Enlightenment, in other words, has a history—and this history matters; it is not
an entity, a “thing” that was invented and then disseminated. We must move beyond
a preoccupation with definitions that make the meaning of Enlightenment immu-
table. Ever since Immanuel Kant’s famous 1784 essay in the Berlinische Monats-
schrift, historians have pondered his question “Was ist Aufklärung?” (What is En-
lightenment?). The scholarly battle between attempts to define its substance and
efforts to legislate its limits has generated a massive bibliography.4 The responses
have been manifold, depending on time and place, but they have not yielded an
authoritative definition. Rather, they demonstrate just how malleable the concept
really was.
Take, for example, an allegory by the Japanese artist Sho៮ sai Ikkei in 1872 that
we can read as one possible answer to Kant, albeit with the benefit of almost a century
of hindsight. In his woodblock print titled Mirror of the Rise and Fall of Enlightenment
and Tradition, he depicts the conflicts and battles between the new and the old in
early Meiji Japan (1868–1912), with the new clearly gaining the upper hand. (See
Figure 3.) Not all of the items would have made it onto Kant’s list: the print shows
a Western umbrella defeating a Japanese paper parasol, a chair prevailing over a
traditional stool, a pen over a brush, brick over tile, short hair vanquishing the tra-
ditional chonmage hairstyle with the top of the head shaved, and so forth. The whole
process is driven by a steam locomotive, a towering symbol of the spirit of progress
that enthralled contemporary Japanese. And in the center of the print, a gas lamp
subdues a candle, thus more than symbolically enlightening all that seemed dark in
premodern Japan.
The crucial term in the title of the print is kaika, conventionally rendered as
“Enlightenment”; it is also translated as “civilization” and bears connotations of
social evolutionism.5 In this image, it is depicted less as a quasi-natural development,
as suggested by Kant—Enlightenment, he wrote, “is nearly inevitable, if only it is
granted freedom”—and more as a violent battle. Civilization/Enlightenment came
4 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in James Schmidt, ed.,
What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, Calif.,

1996), 58–64. See also the monumental Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors (Ox-
ford, 2002).
5 Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century
Japan (Honolulu, 2002), 40– 42.

not only with the power of conviction,

but also with the use of force; not only
with the promise of emancipation—
“mankind’s exit from its self-incurred
immaturity”—but also with “the mo-
bilization, on its behalf, of effective
means of physical coercion,” as post-
colonial scholars would put it yet a
century later.6
Equally significant is the inclusion

of an object in the parade of enlight-
ened modernity that would hardly
seem to belong there: a rickshaw. On
the right-hand side of the print, a man
labeled “rickshaw” is trampling on
another representing an oxcart, the
preferred conveyance of Tokugawa
elites. Unlike the other objects al-
luded to, the rickshaw was not im-
ported from Europe, but was in fact
an invention of the early Meiji period.
It nonetheless went on to become a
symbol of the new times, together
with the brick buildings of the Ginza,
៮ sai Ikkei, Kaika injun ko៮ hatsu kagami, 1872.
the trains, clocks, and artificial light. FWaseda
IGURE 3: Sho
University Library.
The depiction of the rickshaw is thus
a reminder that what was perceived as
new, civilized, or enlightened was in fact highly ambivalent and hybrid, the product
of local conditions and power structures more than the actualization of a blueprint
conceived in eighteenth-century Paris, Edinburgh, or Königsberg.
Emphasizing the variations in usage of “Enlightenment” around the world im-
plies a rejection of earlier narrow definitions of the term.7 Recent work on European
history has been increasingly skeptical of the idea that the Enlightenment represents
a coherent body of thought. Historians focus instead on the ambivalences and the
multiplicity of Enlightenment views. One strand of scholarship concerned with the
intellectual debates has made it clear that the various European Enlightenments
have to be situated in the specific contexts—Halle, Naples, Helsinki, and Utrecht,
among others—to which they were responding and within which they generated their
sometimes very different and centrifugal dynamics.8 John Pocock, in a monumental
6 Kant, “An Answer to the Question,” quotes from 59, 58; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 44.
7 For standard accounts of the Enlightenment, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,
2 vols. (New York, 1966–1969); Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995); Hugh Trevor-
Roper, History and the Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn., 2010); John W. Yolton, Pat Rogers, Roy
Porter, and Barbara Stafford, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992).
8 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols. (Turin, 1966–1990); Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich,
eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1982).


FIGURE 3, cont’d
work, has reconstructed the way in which Edward Gibbon engaged with many dif-
ferent “Enlightenments.”9 Jonathan Israel and others have significantly extended the
perspective backward in time and thereby complicated our understanding of the
Enlightenment.10 A second strand of scholarship has looked at the social history of
ideas and communication, thus further contributing to the idea of Enlightenment
heterogeneity. As soon as the focus is moved from lofty philosophical debates to the
material production of the public sphere and to the forms of popular mentalities,
the picture becomes much less uniform. The Enlightenment, broadly conceived, was
thus fragmented, socially and across gender lines.11 The entrenched dichotomy of
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment has also been called into question.12
9 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2011).
10 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750
(Oxford, 2001); Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man,
1670–1752 (Oxford, 2008).
11 Outram, The Enlightenment ; Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of
Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Past and Present 51 (May 1971): 81–115; Darnton, The Literary
Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A
Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996); Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott, eds.,
Women, Gender and Enlightenment (New York, 2005); Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age
of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009).
12 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Re-Description of Enlightenment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 125
(2004): 101–117; Robert E. Norton, “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 68, no. 4 (2007): 635–658.

And finally, the convenient fiction of the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason
has begun to recede. It has become increasingly clear that the Enlightenment cannot
simply be equated with secularization, but on the contrary was deeply embedded in
religious world views.13 Therefore, the stylization of the period as an age of disen-
chantment is itself a modern myth. Instead, popular social practices such as occult-
ism, mesmerism, and magic not only survived, but were enmeshed with elite culture,
empirical science, and the celebration of reason.14
At present, only a small—if vociferous—minority of historians maintain the unity
of the Enlightenment project.15 Most authors stress its plural and contested char-
acter: Enlightenments, or—as the French term, in wise anticipation, has framed it

since the eighteenth century—les lumières.16 It is no accident that the very term “En-
lightenment” was originally a rallying cry issued by the Catholic and royalist ad-
versaries of the French philosophes.17 The unity of the phenomenon was thus con-
stituted by its enemies. It became further entrenched when it was appropriated in
Latin America and Asia as a seemingly integrated and unified body of thought. “En-
lightenment” as a reified concept has, in other words, primarily been the slogan used
by historical actors to label a movement that should be either fought or imitated. The
Enlightenment was “a state of intellectual tension,” as Judith Shklar has phrased it,
“rather than a sequence of similar propositions.”18
Such a broad understanding is a helpful point of departure for moving us beyond
the different ways in which the current historiography has understood the Enlight-
enment’s role in global history. It may help us focus on the transnational condi-
tions that went into the making of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, mainly in
the Atlantic world, but elsewhere as well. Finally, it enables us to move the discussion
to the nineteenth century and trace the way in which these debates were extended
throughout Asia, as “Enlightenment” became a concern for social reformers across
the globe.19
13 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
(Princeton, N.J., 2008); Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization:
A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1061–1080.
14 Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical
Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 692–716. For a recent overview of the multifaceted approaches, see Karen
O’Brien, “The Return of the Enlightenment,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010):
1426–1435.
15 In particular, Jonathan Israel, and John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and
Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). Note that each author opts for a very different Enlightenment:
for Israel, the “real” Enlightenment is over by the 1740s, while for Robertson it only begins then.
16 Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century
Germany (Oxford, 1995). See also Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment ; Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Re-
ligion, and the Enigma of Secularization.”
17 Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the
Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 11.

18 Judith N. Shklar, “Politics and the Intellect,” in Stanley Hoffmann, ed., Political Thought and
Political Thinkers (Chicago, 1998), 94 –104, here 94.

19 Such a history could easily be extended into the twentieth century—and into our present—when
Marxists, dialecticians of the Enlightenment, postmodernists, and self-styled warriors in the “clash of
civilizations” continued to appropriate, and redefine, “the Enlightenment” for their own purposes. For
attempts to take stock, see Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment?
A Postmodern Question (Stanford, Calif., 2001); Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?; Graeme Garrard,
Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 2005). I will also bracket
the strands of anti-Enlightenment thinking, from Edmund Burke, Nietzsche, and Adorno to Gandhi and
Kita Ikki, and concentrate on the moments in which “Enlightenment” was invoked as a positive resource.

