The Atlantic Enlightenment (review)

Abstract

aThe Enlightenment. Edited by Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano. (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 209. Cloth, $99.95.)Reviewed by Rosemarie ZagarriThis volume represents the fruits of a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2002 to reconsider the nature and character of the transAtlantic Enlightenment. Although some scholars continue to regard the as a single, cohesive movement centered in France that radiated outward to influence the rest of the western world, others have a different conception. For these scholars, there is one Enlightenment, but many, each of which took on the distinctive characteristics of the particular locale in which it occurred. By presenting the work of geographers and literary scholars as well as historians, this volume offers a set of richly textured, multidisciplinary essays that substantially broadens our understanding of this newer approach, especially as it applies to the English-speaking North American world.In their Introduction, Manning and Cogliano are forthright about the limits of the volume. As they admit, these essays concentrate on the North with a particular emphasis on Protestant, Anglophone thinkers and ideas. They do explore the Spanish or Southern European Enlightenments or push beyond the boundaries of the British North American colonies. Even so, many of the volume's best essays do take the meaning of Atlantic Enlightenment for granted; they interrogate the role of the in producing a distinctive kind of thought. In a study of sailors' understandings of ideas such as equality and rights, for example, Paul Gilje demonstrates that the not only stretch [ed] across the Atlantic, but also upon the Atlantic, reaching into the forecastle and the world of the common seamen (180). This was an Enlightment from the bottom up as well as the top down. In a fascinating discussion of the mapping of the Gulf Stream, Charles W.J. Withers describes the circulation of knowledge throughout the world. The Enlightenment, he concludes, was not a single entity but ... a dynamic space, at once social, geographical, and epistemological. Its characteristics were different depending on where on its margins knowledge was made and received, by whom, and in what form and how such knowledge and its makers and audiences moved, if at all, between one place and another (47). This was one movement, but a complicated set of processes that occurred in different ways at different places and times.This more capacious understanding of the enables contributors to put familiar thinkers or traditional ideas into a new context. Peter S. Onuf's insightful essay, Adam Smith and the Crisis of the American Union, is a case in point. Using Smith's influential Wealth of Nations as the basis of his analysis, Onuf shows that the text can be read in two ways: in the more familiar fashion as a brief for free trade, in anticipation of free market ideology; or retrospectively, as Smith's historical critique of British trade policy with respect to the North American colonies. …