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 Eurocentric 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.

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The dominant readings are based on narratives of uniqueness and diffusion.The assumption that the Enlightenment was a specifically European phenomenon remains one of the foundational premises of Western modernity, and of the modern West. The Enlightenment appears as an original and autonomous product of Europe, 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 Enlightenment of the eighteenth century."'The results included the world of the individual, human rights, rationalization, and what Max Weber famously called the “disenchantment 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 Williamn 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 geniuses of early modern Europe.”3

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This interpretation isno longer tenable. Scholars are now challenging the Eurocentric account of the “birth of the modern world.” Such a rereading implies three analytical moves:First,the eighteenth-century cultural dynamics conventionally rendered 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 crossborder 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.Crucially, 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.

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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 immutable.Ever since Immanuel Kant's famous 1784 essay in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, historians have pondered his question “Was ist Aufkl?rung?” (What is Enlightenment?). 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.

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Take, for example, an allegory by the Japanese artist Sh?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 paraso1, a chair prevailing over a traditional stool, a pen over a brush, brick over tile, short hair vanquishing the traditional 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.

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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 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 mobilization, on its behalf,of effective means of physical coercion,” as postcolonial scholars would put it yet a century later.6

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Equally significant is the inclusion of an object in the parade of enlightened 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 alluded to,the rickshaw was not imported 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, the trains, clocks,and artificial light. The depiction of the rickshaw is thus a reminder that what was perceived as 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 K?nigsberg.

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Emphasizing the variations in usage of “Enlightenment” around the world implies a rejection of earlier narrow definitions of the term.? 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 work, has reconstructed the way in which Edward Gibbon engaged with many different“Enlightenments.”9Jonathan Israel and others have significantly extended the perspective backward in time and thereby complicated our understanding of the Enlightenment.1° 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.'' The entrenched dichotomy of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment has also been called into question.12 And finally， the convenient fiction of the eighteen職th 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 disenchantment is itself a modern myth. Instead, popular social practices such as occultism, mesmerism, and magic not only survived, but were enmeshed with elite culture, empirical science, and the celebration of reason.14

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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 character: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 “Enlightenment” was originally a rallying cry issued by the Catholic and royalist adversaries of the French philosophes.17 The unity of the phenomenon was thus constituted by its enemnies. It became further entrenched when it was appropriated in Latin America and Asia as a seemingly integrated and unified body of thought. “Enlightenment" 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

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Such a broad understanding is a helpful point of departure for moving us beyond the different ways in which the current historiography hasunderstood the Enlightenment's role in global history. It may help us focus on the transnational conditions 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

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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 theinbuilt universality of enlightened claims that enabled 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 inequalities of power, that transformed multiple claims on Enlightenment into a ubiquitous presence.

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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 Enlightenment 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.

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The production of knowledge in the late eighteenth century was structurally embedded 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 discussions. No contemporary genre was more popular and more influential than the travelogue.42 Accounts of the Hurons in North America, of the Polynesian Omai who was takento 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 enlightened and meritocratic society-and instrumentalized for criticisms of absolutist rule in Europe.43

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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 discussions 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

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On this level, the worldliness of the European Enlightenment was not limited to references to distant places, instrumentalizedI essentially as mirrors of the Self-such as Montesquieu's imagined Orient in his lettres persanes. Neither is it helpful to calculate 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 knowledge 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 European trade relations, the annexation of military and commercial bases and colonies, 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 thie terms that were employed and the theories that were developed. Geopolitical hierarchies, in other words, found their way into the very content of the vocabulary that was devised to think the world. The dichotomies of civilization andbarbarism, 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.

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Enlightenment debates were thus always political moments, never just intellectual 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 situated in, and corresponded to, the asymmetrical power relationships that structured the integration of the globe.

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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 Enlightenment was it, anyway?” Jorge Ca?izares-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 interactions.

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In particular, historians have underscored the global gathering of facts and information and the co-production of modern knowledge regimes. Historians of science have contributed to a broad view of the transregional networks and cross-border 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-constructive 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 reconfiguration of existing knowledges and specialized practices on both sides of the encounter.”50

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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 production did not preclude the active cooperation of a wide variety of actors. “Important parts of what passes off as 'Western' science," concludes Kapil Raj, “were actually made outside the West."51

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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 particular body of thought and practice associated with the “Enlightenment” in Europe. Thus our attention shnifts from the salons in Paris, Berlin, and Naples to the conditions 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 Independence-a document of global reach, “an instrument, pregnant with our own and the fate of the world,” as Thomas Jefferson1 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

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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, 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 MMysore 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

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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 particular historical situations, but their impact went beyond their local effects. Moments of appropriation were thus frequently instances of programmatic radicalization. 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

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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 Assemblée 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 Enlightenment.”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 therights of man-nothing less was at stake-was thus the result of a circulation of ideas and their re-articulation under colonial conditions.60

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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 example 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. Twothirds 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 practices such as voodoo for the formation of revolutionary communities.62 The revolution 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 characteristic-and indeed constitutive-of the career of Enlightenment ideas and practices. The negotiation of different intellectual and cultural resources was a normal and integral part of this history.

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