In privileging connections and synchronic contexts in space over long intellectual

continuities in time, a global history perspective has fundamental consequences for
our understanding of “Enlightenment.” Few other terms are as normatively charged
or as heavily invested with notions of European uniqueness and superiority, and few
have gained as much potency in contemporary political debates. Situating the history
of the Enlightenment in a global context will thus have unsettling and potentially
salutary implications. In the last instance, such a perspective de-centers the debate
on universalism that is so crucially linked to general notions of Enlightenment
thought. It was not so much the inbuilt universality of enlightened claims that en-
abled it to spread around the world. Rather, it was the global history of references

to the Enlightenment, of re-articulation and reinvention, under conditions of in-
equalities of power, that transformed multiple claims on Enlightenment into a ubiq-
uitous presence.
“ENLIGHTENMENT SCHOLARS,” DORINDA OUTRAM has acknowledged, “have yet to

come to grips with the issues of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the
creation of a global world.”20 To date, three metanarratives have dominated inter-
pretations of the role of the Enlightenment in world history. In general textbooks
and survey courses, the Enlightenment is usually portrayed as the apotheosis of uni-
versal reason at the expense of religion and traditional cosmologies, and as pro-
moting an encompassing rationalization of social and cultural life. It stands, in short,
for secular progress.21 The birth of the Enlightenment, according to the standard
version, was entirely and exclusively a European affair: only when it was fully fledged
was it then diffused around the globe. This diffusionist view has led to such questions
as why the emancipation of religious authority did not develop outside the West.22
The standard paradigm is based on a logic of repetition, deferral, and derivation.
“The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon,” Jürgen Osterhammel has said
in summarizing the prevailing view, “that had multifaceted effects around the world
but originated only in Europe.”23
Against this dominant view, a second interpretation has emerged, based on a
radically critical view of the Enlightenment. Scholars in the field of postcolonial
For these other trends, see Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian, “Japan’s Revolt against the West,”
in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge, 1998), 207–272; Mark Sedg-
wick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century
(Oxford, 2009).
20 Outram, The Enlightenment, 8.
21 For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American
Enlightenments (New York, 2004); Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment (London, 2009);
Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (Chicago, 2004);
John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy
(Princeton, N.J., 2008); Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical
Engagement (New York, 2004); Robert B. Louden, The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the
Enlightenment Still Elude Us (Oxford, 2007).
22 See, for example, Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West
(Oxford, 2008).
23 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Welten des Kolonialismus im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in Hans-Jürgen
Lüsebrink, ed., Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt (Göttingen, 2006),
19–36, quote from 19.

studies have focused on direct connections between Enlightenment thinking and

imperialism. This view shares with the dominant paradigm of benevolent modern-
ization the assumption that the Enlightenment was a uniquely European invention.
It also equates the Enlightenment with the “march of universal reason.” In addition,
it shares the diffusionist view of the first interpretation. But here the spread of the
Enlightenment’s message is seen not as emancipation but as deprivation.
Two different but related arguments are involved. The first is the hypothesis that
the expansionist desire of the West was rooted in Enlightenment thinking proper.
It was only a small step, according to this critique, between positing universal stan-
dards and deciding to intervene and to implement those standards, also by force,

under the auspices of a paternalistic civilizing mission. In one of the more extreme
statements, “the new forms of man-made violence unleashed by post-seventeenth-
century Europe in the name of Enlightenment values” are then seen to lead not only
to imperialism, but also to “the Third Reich, the Gulag, the two World Wars, and
the threat of nuclear annihilation.”24 The second argument is that the spread of
Enlightenment cosmology needs to be understood as a form of cultural imperialism
with the potential to eradicate alternative world views.25 Critical scholars have in-
terpreted the spread of Enlightenment tenets in the nineteenth century as a process
of coerced and oftentimes brutal diffusion, made possible and driven by highly asym-
metrical relations of power.26
The postcolonial critique has done much to help us understand the complexities
of knowledge transfer under conditions of colonialism. In particular, it has sharp-
ened our sensibility for the asymmetrical structures of exchange and urged us “to
write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force,
and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it.”27 A critical global history perspec-
tive that is not intended to reproduce a liberal ideology of globalization needs to
build on these approaches. But that does not imply that eighteenth-century Enlight-
enment debates already contained the seeds of imperialism; recent scholarship has
shown to what extent Enlightenment thinkers were engaged in a fundamental cri-
tique of imperialism and its underlying assumptions.28 And in its more radical for-
mulations, the postcolonial critique runs the danger of postulating incompatible re-
gimes of knowledge, civilizational orders between which dialogue is virtually
impossible. Such cultural essentialisms may prevent us from recognizing the extent
to which both allegedly pure indigenous traditions and seemingly universal forms of
Western knowledge are the result of complex processes of interaction.
Emancipatory modernization and cultural imperialism are both deeply diffusion-
ist and take the Enlightenment’s European origins for granted. What is more, they
24 Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Veena
Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Delhi, 1990), 90.
25 See Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 1990).
26 On this issue, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999). See also the contributions in Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment:
Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford, 2009).
27 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 43.
28 See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J., 2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn
to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J., 2006); Jürgen Oster-
hammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1998).

rely on the absence of Enlightenment elsewhere as one of their axiomatic tenets. In

recent years, however, the European claim to originality, to exclusive authorship
of the Enlightenment, has been called into question. Historians have begun to look
for parallels and analogies, for autochthonous processes of rationalization that
did not depend on developments in Europe but led to similar results. This quest
forms part of a larger scholarly debate on the origins of modernity. It was born out
of a desire to challenge diffusionist notions of modernization, and to acknowledge
the social dynamics that existed in many societies before their encounter with the
West. The aim was to replace older notions of traditional societies and “people
without history” with a broader understanding of the multifaceted “early moder-

nities.”29
While much of the scholarship that has attempted to de-Europeanize the En-
lightenment has been concerned with Latin America and Haiti, an especially pow-
erful claim to “early modernities” has been made in the context of Asian history. The
genealogy of these debates leads us back to such classic works as Robert Bellah’s
Tokugawa Religion (1957). In this book, he attempted to locate the origins of modern
Japan in certain strands of Confucian thinking, a “functional analogue to the Prot-
estant Ethic” that Max Weber singled out as the driving force behind Western capi-
talism.30 Bellah’s analysis set a precedent for an outpouring of works aimed at plu-
ralizing the notion of modernization. In the Islamic world, Peter Gran saw in eigh-
teenth-century Egypt a form of “cultural revival” in the making—specifically Islamic
origins of modernization long before Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.31 In his quest
for an independent “Islamic Enlightenment,” Reinhard Schulze has argued that the
“idea of autonomy of thought that through experience and reason arrives at truth
was formulated by a large number of Islamic thinkers” in the eighteenth century.32
In East Asia, Mark Elvin sees in eighteenth-century China “a trend towards seeing
fewer dragons and miracles, not unlike the disenchantment that began to spread
across the Europe of the Enlightenment.”33 Likewise, Joel Mokyr is convinced that
“some of the developments that we associate with Europe’s Enlightenment resemble
events in China remarkably.”34
These recent interventions provide welcome reminders that the image of non-
Western societies as stagnating and immobile is wide of the mark. The West did not
have a monopoly on cultural transformations and intellectual conflicts. Such an ar-
chaeology of independent seeds of the modern is frequently connected to the larger
project to revise modernization theory, and to replace it with the paradigm of early,
29 Early Modernities, Special Issue, Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998).
30 Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (New York, 1957), 2.
31 Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin, Tex., 1979).
32 Reinhard Schulze, “Was ist die islamische Aufklärung?,” Die Welt des Islams 36, no. 3 (1996):
276–325, here 309. See also Schulze, “Islam und andere Religionen in der Aufklärung,” Simon Dubnow
Institute Yearbook 7 (2008): 317–340.
33 Mark Elvin, “Vale atque ave,” in K. G. Robinson, ed., Joseph Needham: Science and Civilisation
in China, vol. 7: The Social Background, pt. 2: General Conclusions and Reflections (Cambridge, 2004),
xliv–xliii, here xl. See also the debate about the emergence of a “public sphere” in Qing China; e.g.,
Frederic Wakeman, “Boundaries of the Public Sphere in Ming and Qing China,” Daedalus 127, no. 3
(1998): 167–190.
34 Joel Mokyr, “The Great Synergy: The European Enlightenment as a Factor in Modern Economic
Growth,” in Wilfred Dolfsma and Luc Soete, eds., Understanding the Dynamics of a Knowledge Economy
(Cheltenham, 2006), 7– 41.

