Enlightenment Geographies

Abstract

The Enlightenment, usually taken to be an intellectual phenomenon and a historical period, broadly equivalent to the “long” eighteenth century in Europe, should also be understood as a matter of geography with global reach and significance. The term “Enlightenment geographies” embraces three related concerns: the importance of where questions, and matters of scale, space, and place, in explaining what the Enlightenment was; the explanation of philosophical inquiries concerning human difference, cosmopolitanism, sociability, and comparative cultural development with reference to geographical factors, such as climate; and the content and purpose of geography as a subject and as a set of practices in the Enlightenment. Thinking geographically about the Enlightenment in these ways has challenged essentialist conceptions of the Enlightenment, and nation‐based interpretations of the Enlightenment as only a European enterprise. Explanation of the Enlightenment's spatial dimensions extends from the broader “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences since the 1990s, including evident recognition of the importance of geography in the history of science in particular, and in studies of colonialism and of imperial history in general.