Enlightenment, The

The Enlightenment is that period of intellectual enquiry, broadly synonymous with the “long” 18th century (circa 1680–1820), when modern ideas of rationality, public criticism, and the emancipation of civil society through reasoned reform took shape. During the Enlightenment, ideas of “ancient authority” and “tradition” were challenged. Earlier, classical and Renaissance conceptions of the world and humanist scholarship had been rejected. Philosophical inquiry and science were widely believed to be the basis to socially useful goals. Religious restrictions would diminish in the face of secular tolerance. Humankind would be free from ignorance and error. Since then, and even during its development, the Enlightenment has been the subject of detailed scrutiny as to what it was, why it happened, and what its consequences have been. Conventional views of the Enlightenment as an essential, largely philosophical phenomenon evident in urban Europe, especially in the lives and writings of great men, have been challenged decisively during recent years. Questions of geography are central to these revised and revitalized notions of the Enlightenment.

In conventional interpretations, little attention was paid to the geography of the Enlightenment. Where it was, emphasis was given to its distinctive features and differences at the level of the nation-state, chiefly within Europe. Attention concentrated on the idea of the Enlightenment's originating “hearth” or “core” nations (e.g., France, England, Scotland, Holland, Germany) and to a “periphery” where the Enlightenment was evident later or in different form (e.g., Russia, the Scandinavian countries). Relatively limited attention was given to the Enlightenment in the Americas and to its presence and making in Portugal, Spain, or the countries of Eastern Europe. As Enlightenment studies in general have become more diverse—embracing, for instance, medical knowledge and questions of gender, exoticism, race, and sexuality—studies of the Enlightenment and geography have diversified beyond the scale of the nation and rejected simplistic distinctions between an Enlightenment core and periphery. Three distinct but interrelated themes may be noted.

The first theme is geographic knowledge and the Enlightenment. Geographic knowledge, gleaned through oceanic navigation, terrestrial exploration, [Page 131]mapping, and natural history survey, was crucial during the Enlightenment to new ideas about the shape and size of the earth, the richness of its natural diversity, and the nature of its human cultures. In this first sense, the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement depended on new geographic knowledge about the extent of what contemporaries then called the “fourth world” (the Americas) and, crucially, about the “fifth division” of the world (the Pacific world or, in modern terms, Australasia). One distinctively Enlightenment idea, that of society's development through a series of stages, was profoundly shaped by the “discovery” of new peoples on the islands of the Southern Ocean, for example, and by the extent of human cultural difference. Contemporaries referred to these geographies of human difference as “The Great Map of Mankind” and devoted considerable time to theories explaining the development of human society in relation to factors such as climate, the role of custom, and commercial capacity.

Second, we may think in terms of geography during the Enlightenment. Geography as one form of modern intellectual endeavor was itself shaped by the evolving encounter with new peoples and lands during the Enlightenment. This was apparent in terms of emphases on realism in description, systematic classification in collection, and comparative method in explanation. Geography during the Enlightenment was a discourse, a set of practices by which the world was revealed and ordered. It was also a discipline in which formal study was possible in schools and universities. It was likewise a popular subject, taught in academies and public lectures alongside history, astronomy, and mathematics, to educate citizens about the extent and content of the globe. In these ways, geography during the Enlightenment was part of what thinkers then called the “science of man”—that concern to understand the human world through the same observational and methodological principles as the natural world.

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