alternative, and multiple modernities.35 But this refashioning of modernization the-

ory is no less problematic. In the last instance, the paradigm of multiple modernities
also posits an identical telos—modern, capitalist society—even if this goal is
achieved not by the transformations inspired by contact with the West, but rather
on the basis of recently “rediscovered” indigenous cultural resources: a teleology of
universal disenchantment, realized in each society internally, but across the globe.
It is the specter of parallels—“the search for the Indian Vico, the Chinese Descartes,
the Arab Montaigne”—that continues to haunt the recent quest for alternative mo-
dernities.36 The emphasis is on the internal conditions and dynamics of change—and
on the “strange parallels” between widely separated parts of the globe.37 In this way,

the history of the modern age is constructed as an order of analogous, autopoietic
civilizations, thereby neglecting, and indeed effacing, the long history of entangle-
ments and systemic integration of the world. Reducing the complex and locally spe-
cific histories of cultural transformation to an indigenous prehistory of the modern
thus tends to obfuscate the larger structures and power asymmetries that brought
about the modern world.38
THESE THREE PARADIGMS—MODERNIZATION, postcolonialism, and multiple moderni-

ties—converge in their methodological bias toward national and civilizational
frames. Their many differences notwithstanding, they all rely on internalist logics in
their attempt to explain what was in fact a global phenomenon. In response to stim-
ulating recent scholarship, however, we need to place the various notions of “En-
lightenment” in the context of connectivities that shaped and reconfigured societies
globally. Referring to the issue of modernity, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has argued that
it is “historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from
one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought
hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set
35 On multiple modernities, see Multiple Modernities, Special Issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000);
Dominic Sachsenmaier and Jens Riedel with Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, eds., Reflections on Multiple Mo-
dernities: European, Chinese, and Other Interpretations (Leiden, 2002).
36 Sheldon Pollock, “Pretextures of Time,” History and Theory 46, no. 3 (2007): 366–383, quote from
380. This is true even for one of the most fascinating examples of recent scholarship, Textures of Time:
Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (Delhi, 2001), by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman,
and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The authors mine a variety of genres to locate history-writing in the South
Asian tradition and thus refute the standard assumption that in the Indian context, a historical con-
sciousness arrived only with the British. Theirs is an exemplary work of philological scholarship and
intellectual vision, and it vividly demonstrates the complexity and dynamics of South Indian societies
before 1800. At times, however, the authors do not refrain from inserting this new sense of history into
the familiar language of individualization, rationalization, secularization, and “the arrival of a certain
kind of ‘modernity’ in the far south” (264). It should be noted that some contributions to the debate
on “early modernities” do not embrace the teleological outlook that seems inherent in its label. A good
overview on the debate can be found in Lynn A. Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
37 Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, 2003–2004). See also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006), 118–121; Goody,
Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, 2009).
38 For a critique, see Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boul-
der, Colo., 2007); Timothy Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minne-
apolis, 2000), xi–xvii.

of diverse phenomena.”39 From such a vantage point, it is less instructive to search

for alleged origins—European or otherwise—than to focus on the global conditions
and interactions in which the “Enlightenment” emerged.
Debates about Enlightenment were the product of related attempts to come to
terms with a global situation. They were conducted within a space that transcended
the boundaries of Western Europe, and the circulation of concepts and ideas fol-
lowed a variety of trajectories.40 These debates were linked across borders, but they
did not unfold everywhere or equally. The trajectory of interactions was not indis-
criminate, but was conditioned by the larger structures of the world economy and
political powers such as the British Empire. Invoking the “Enlightenment” presup-

posed some relation with Europe, even when references were primarily rhetorical
and strategic. Connections reached beyond the integrated Atlantic world, but the
speed and density of contacts was highly uneven; while Madras was part of multiple
networks in the Indian Ocean and beyond, Korea, the “hermit kingdom,” aimed at
isolation, and intellectual transfers reached social elites in port cities earlier than
elsewhere, if at all.41
Related to these different forms of cultural interaction, a spate of exciting new
scholarship has resituated the emergence of Enlightenment thinking. So far, most
of these studies have addressed a particular literature, while a synthetic picture has
yet to emerge. But drawing on this work allows Enlightenment debates to be read
in a context that transcended Europe. The globality of eighteenth-century Enlight-
enment needs to be located on two levels: it was a product of, and a response to,
global conjunctures; and it was the work of many authors in different parts of the
world.
The production of knowledge in the late eighteenth century was structurally em-
bedded in larger global contexts, and much of the debate about Enlightenment in
Europe can be understood as a response to the challenges of global integration. The
non-European world was always present in eighteenth-century intellectual discus-
sions. No contemporary genre was more popular and more influential than the trav-
elogue.42 Accounts of the Hurons in North America, of the Polynesian Omai who
was taken to England by Captain Cook in 1774, and of the Mandarins at the Chinese
court reached a broad readership and found their way into popular culture. Most
direct was the impact of the idealization of the reign of the Qing emperors Kangxi
(1661–1722) and Qianlong (1736–1795); China was posited as the incarnation of an
39 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–
1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104, here 99–100.

40 See James E. Vance, Jr., Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation since
the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore, 1990); Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-
Century History (Princeton, N.J., 2011); Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens; Suraiya Faroqhi, The
Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London, 2004).
41 See C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989);
David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840
(New York, 2009); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Oxford, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009).
42 Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and
Ethnology (London, 2007); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance
to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn., 1994).

enlightened and meritocratic society—and instrumentalized for criticisms of abso-

lutist rule in Europe.43
But the appropriation of the world was not confined to its function as a mirror.
In many ways, central elements of the cultural transformations that are customarily
summarized as “Enlightenment” need to be understood as a reaction to the global
entanglements of the times. The expansion of Europe’s horizons that had begun in
the Age of Discovery and culminated in the voyages of James Cook and Louis de
Bougainville resulted in the incorporation of the “world” into European systems of
knowledge. In particular, the emergence of the modern sciences can be seen as an
attempt to come to terms with global realities. Further examples include the dis-

cussions about the character of humanity following the interventions of Bartolomé
de las Casas; the idea of the law of nations and an international world order as
proposed by Hugo Grotius; the ethnological and geographical explorations of the
globe; the comparative study of language and religion; the theories of free trade and
the civilizing effects of commerce; and the notions of race, on the one hand, and
cosmopolitanism, on the other. The perception of an increasingly interlinked globe
posed a cognitive challenge that was gradually met by reorganizing knowledge and
the order of the disciplines.44
On this level, the worldliness of the European Enlightenment was not limited to
references to distant places, instrumentalized essentially as mirrors of the Self—such
as Montesquieu’s imagined Orient in his lettres persanes. Neither is it helpful to cal-
culate balances of influence, a kind of cultural import-export sheet that weighs the
diffusion of Occidental culture against borrowing from the East—porcelain and tea,
but also ideas of a just life. Instead, we need to understand the production of knowl-
edge in the late eighteenth century as fundamentally tied to conditions of globality:
as a specific way of incorporating the world in the context of the expansion of Eu-
ropean trade relations, the annexation of military and commercial bases and col-
onies, and the cartographic mapping of the globe. Crucially, these debates did more
than merely express the fact of entanglement as such; rather, the particular modes
and structures of integration affected the terms that were employed and the theories
that were developed. Geopolitical hierarchies, in other words, found their way into
43 D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md., 1999);
Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1999); Julia Ching
and Willard Gurdon Oxtoby, eds., Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlightenment
(Rochester, N.Y., 1992); Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens, 271–348; J. J. Clarke, Oriental En-
lightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London, 1997). See also Humberto
Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore, 2012).
44 Representative works of this vast literature include Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert
Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Larry
Wolff and Marco Cipolloni, eds., The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 2007); Lauren
Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge,
2009); István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Per-
spective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book
That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s “Religious Ceremonies of the World” (Cambridge, Mass, 2010);
Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge,
1997); Hans Erich Bödeker, Clorinda Donato, and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Discourses of Tolerance and
Intolerance in the European Enlightenment (Toronto, 2009); William Max Nelson, “Making Men: En-
lightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010):
1364 –1394; Franz Leander Fillafer and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Cosmopolitanism and the German En-
lightenment,” in Helmut Walser Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford,
2011), 119–143.

