Ideas of Enlightenment

Abstract

Jeremy Black. Europe and the World. 1650-1830 (New York: Routledge, 2001). Pp. viii + 192. $80.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. Kevin L. Cope and Rudier Ahrens, eds. Talking Forward, Talking Back. Critical Dialogues with the Enlightenment (New York: AMS Press, 2000). Pp. vxi + 388. $78.50 cloth. After years of exile for having perpetrated historical and literary "meta-narratives" of national histories, identities, and literatures, bruised yet still breathing eighteenth-century historians and their "narratives" are on the rebound, returning this time under the guise of scholars' new stories about "Europe" and the "idea of Enlightenment." Doubtless, our contemporary preoccupation with "the new Europe" and EU enlargement has also contributed to a renewed interest in the history of Europe (see N. Davies' Europe. A History, J. M. Roberts' History of Europe, Jones and Pennick's, Pagan Europe). New interest in the Enlightenment is a thornier issue, messily tied up with current academic politics or more tangentially, the sudden appearance of the underserved Enlightenment of eastern Europe (see K. M. Baker's What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, Israel's monumental Radical Enlightenment, or Reill's The German Enlightenment). Two new works may now be added to the list: Jeremy Black's Europe and the World. 1650-1830 and Cope and Ahrens' Talking Forward, Talking Back. Critical Dialogues with the Enlightenment. They share in common a desire to break free from what has long been perceived as a (primarily) American stranglehold on their respective disciplines by New Historicism or Critical Theory. This is not to say the authors are ignorant or dismissive of the above perspectives; rather, they suggest that to move beyond these academic polemics invites a concerted return to text or event, and presenting these historically from multi-faceted, thematic, and cosmopolitan perspectives which themselves may well reach into our present critical activity. Jeremy Black's Europe and the World. 1650-1830 is a concise, readable, and relatively short study of Europe's "impact and influence on the world." It is well suited to serve as a textbook for serious undergraduates of European history or for graduate students in eighteenth-century studies across disciplines in need of a finely detailed overview of the long European Enlightenment in its global context. As Routledge's senior editor for its "Warfare and History" series, and a prolific scholar of published works on European, British, and French military and political history, Black is well placed to reconsider the notion of European "imperialism" between the Age of Discovery and that of (nineteenth-century) Empire. Black's choice for descriptive classification—European expansion—is telling of his cautionary approach to Europe as a global partner and player in the eighteenth century. Without denying Europe's enormous thirst for territorial, military, and commercial power, Black suggests that "empire" is too ambitious of a term, that ancien régime Europe lacked what might be called "the vision thing" in order to create, let alone maintain, a British or French or Dutch or Spanish empire. Black does repeatedly examine both the constructive and destructive impact of European expansion on the world, but he also builds a convincing case against the charge of European imperial scheming on a grand scale: Black's Europe lacks [End Page 689] the technological innovation, cultural knowledge (of the Other), and domestic and continental stability to permit hugely costly and populous overseas dominions, among other reasons. Black organizes his work thematically in six topics: Exploration, Knowledge; Attitudes; Trade; Migration, Settlement, Slavery and Colonies; Warfare with Non-Europeans (two chapters); and Transformation of the European World (1795-1830). While each themed chapter stands on its own, the later chapters are best understood by the reader who has perused the earlier ones. Each chapter is literally packed with the historical data of events, projects, personalities, and the "ebb and flow" of power politics writ large. The author furnishes little detail about individual data, yet, it is the sheer quantitative amassing of events, peoples, projects, and ideas that translates the reality...