Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique

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. 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.”1 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 William 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 This interpretation is no longer tenable. Scholars are now challenging the Eurocentric account of the “birth of the modern world.” Such a rereading implies three