the very content of the vocabulary that was devised to think the world. The dichot-
omies of civilization and barbarism, as well as the discovery of a progressive regime
of time and the stadial theories of history, for example, responded not only to the
broadening of horizons, but specifically to emerging European hegemony—or, more
precisely, to what Europeans perceived as such, even though their traders were still
complying with local rules in Asia, and Lord Macartney was compelled to kneel in
front of the Chinese emperor.
Enlightenment debates were thus always political moments, never just intellec-
tual appropriations of an abstract world. The invention of “Eastern Europe,” for
example, not only represented the stages of civilization prescribed by conjectural

history, but was closely tied to power differentials on the Continent.45 And when
Hegel defined freedom in terms of master and slave, he reformulated an Aristotelian
ontology that should also be placed within the long history of relentless expropriation
and slavery that shaped the Atlantic economy.46 The mapping of the world was sit-
uated in, and corresponded to, the asymmetrical power relationships that structured
the integration of the globe.
The intellectual discussions of eighteenth-century Europe not only were situated
in a global context, they were also received, appropriated, and indeed made globally.
The history of Enlightenment debates was a history of exchanges and entanglements,
of translations and quotations, and of the co-production of knowledge. “Whose En-
lightenment was it, anyway?” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has asked, and this question
can easily be extended beyond the Atlantic world.47 The Enlightenment, as recent
scholarship suggests, was the work of many actors and the product of global inter-
actions.
In particular, historians have underscored the global gathering of facts and in-
formation and the co-production of modern knowledge regimes. Historians of sci-
ence have contributed to a broad view of the transregional networks and cross-bor-
der circulations that fed into Enlightenment science and world views.48 The
geographic reach of these networks was broad, ranging from Latin America all the
way to Tibet, Japan, and Oceania.49 But in contrast to an earlier literature that was
based on a diffusionist reading of scientific encounters, historians have begun to
emphasize the degree to which “scientific knowledge [is made] through co-construc-
tive processes of negotiation of skilled communities and individuals” in many parts
of the world, “resulting as much in the emergence of new knowledge forms as in a
45 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
(Stanford, Calif., 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
46 Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–865.
47 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies,
and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 266.
48 See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the Eng-
lish Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994); Richard Drayton, Nature’s
Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000);
David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999);
Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds., Science in the Spanish and
Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, Calif., 2009).
49 See John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, 2005);
Gordon T. Stewart, Journey to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism, and the British Encounter with Tibet,
1774 –1904 (Cambridge, 2009); Grant K. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, 1600–1853 (Richmond, 2000).

reconfiguration of existing knowledges and specialized practices on both sides of the

encounter.”50
This literature suggests that to a large degree, the production of knowledge in
the Age of Enlightenment was not confined to the academy and the laboratory, but
came out of forms of “open air science” in a multiplicity of contact zones in Latin
America, Africa, and Asia. Circulation itself emerged as a central ingredient of
knowledge formation. To be sure, these relationships were by no means equal;
economically, politically, and militarily, the balance was skewed, usually—but not
always—in favor of Europeans. But the asymmetrical conditions of knowledge pro-
duction did not preclude the active cooperation of a wide variety of actors. “Im-

portant parts of what passes off as ‘Western’ science,” concludes Kapil Raj, “were
actually made outside the West.”51
The philosophical and political vocabulary of the Enlightenment was also a global
creation. In many cases, this was a result of the purposeful reformulation of a par-
ticular body of thought and practice associated with the “Enlightenment” in Europe.
Thus our attention shifts from the salons in Paris, Berlin, and Naples to the con-
ditions under which cultural elites in Caracas and Valparaiso, in Madras and Cairo,
engaged with its claims. Engagement with Enlightenment propositions reached well
beyond Western Europe—from Greece and Russia, where Catherine II refashioned
herself as an “enlightened monarch” intent on correcting the “irrational” course of
history, to Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American Declaration of Indepen-
dence—a document of global reach, “an instrument, pregnant with our own and the
fate of the world,” as Thomas Jefferson contemplated in retrospect.52 In cultural
centers such as Lima and Bogotá, small groups of Creole “Enlighteners” (ilustrados)
engaged with the ideas of European philosophers while also mining the earlier works
of indigenous elites in their quest to challenge crucial assumptions of European
Enlightenment rationality and the Eurocentrism of European theories about Latin
America.53
The late-eighteenth-century reference to Enlightenment ideas was not confined
to the Atlantic world. In other places as well, European expansion set in motion a
confrontation with claims for the validity of Enlightenment propositions. In Egypt,
50 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia
and Europe, 1650–1900 (Delhi, 2006), 223.

51 Ibid. For similar arguments, see Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science:
A Social History of Science and Culture in Colonial India (New Delhi, 2004); Thomas R. Trautmann,
Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (New Delhi, 2006).
52 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007),
1. See also Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Hampshire, 2008);
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the
American Revolution (New York, 1992); Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically
about the Age of Reason (Chicago, 2007).
53 Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. See also Neil Safier, Measuring
the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008); and for an early statement,
Edmundo O’Gorman, El proceso de la invención de América (Mexico City, 1958). For the imperial and
Atlantic contexts, see Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review
113, no. 2 (April 2008): 319–340; J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America,
1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006); A. Owen Aldridge, ed., The Ibero-American Enlightenment (Ur-
bana, Ill., 1971); Renan Silva, Los ilustrados de Nueva Granada, 1760–1808: Genealogı́a de una comu-
nidad de interpretación (Medellı́n, 2002).

for example, Napoleon’s expedition served as a trigger for social transformations that
harked back to debates about inner-Islamic reform, but now were also legitimized
by referring to the authority of the Enlightenment.54 In India, it was Tipu Sultan, the
ruler of Mysore and arch-enemy of the British, who fashioned himself an enlightened
monarch: he was one of the founding members of the (French) Jacobin Club in
Seringapatam, had planted a liberty tree, and asked to be addressed as “Tipu
Citoyen.”55
Analytically, it is important to recognize that the widespread engagement with
these terms and ideas did not leave them unaffected. As actors in different situations
and moments mobilized concepts for their own concerns, their re-articulations set

in motion a process of displacement. These reformulations were the product of par-
ticular historical situations, but their impact went beyond their local effects. Mo-
ments of appropriation were thus frequently instances of programmatic radicaliza-
tion. The most powerful example of this kind of redefinition was the revolution in
Haiti (Saint-Domingue) in 1791, only two years after the fall of the Bastille. As
Laurent Dubois phrased it, “The democratic possibilities imperial powers would
claim they were bringing to the colonies had in fact been forged, not within the
boundaries of Europe, but through the struggles over rights that spread throughout
the Atlantic Empires.”56
The most radical revolution of the Age of Revolution had many causes, chief
among them structural conflicts in a slaveholder society and the transformations of
the Atlantic economy. At the same time, the French Revolution and the symbolic
power of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 were important reference
points. The spokespersons for the rebellious slaves and the gens de couleur frequently
formulated their claims in the language of republican rights.57 As important as the
transfer of ideas was, the rebellion was not just a distant and peripheral effect of the
French Revolution. As recent work has amply demonstrated, it had world-historical
significance of its own. It was part of the revolution of the public sphere that spanned
the Atlantic and beyond, extending to social groups beyond the bourgeois European
elites.58 Most importantly, it reframed the parameters of the debate on human rights,
as—the long history of enlightened critique of slavery notwithstanding—the Assem-
blée nationale in Paris had explicitly denied the extension of civil rights to slaves.
The eventual transfer of the rights of man to the slave population “did challenge the
ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlighten-
54 Dror Ze’evi, “Back to Napoleon? Thoughts on the Beginning of the Modern Era in the Middle
East,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19, no. 1 (2004): 73–94. See also Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose
Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berke-
ley, Calif., 2002); Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, 2007); Irene A.
Bierman, ed., Napoleon in Egypt (Reading, 2003).
55 Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain
(Delhi, 1997), chap. 5.

56 Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean,
1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 4 –5.

57 Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville,
Tenn., 1990); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 2004).
58 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and
the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2001); Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott, eds.,
Origins of the Black Atlantic (New York, 2009).

ment.”59 The notion of humanité as it was employed in metropolitan France was

based on a largely abstract concern with natural rights; only its refashioning in the
Caribbean turned the appeal to “humanity” into the claim with universal reach that
it was retrospectively taken to have always been. The universalization of the rights
of man—nothing less was at stake—was thus the result of a circulation of ideas and
their re-articulation under colonial conditions.60
Finally, the appropriation of concepts and ideas needs to be situated in a broad
context of transnational entanglements in which transfers from Europe were only
one factor, albeit an important one. The global remaking of Enlightenment claims
was a result of the hybridization of ideas and practices. As the example of Haiti

shows, the various forms of appropriation were part of complex transcultural flows.
Radical claims as formulated in Paris were received and mobilized in Haiti, for ex-
ample by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the slave rebellion. Toussaint had
read the strident critique of European colonialism in Raynal’s multivolume Histoire
des deux Indes, and was particularly impressed by Raynal’s prediction of the coming
of a “Black Spartacus.”61 But Europe was not the sole source of inspiration. Two-
thirds of the slaves had been born in Africa and came from diverse political, social,
and religious backgrounds. This enabled them to draw on specific notions of kingdom
and just government from Western and Central Africa, and to employ religious prac-
tices such as voodoo for the formation of revolutionary communities.62 The revo-
lution in Haiti was the result of the triangular trade in the Atlantic world, not only
in goods and laborers, but in practices and ideas as well. Events in Haiti, for their
part, forced the French National Convention to abolish slavery in 1794. The ripples
of this transnational event were again palpable in both Americas, and remained an
influential reference globally.63 The processes of mixing and hybridization were char-
acteristic—and indeed constitutive—of the career of Enlightenment ideas and prac-
tices. The negotiation of different intellectual and cultural resources was a normal
and integral part of this history.
ENLIGHTENMENT WAS MORE THAN a self-contained moment in European history. As

recent scholarship has demonstrated, it was produced in a regime of global syn-
59 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995),
82.
60 See most explicitly Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical
Enlightenment (Charlottesville, Va., 2008).

61 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938;
repr., New York, 1963), 25. The claim has been disputed by Louis Sala-Molins, Les misères des Lumières:
Sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris, 1992); but see also Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism
and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, N.C., 1999); Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethink-
ing the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–14.
62 See David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution
and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997); John K. Thornton, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King
of Kongo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2
(1993): 181–214; Bernard Camier and Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaire, ou le théâtre des Lumières
dans l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 54, no. 4 (2007): 39–69.
63 David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C.,
2001); Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
(Durham, N.C., 2004); Doris L. Garraway, ed., Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution
in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville, Va., 2008).

chronicity. But it did not stop there. Moving beyond that literature, it is possible to
trace the trajectory of Enlightenment through the nineteenth century. A case can be
made, then, for a long history of Enlightenment. Scholars have so far ignored this
possibility, assuming that the development of the Enlightenment substantially came
to an end around 1800, if not before, and that it resurfaced as an object of scholarly
concern only in the 1930s and 1940s.64 But this chronology is Eurocentric, in that it
erases the vibrant and heated contestations of “Enlightenment” in the rest of the
world, particularly in Asia. Crucially, these debates should not be seen as merely the
aftereffects of a foundational moment. Instead, the various reformulations of En-
lightenment standards were part of its continuous history.65

Such a claim may immediately evoke two objections. Was this still “the Enlight-
enment,” and are we justified in subsuming a variety of debates in places such as
India, the Philippines, and Korea under that rubric? And if so, was this not essentially
a process of diffusion, a process by which a template of thoughts and ideas was
transferred from Europe to the rest of the world? This second concern would also
suggest that there is not much to learn about the Enlightenment by following the
history of its dissemination.
Let us bracket the latter issue for a moment and address the question of the
Enlightenment’s substance. Do nineteenth-century global appropriations of Enlight-
enment shed light on “Enlightenment itself”? This question is wrongly put, as it
assumes an essential and firmly fixed Enlightenment. Such an axiomatic definition
forecloses every possibility of global perspectives, as it reads all variations as deficit
and lack. But Enlightenment was not a thing; rather, we should ask what historical
actors did with it. Enlightenment should not be confused with an analytical category.
It was primarily a concept used to formulate and legitimize particular claims. “Schol-
ars should not try for a slightly better definition,” Frederick Cooper has said in his
discussion of the term “modernity.” “They should instead listen to what is being said
in the world.” Thus, if Enlightenment is “what they hear, they should ask how it is
being used and why.”66
Indeed, when social reformers around the globe tapped into Enlightenment rhet-
oric, they were able to filter a multiplicity of claims through its vocabulary. For some,
the concept denoted a commitment to reason, to “improvement,” and some kind of
emancipation, however differently defined. But “Enlightenment” was also employed
to dismantle tariffs and to create private property in land; it was invoked to legitimize
free love and to allow the remarriage of widows; it was quoted in support of the
reform of penal systems and spawned discussions on national character; it was cited
as authorizing the introduction of department stores, the use of underwear, the
spread of pocket watches and of horizontal script, and the introduction of the West-
64 Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris, 1935); Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam, 1947). See also
Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?
65 For stimulating works that project intellectual history into a global context, see Christopher L.
Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France,
and the United States (Durham, N.C., 2008); and Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History:
Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008). See also Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing,
eds., Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham, N.C., 2009).
66 Frederick Cooper, “Modernity,” in Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 113–149, here 115.

ern calendar. “Whenever we open our mouths,” confessed the Japanese reformer
Tsuda Mamichi in the 1870s, “it is to speak of ‘enlightenment.’ ”67
This implies that over the course of its global career, the label “Enlightenment”
became to some degree detachable from the notions and ideas with which it was first
associated. Thus, for example, the secularizing impulse of the label could be turned
on its head: “There is no religion in the world today that promotes enlightenment
as does Christianity,” Tsuda insisted in words that would have elicited a scowl from
Voltaire and Diderot in the eighteenth century—and from Jonathan Israel in the
twenty-first.68 This should not simply be discarded as a cultural misunderstanding.
We cannot understand the global manifestations of Enlightenment by comparing

them with an abstract blueprint, but only by looking at the concrete constellations
in which “Enlightenment” was invoked—as authority, goal, or warning. It is less
important, in other words, to compare the demands of, say, Philippine ilustrados
diachronically with tenets of eighteenth-century Europe than it is to understand what
labeling them as part of a Philippine “Enlightenment” implied in the closing years
of the nineteenth century.
As dazzling as the variety of references was, it was not indiscriminate. When
social reformers tapped into its vocabulary, references were sometimes explicitly to
“Enlightenment” and vernacular equivalents of the term. But we do not always find
that word. Once a set of ideas had been established and associated with the En-
lightenment, it was also possible to appropriate it elsewhere without using the same
vocabulary. In these cases, too, reformist elites drew on a specific group of ideas,
texts, and authors, frequently sparked by translation movements of various kinds.
Works by figureheads of the movement—Rousseau and Voltaire, Adam Smith and
Benjamin Franklin, but also Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao—were made avail-
able to local audiences through publications and translations. Thus we can treat
these debates about improvement and change as related but not converging phe-
nomena—even if the labels attached to them ranged from “Enlightenment,” as in
East Asia, to “Renaissance,” as in Bengal and the Arab world.
Nor was the chronology of these debates accidental. The timing typically cor-
responded to moments in which local crises were linked to the deep social trans-
formations triggered by the integration of these societies into the world economy and
imperialist order.69 In such moments of domestic and external urgency, proponents
of change linked their claims for social renewal both to traditional resources and to
the newly available Enlightenment discourse in order to link their programs of social
reform to the authority of European power. In parts of India, in the context of the
self-styled “Bengal Renaissance,” tenets of the post-Enlightenment reform era were
discussed as early as the 1820s. Rammohan Roy, the most influential actor in the
Bengali engagement with the West, fused different traditions in his project of social
reform that made him a proponent of a “religion of reason,” as Friedrich Wilhelm
67 Cited in Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi
(Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 147.

68 Cited in William Reynolds Braisted, ed., Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 39.

69 For the fusion of internal and external crises, see Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World
History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1034 –1060.

Schelling called him.70 In the Ottoman Empire, the texts of the French philosophes
emerged as an important point of reference in the 1830s, while the introduction of
these classics into public debate had to wait until mid-century. As a result, Young
Ottomans such as Namik Kemal legitimized their cause by referencing the works of
Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.71 In Egypt, Rifa al-Tahtawi was nominated in
1841 to head the translation bureau (Tercüme Odasi) and oversaw the publication
of hundreds of European works in the Arabic language.72 In 1870s Japan, the journal
Meiroku zasshi introduced crucial new terms such as “rights,” “freedom,” and “econ-
omy” to a larger public, while Fukuzawa Yukichi’s bestselling Conditions in the West
discussed Western institutions, customs, and material culture.73 In Qing China, Yan

Fu emerged as the most prominent translator—of works by Thomas Huxley, Adam
Smith, Herbert Spencer, Montesquieu, and others—since the 1890s.74
As a consequence of this shifting chronology, debates did not always focus on the
same issues. This was primarily because the local contexts in which the term was
invoked changed considerably, from 1820s Bengal to 1890s Korea. Moreover, the
reference itself changed, too. “Enlightenment” did not mean the same thing in the
1830s that it had in the eighteenth century, and by the 1880s its connotations had
been further transformed. As Enlightenment ideas were articulated across the globe,
they were gradually fused with other strands of thinking, some of which had originally
been formulated against them. Particularly important was the impact of liberalism,
of utilitarianism along the lines of John Stuart Mill, of Darwinian and Spencerian
evolutionism, and of positivist philosophy as outlined by Comte, often popularized
by global bestsellers such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, and the more specialized
handbooks by authors such as Frédéric Bastiat and Henry Wheaton. As a result of
this merging of vocabularies, the conceptual content of “Enlightenment” changed,
too. The focus now was less on individual consciousness liberated from religious
fetters and state oppression, and more on collective and national projects of tech-
nical and material improvement. By the 1880s, an unequivocal notion of material
progress was firmly entrenched and had lost the sense of ambivalence, and of the
possibility of nonlinear alternatives, that had still been present in the eighteenth
century. And as paradoxical as it might seem, the inclusion and grafting of different
70 Schelling cited in Bruce Carlisle Robertson, Raja Rammohan Roy: The Father of Modern India
(Delhi, 1995), 71. See also David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics
of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969); Lynn Zastoupil, Rammohun Roy and the
Making of Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2010); C. A. Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Con-
stitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (2007): 25– 41. For the 1840s
and 1850s, see also Brian A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidya៮ sa៮ gar and Cultural Encounter in
Bengal (Calcutta, 1996).
71 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, N.J.,
1963); Christoph Herzog, “Aufklärung und Osmanisches Reich: Annäherung an ein historiographisches
Problem,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig, ed., Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung (Göttingen, 2010), 291–321;
Dagmar Glass, Der Muqtataf und seine Öffentlichkeit: Aufklärung, Räsonnement und Meinungsstreit in der
frühen arabischen Zeitschriftenkommunikation, 2 vols. (Würzburg, 2004).
72 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1983); Roxanne L.
Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.,
2006).
73 Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi; Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings
of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge, 1964).

74 Benjamin I. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.,
1964).

FIGURE 4: In the Ottoman Empire, reference to the tenets of the Enlightenment emerged as an important
element of political discourse in the 1830s. From mid-century onward, Young Ottomans such as Namik Kemal
(1840–1888) legitimized their cause by citing the works of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, which were
beginning to be translated. Consequently, Kemal was dubbed the “Voltaire . . . of this nation” by the Ottoman
journalist Ebüzziya Revfik in 1903. However, Kemal drew on a variety of intellectual resources in his quest
for social and political reform. As his response to Ernest Renan’s indictment of Islamic religion in 1893 made
abundantly clear, his version of Enlightenment was not a poor copy of French debates in the eighteenth century,
but an original position responding to the exigencies of Ottoman society in the late nineteenth century.

strands of thought helped turn the many Enlightenments of the eighteenth century
into the singular “hyperreal” Enlightenment of the 1880s.75 It came to be embraced
by a wide variety of actors. Many of them used the terms “Enlightenment” and “civ-
ilization” almost interchangeably; at times, they avoided both and merely employed
a vocabulary of reform. In Japan, for example, the term keimo៮ (“Enlightenment”)
increasingly gave way to kaika, with its strong overtones of social evolutionism.76
The equivalence of civilization and Enlightenment points to the degree to which
the latter had changed meaning; it was now primarily a gauge for the relative geo-
political position of a given nation in the global arena. This, to be sure, was not
entirely new; thinking in stages was one of the ways in which eighteenth-century

Enlightenment thinkers translated cultural difference into a language of progress.
But while this idea coexisted with other notions of being “enlightened”—the prog-
ress of reason, the public sphere, secular world views—by the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Enlightenment was increasingly inserted into a narrative of evolutionism and
the advance of civilization. It was thus transformed from a process into a currency—
some had more of it, and some needed tutors to give it to them. This was, by the
way, also the case in Europe, where the culture wars that pitted liberal states against
the churches were represented as a “great battle” between the light of the Enlight-
enment and the darkness of the papal Middle Ages, and where Enlightenment in the
guise of the civilizing mission rhetoric and international law served as the ideological
prop of imperialism.77
But this transformation was even more pronounced outside of Europe. The rhet-
oric of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” the potent slogan in Japan, Korea, and
China, was widely employed in an attempt to come to terms with the challenges of
globality. The notion always encompassed a positioning in the world, as in Fukuzawa
Yukichi’s influential triptych of barbarism, semi-Enlightenment, and civilization. In
many societies, the prevailing view held that Enlightenment was not specifically Eu-
ropean, but rather a universal standard. Western societies might well have appeared
superior at the time, but that had not always been the case, nor would it be in the
future. “Europe which in terms of enlightenment had lagged behind us was now
ahead of us,” the Korean newspaper Hwangsŏng sinmun declared in 1899.78
To speak of Enlightenment was thus to think globally—and the urgency with
which Enlightenment tenets were invoked was related to differentials of power.
Characteristically, the connection between the local and the global was mediated by
three fundamental ways in which the nineteenth-century world was transformed: the
integration of the world economy, the emergence of a system of nation-states, and
the consolidation of imperialism. These large processes established a global frame-
work that seemed to imbue Enlightenment vocabulary with universal exchange value,
and generated resonances between otherwise disparate locations.79 They worked
75 In this use of the term “hyperreal,” I follow Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
76 Alistair Swale, The Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji Conservatism (Richmond,
2000); Howland, Translating the West, 40– 42.
77 See Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nine-
teenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford, Calif.,
2004); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law,
1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2001).
78 Cited in Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York, 2002), 83.
79 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984), 147, speaks

thus as enabling contexts and structured the way in which Enlightenment ideas were
used. More importantly, the discourse of “Enlightenment” was employed as a means
to negotiate these shifting moments and to come to terms with the challenges of
living in a global world.
First, the emergence of a worldwide system of markets and capital accumulation
not only synchronized nations around the world, but also made reforms aimed at the
gradual incorporation of societies into capitalist structures seem a historical neces-
sity. Many of the actors who formulated their goals in Enlightenment rhetoric were
aiming to transform society under the auspices of liberalism and market integration.
Calls for Enlightenment were frequently linked to demands for new forms of taxation

and the introduction of the gold standard, for the liberalization of customs, the re-
gime of free trade, and the opening of ports. Projects to enlighten the populace and
to transform an idle population into a diligent workforce were thus also claims to
participation in the global economy.
Second, the incorporation of nations into the international state system was ac-
companied by strategies of nation-building couched in Enlightenment terms. The
great “reorganization” (tanzimat ) of the Ottoman Empire after 1839, the activities
of the “Independence Club” in Korea in 1896, and the Guangxu reforms in China
in 1898 were all attempts to cluster various strands of reformist thinking into a com-
prehensive response to the deepening political and social crisis of the polity. Re-
formers typically used Enlightenment rhetoric in two ways. On the one hand, the new
language was employed internally, in an effort to railroad the populace into “civ-
ilized” ways of comportment, participation, and work: the civilizing mission within.
On the other hand, it was directed against the threat of colonization, one of the
central concerns of nation-building. In 1897, King Chulalongkorn of Siam, one of
the few non-colonized countries in Asia, took an extended trip to Europe so that he
could see firsthand everything—from battleships and fire engines to botanical gar-
dens and hospitals—that made societies “enlightened” and “civilized.”80 In the Span-
ish colony of the Philippines, self-styled “Enlighteners” invoked the authority of
reason and natural law in their nationalistic critique of Spanish rule and the influence
of Spanish missionaries. In Java, Raden Ajeng Kartini, one of the few audible voices
of women in the political public sphere in Asia, addressed two memoranda to the
Dutch colonial government in 1903 in which she drew on Enlightenment principles
to call for modern education and social emancipation for Javanese girls and
women.81
Third, invoking “Enlightenment” was part and parcel of strategies to position the
country within the larger imperialist order. Enlightenment rhetoric, in other words,
could be used as a tool of empire. For expansionist Japan, the cosmology of different
stages of civilization and the differing chronologies of progress were crucial elements
in justifying colonial forays into East Asia. In a famous essay, Fukuzawa Yukichi
of “two interdependent master processes,” to which we must add imperialism as the hegemonic mode
of interaction.
80 Niels P. Petersson, “König Chulalongkorns Europareise 1897: Europäischer Imperialismus, sym-
bolische Politik und monarchisch-bürokratische Modernisierung,” Saeculum 52, pt. 2 (2001): 297–328.
81 Barbara N. Ramusack, “Women and Gender in South and Southeast Asia,” in Bonnie G. Smith,
ed., Women’s History in Global Perspective, 3 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 2005), 2: 101–138.

FIGURE 5: King Chulalongkorn of Siam (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) continued the modernizing reforms that his
father, King Mongkut, had initiated. After study tours to neighboring countries such as Dutch Java and the
British colonies of Singapore, India, and Burma, he embarked on a trip to Europe in 1897 and “saw that there
is more to do than there is time.” He meticulously noted the differences between England and Russia, Hungary
and Switzerland (“similar to Java, but 100 times prettier”), Italy, Austria, and Portugal (“I have not seen a
country worse than this”). His political and social reforms went beyond the introduction of Western technology
and extended to the bureaucracy and the legal system, while his fusion of European ideas of just government
with Theravada Buddhist concepts of kingship was to ensure his position of absolutist ruler and enlightened
monarch at the same time. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, Washington, D.C., LC-DIG-ggbain-05360.

emphasized that “our country cannot afford to wait for the enlightenment of our
neighbours and to co-operate in building Asia up. Rather, we should leave their
ranks to join the camp of the civilized countries of the West [datsua nyu៮ o].” There-
fore, he famously concluded, Japan should treat China and Korea “as the Westerners
do.”82 This was nothing less than an explicit call for colonization.
In all of these cases, the notion of “Enlightenment” helped historical actors to
think globally, and to make a complex world legible. In the face of local, regional,
and global challenges, they articulated their claims with Enlightenment discourse not
only because it was a lingua franca that promised to endow their ideas with universal
validity, but also because “Enlightenment” had been transformed, not least through

their efforts, into a language of global positioning. The term was thus employed in
ways that departed from earlier usages—but it would be shortsighted to ignore this
longer history. “Every reading by later generations of past conceptualizations alters
the spectrum of possible transmitted meanings,” Reinhart Koselleck reminds us.
“The original contexts of concepts change; so, too, do the original or subsequent
meanings carried by concepts.”83 This process is particularly salient from a global
history perspective: the trajectory of “Enlightenment” and the various ways in which
it is used need to be understood as part of its conceptual development.
GIVEN THESE FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATIONS, whether this was more than a history
of diffusion may by now appear to be a rhetorical question. But it is worth dwelling
on it for a moment, as we need to recognize that conceptual change was not only
the result of changing geopolitical contexts, and of European expansion in the Age
of Imperialism. Instead, non-European actors increasingly took the lead in pro-
nouncing claims to equality and to Enlightenment promises.84 Rather than a process
of diffusion, the longer history of Enlightenment was the result of its constant re-
invention.
We may speak thus of the global co-production of Enlightenment knowledge.
This process took many forms, but two mechanisms are of particular salience here.
While the rhetoric of Enlightenment remained vested with the authority of European
power, it was merged with other cultural traditions and increasingly detached from
its sole association with Europe. First, the mixing and hybridization of intellectual
resources was characteristic of any attempt to connect the assumed universalism of
Enlightenment notions with the specificities of their local manifestation. This pattern
was more pronounced in the Asian contexts of the nineteenth century, as endog-
enous intellectual resources had greater weight, autonomy, and staying power in Asia
than in the Atlantic world. The merging with traditions owed also to the strategic
need to plant radical visions on familiar terrain. Rammohan Roy’s “version of en-
lightenment,” as C. A. Bayly has underlined, “embraced Hindu, Muslim and Western
82 Fukuzawa Yukichi, “On De-Asianization,” in Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, comp., Meiji
Japan through Contemporary Sources, 3 vols., vol. 3: 1869–1894 (Tokyo, 1972), 133.
83 Reinhart Koselleck, “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” in Hart-
mut Lehmann and Melvin Richter, eds., The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on
Begriffsgeschichte (Washington, D.C., 1996), 59–70, quote from 62.
84 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and
Pan-Asian Thought (1882–1945) (New York, 2007).

notions of virtue.”85 And when Fukuzawa published his Introduction to the Countries
of the World (Sekai kunizukishi ) in 1869, he arranged it in metrical patterns to fa-
cilitate its being read in the manner of Buddhist catechisms.86
In East Asia, one of the most frequent ingredients in this process, somewhat
paradoxically, was Confucianism. Ostensibly relegating the Confucian heritage to
the dustbin of history, ideas associated with the Enlightenment were instead fused
with the existing cosmology—which in turn was refashioned under conditions of
global interaction. In Japan, the term ri, which in Confucian thought denotes the
principle that bestows order and harmony on human society, was used to express the
idea of laissez-faire and the rationality of market exchange.87 In China, the notion

of progress was constructed by drawing both on neo-Confucianist discussions and on
social Darwinist texts.88 And Liu Shipei, intoxicated by his fascination with Rous-
seau, published his Essential Idea of the Chinese Social Contract in 1903, arguing that
the essence of Rousseau’s project could be found in the much older legacy of Con-
fucianism.89 As much as this was an ideological strategy to indigenize reformist con-
cepts, it did affect the content of these concepts and enabled, for example, Enlight-
enment claims to be expressed in a language that was less reliant on an atomized
individualism. Sometimes, conversely, Enlightenment rhetoric could help legitimate
re-articulations of Confucian thinking in response to new global challenges.90
Second, “enlightened” concepts were wrested from their sole attachment to Eu-
rope. Around 1900, reference to “Enlightenment” was already globalized to such an
extent that Western Europe ceased to be the only location of authority. In Java, for
example, Kartini legitimized her demand for women’s emancipation not only with
Dutch models, but also with the texts of the Indian feminist Pandita Ramabai. Lib-
eral reforms in 1830s Bengal, on the other hand, were fueled by analogies with Ire-
land and Greece, and especially with the independence movements in Latin Amer-
ica.91 At the end of the century, the most powerful point of reference was Japan.
After the 1905 military victory over Russia, Japan emerged in many parts of the
world—including Egypt, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire—as a privileged counter-
point that promised to provide Enlightenment and modernization without the im-
perialism and race ideology displayed by the “West.”92
The role of Japan as a cultural mediator was particularly powerful in East Asia.
85 Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India,” 29.
86 Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 460– 461.
87 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (London, 1989), 29.
88 A good overview of intellectual trends in China can be gleaned from Charlotte Furth, “Intellectual
Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895–1920,” in Merle Goldman
and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge, 2002), 13–96. Usually,
the term “Chinese Enlightenment” is reserved for the May Fourth movement of 1919. See Vera
Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919
(Berkeley, Calif., 1986).
89 Xiaoling Wang, “Liu Shipei et son concept de contrat social chinois,” Études chinoises 27, no. 1–2
(1998): 155–190; Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890–1911
(Berkeley, Calif., 1987).
90 See Viren Murthy, “Modernity against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese
Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006): 137–165; Ban Wang, “Discovering Enlightenment in
Chinese History: The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, by Wang Hui,” boundary 2 34, no. 2 (2007):
217–238.
91 Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India.”
92 Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia.

“Fortunately, Japan has taken the lead in opening the way to enlightenment
[kyohwa],” wrote the editors of Hwangsŏng sinmun in 1899.93 Attracted by Japan’s
successful development, but also threatened by its aggressive imperialism, the Ko-
rean movement for “Civilization and Enlightenment” (munmyŏng kaehwa) was pri-
marily oriented toward the Meiji state. A good example is the influential Enlight-
enment thinker Yu Kilchun, who began his studies at Fukuzawa’s Keio៮ University.
Disillusioned by Japan’s modernization, which he felt was an inferior copy and a poor
imitation of the West, Yu traveled to the United States to see modernity “with his
own eyes.” After his return, he published the influential Observations on a Journey
to the West (Sŏyu kyŏnmun), which would make “Enlightenment” a household name

in Korea. But even though Yu made every effort to systematically erase all Japanese
traces of his encounter with the West, his book remained closely modeled after Fu-
kuzawa’s Seiyo៮ jijo៮ . Indeed, Fukuzawa subsidized publication of the book, which was
produced in Japan on his printing press because by 1895 there were not yet any
printing presses in Korea with Hangul script.94
Japan also emerged as an important agent of intellectual innovation in Qing
China. In the wake of the failed 1898 coup, Tokyo was a magnet for reform-minded
Chinese. For many of them, the sojourn in Japan was perceived as a crucial turning
point. “Books like I have never seen before dazzle my eyes. Ideas like I have never
encountered before baffle my brain. It is like seeing the sun after being confined in
a dark room,” confessed Liang Qichao, the most influential Chinese thinker of the
turn of the century, who intended to transfer Japan’s bunmei kaika to China in the
form of a general “Enlightenment”: “I am like a different person.”95 In the years to
come, the ferment generated by this exchange would enable the production of new
knowledges. Japanese teachers worked as consultants for the reform of the Chinese
educational system. Liang founded a bureau of translation in Shanghai, and up to
1911, about 1,000 Japanese works were published in Chinese. Most importantly,
Japanese neologisms were imported to China: “science” and “labor,” “nation” and
“equality,” “society” and “capitalism” were among the hundreds of terms newly
coined in Japan—by building in turn on classical Chinese characters.96 The authority
of forms of knowledge that were associated with Japan was immense; imitating Japan
seemed to promise a shortcut to modernization in comparison to learning from the
“West.” At the same time, cultural borrowing from Japan was legitimized as tapping
into an already “Asianized”—and hence different—version of modernity, devoid of
the kind of individualism bordering on the egotistical that many observers saw as
93 Cited in Schmid, Korea between Empires, 90.
94 Ibid., 110–111; Lee Sang-Ik, “On the Concepts of ‘New Korea’ Envisioned by Enlightenment
Reformers,” Korea Journal 40, no. 2 (2000): 34 –64; Shin Yong-ha, “The Thought of the Enlightenment
Movement,” Korea Journal 24, no. 12 (1984): 4 –21.
95 Cited in Douglas R. Reynolds, “A Golden Decade Forgotten: Japan-China Relations, 1898–
1907,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 4, no. 2 (1987): 93–153, quote from 116. See also
Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Paula Har-
rell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, Calif., 1992).
Specifically on Liang and his transnational agenda, see Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist
Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif., 1996); Joshua A. Fogel,
ed., The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China (Berkeley,
Calif., 2004).
96 See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—
China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif., 1995).

prevalent in Europe. “Japan has certain advantages over the West,” Zhang Zhidong
emphasized in 1898. “China and Japan share similar circumstances and customs,
making it easier [for us] to copy from Japan.”97
The result of these processes of mixing, and of expanding the range of models,
was a transnational production of knowledge that cannot be reduced to a European
genealogy. Social groups in Istanbul, Manila, and Shanghai literally made the En-
lightenment; they were not merely on the receiving end of innovations conceived
elsewhere a century earlier. Historians have tended to read the history of knowledge
as a script that is written in one place and then adopted and adapted in another,
influencing if not determining the thoughts and actions of the recipients. But the

reverse trajectory is at least as important. Speaking “Enlightenment” in Seoul was
a response to a specific situation in Korea in the 1890s, and not a belated answer
to Voltaire.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS OBSESSED with the problem of origins. Surely this was not
in itself original, as the search for origins has preoccupied intellectuals since the Age
of Humanism. But at the end of the eighteenth century, the quest for origins took
center stage and corresponded with the general trend toward historicizing science
and philosophy. As biblical and divine authority no longer guaranteed absolute cer-
tainty, genealogy and attempts to trace all phenomena back to their earliest origins
took its place. Even if the Enlightenment was defined by privileging rationality, fu-
ture orientation, and progress—Ernst Cassirer was one of the first to point out this
paradox—it was at the same time tied to the spirits of the past and the fascination
with beginnings. “The specter of origins,” according to Pierre Saint-Amand, “is the
skeleton in the closet of Enlightenment political philosophy, the evil spirit that
haunts it, the ever-present threat of incompletion.”98
Thus Condillac sought the origins of human knowledge, and Rousseau explored
the origins of inequality. The quest for origins—and foundations—of law, of national
consciousness, of religion, was an ongoing concern of scientific research, philosoph-
ical speculation, and erudite discussion. Winckelmann and later Schiller initiated the
cult of antiquity, the Archimedean point of departure of European culture. Archae-
ology was complemented, in the wake of Napoleon and Champollion, by Egyptology.
Colonial expansion extended the quest for origins—of Europe, of Man, of the mod-
ern—to the whole world: ethnographers searched for the “primitive peoples”; Wil-
liam Jones in Bengal inquired into the common origins of Greek and Sanskrit; lin-
guists and anthropologists scrutinized the roots of the Indo-Germanic language and
the Aryan origins of European civilization. Also beyond Europe, the quest for origins
was a strategy to tap into this discourse: Hindu reformers in Bengal looked for the
oldest available texts in order to define the cultural foundations of India, and José
97 Cited in Reynolds, “A Golden Decade Forgotten,” 113. For an instructive case study, see Joan
Judge, “The Ideology of ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’: Meiji Japan and Feminine Modernity in
Late-Qing China,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views
of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period (Norwalk, Conn., 2002), 218–248.
98 Pierre Saint-Amand, “Hostile Enlightenment,” in Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood, eds.,
Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 145–158, quote from 145.

Rizal in the Philippines constructed a precolonial “Golden Age” whose accomplish-

ments dwarfed European civilization.
Not only was this fetishization of the origin part of Enlightenment discourse; it
has been at the core of metanarratives about the Enlightenment ever since. Attempts
to situate the Enlightenment in world history, in particular, have operated within the
framework of a history of origins. Historians have looked for the emergence of what
they saw as the core of the Enlightenment—in substance, in space, and in time—and
have tended to read its further history as one of gradual diffusion, if not dilution.
Typically, this was a history in which eighteenth-century Europe served as the point
of origin, and the rest of the world was but the site of a derivative discourse.99

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, however, was not the intellectual
monopoly of Europeans. It needs to be understood as a result of the transnational
co-production of knowledge by many contributors around the world. This is not to
deny that particular debates were also deeply embedded in European traditions, and
were shaped by specific situations in places such as Edinburgh, Halle, and Naples.
But the intellectual dynamic as well as the revolutionary impact of the transforma-
tions of the late eighteenth century was very much energized by global conditions.
Moreover, the Enlightenment was not confined to its Atlantic moment in the
eighteenth century; it had a much longer course. This was a history not so much of
its diffusion as of its permanent reinvention. Groups and social milieus that pressed
for social and cultural change invoked the authority of the Enlightenment while
fusing it with other traditions. In the process, what was seen as the core of the En-
lightenment changed profoundly, both because of the creative merging of elements
from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and because these ideas were proposed in
geopolitical contexts that differed greatly from eighteenth-century Europe. Increas-
ingly, Enlightenment was employed as a concept that allowed historical actors to
think globally and to position their communities on a world stage.
This requires a rethinking of the spatiality and temporality of the global En-
lightenment. Its history was shaped more by the specific constellations in the loca-
tions in which it was invoked than by the texts of European sages. To be sure, the
gradual translation and circulation of their writings, and of vulgarized handbooks,
did have an impact and was discussed in places as distant as Chile and Vietnam. But
even more important than this centrifugal dissemination was the use to which it was
put: elites in Calcutta, Lima, and Tokyo invoked Enlightenment ideas for purposes
and claims of their own—and thus transformed the connotations of the concepts. In
spatial terms, then, the globality of the Enlightenment cannot be explained simply
as emanation from a center. Its temporality also needs to be rethought, as it was
determined not by origins and continuities, but rather by simultaneity and conjunc-
tures. Eighteenth-century Paris, in other words, was not the model and 1900s Shang-
hai the sequel. Elites in late Qing China were shaped by forces and concerns of their
own time, and the way in which the philosophes were translated, cited, and hijacked
was structured by these conditions.
99 On the notion of derivative discourse, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, 1986). The internalist view of European history is wide-
spread. One of its most vociferous proponents is David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:
Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1998).

An assessment of the Enlightenment in global history, therefore, should not be

concerned primarily with origins, either geographically or temporally. Instead, the
focus needs to be on moments of articulation and invention, and these moments need
to be understood in their constellations of global synchronicity. On its most general
level, the dynamic of appropriation was conditioned and mediated by the geopolitical
order of the world and the capitalist integration of the globe in an age of imperialism.
Under these conditions, ideas that were (sometimes strategically) associated with
Europe were taken up by different actors, and they were connected to other bodies
of cultural practice and thought.
Ultimately, however, it was only this process of global circulation, translation, and

transnational co-production that turned the Enlightenment into the general and uni-
versal phenomenon that it had always purported to be. The discourse of eighteenth-
century Europe relied on a language of universal claims and worldwide validity. But
to make these claims valid in practice, and indeed to convince—and frequently
force—people around the world to accept their claims, more was needed than the
allegedly inherent power of reason. This implementation was the work of many dif-
ferent actors, influenced by geopolitics and the uneven distribution of power, fed by
high hopes and utopian promises, by threats and violence.100 Only this complex and
nonlinear process of global actualization was able to render the universalist claims
of the Enlightenment ubiquitous—and in this restricted sense universal.
100 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
Sebastian Conrad holds the Chair in Modern History at Freie Universität Ber-
lin, where he has taught since 2010. He is the author of German Colonialism:
A Short History (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Globalisation and the Nation
in Imperial Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and The Quest for the
Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century (Uni-
versity of California Press, 2010). He is currently writing an introduction to de-
bates in the field of global history.

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Enlightenment in Global History:

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2012

analytical moves: First, the eighteenth-century cultural dynamics conventionally ren-

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What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, Calif.,

Japan (Honolulu, 2002), 40– 42.

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not only with the power of conviction,

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eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1982).

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Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 11.

Political Thinkers (Chicago, 1998), 94 –104, here 94.

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In privileging connections and synchronic contexts in space over long intellectual

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“ENLIGHTENMENT SCHOLARS,” DORINDA OUTRAM has acknowledged, “have yet to

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studies have focused on direct connections between Enlightenment thinking and

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rely on the absence of Enlightenment elsewhere as one of their axiomatic tenets. In

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alternative, and multiple modernities.35 But this refashioning of modernization the-

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THESE THREE PARADIGMS—MODERNIZATION, postcolonialism, and multiple moderni-

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of diverse phenomena.”39 From such a vantage point, it is less instructive to search

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1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104, here 99–100.

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enlightened and meritocratic society—and instrumentalized for criticisms of abso-

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reconfiguration of existing knowledges and specialized practices on both sides of the

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and Europe, 1650–1900 (Delhi, 2006), 223.

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(Delhi, 1997), chap. 5.

1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 4 –5.

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ment.”59 The notion of humanité as it was employed in metropolitan France was

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ENLIGHTENMENT WAS MORE THAN a self-contained moment in European history. As

Enlightenment (Charlottesville, Va., 2008).

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(Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 113–149, here 115.

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(Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 147.