HIST 22: The Global Enlightenment: Cosmopolitanism between Theory and

Practice
Farid Azfar
Assistant Professor of History

For the longest time, the Enlightenment was conceived as an event in the
history of European ideas: a product of Renaissance values as deepened by the
chaos of the European Wars of Religion; the primum mobile, in its apparently
spectacular attack on the church-state alliance, of modernity itself. Recent
scholarship has challenged this view on several fronts: by provincializing Europe
and imagining its transformation as a product of its global entanglements, by
situating the Enlightenment in these structural sea-changes and by tracing the
role of non-European ideas, commodities and practices in the formation of
Enlightenment philosophies. It was, it has been argued, not just in Europe but all
over the world that the politics and economy of the eighteenth-century inspired
new ways of thinking about culture, nation, and humanity. Enlightenment
cosmopolitanism – a product of these processes – was a global event,
comprehensible only in a global context.
This revisionist vision of a “global Enlightenment” is not, however,
immune to critique. Appealing though it is, questions emerge about what it
leaves out, distorts, and simplifies. What does talk of “sites of contact”, “zones of
exchange” and “maps of cultural interchange” mean in the century of the
Atlantic slave trade? Can we afford to marvel at the Bengal Renaissance in the
age of the Bengal Famine? What place, in other words, does a cosmopolitan
history of the global Enlightenment mean for a history of European empire, of
the colonial violence that sustained and subsidized the Republic of Letters? At
the same time, in what ways do we distort the histories of Enlightenment and
empire by insisting on telling these stories together? To what extent is a
cosmopolitan history of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism itself a form of wishful
thinking, a projection of our contemporary desires onto the past?
There are no clear answers to these questions, but there are ways of
arriving at them, and this will be our charge in this course: a collective
engagement with these questions. We will situate ourselves in the turbulent
cultural atmosphere of the period, surrounding ourselves by its moral crises,
intellectual discoveries, and complex political reckonings. We will consider a
range of themes and topics, but the focus will be on the Atlantic world and India.
I do not expect a background in Enlightenment or even European history,
nor even in philosophy or critical theory. Above all, I expect intellectual curiosity
and sustained engagement with texts that are challenging on multiple levels. The
class is a collective enterprise. I expect you all to take ownership of it.
The capstone of the class will be a final research paper. As such, the class
will be a seminar as well as a workshop. The several assignments – a first draft, a
primary source presentation, a paper on the scholarly context – are designed to
guide you through the process of producing an excellent research paper.
I operate with the belief that a writing course has to be a reading course. As
a result of which, there is less reading than there might be in a course of this kind,
with a greater degree of focus on the architecture of scholarly method. How have
the scholars we are reading have posed questions, framed arguments, and
analyzed sources? In order to become better writers we need to learn to read like
writers. So we will be doing a lot of that in this course. We will also be spending a
good amount of time on the interpretation of primary sources. Once again, the
focus will not be on reading tons of sources but learn how to dig deep and
explore the sources we do read critically and imaginatively.
This course is open to all students and majors but, in particular, to history
majors (or prospective majors) who will be taking HIST 91 in the future.

Assignments
- Final Research Paper (12-15 pages): 50%. An original interpretation of primary
sources guided by a clearly defined question. There will be periodic assignments
throughout the semester. The grade will also reflect your level of involvement
during the peer review period.
- Primary source presentation and Paper (4-5 pages, 15 minutes): 15%. Choose a week
and then choose a primary source to explore the arguments of the scholars we
are reading (you can start by looking through Eighteenth Century Collections
Online, or by reading the bibliographies of the texts we have read, and following
leads for texts which sound interesting to you). Provide your own reading – or
readings - of the source. Isolate the questions raised by your reading of this
source and provide a sense of how you might go about answering them. Each of
you will choose a week on which you will present your source and turn in your
paper.
- Architecture of Scholarly Method (2-4 pages, 20 minutes): 15%. Each of you will
choose a week on which you will dissect the structure and form of the articles we
are reading for that week, in the same way as an architect might appraise the
structure and foundations of a building. You will outline the piece and then
comment on how the scholar practices the art of historical interpretation. I will
provide a model for what I mean by this early on in the semester.
- Participation: 20%

Class Policies
- Each absence must be accompanied by a medical or Dean’s note. This class
meets once a week, so each unexcused absence will result in the reduction of a
half letter grade: an A- will become a B-, and so on. Three unexcused absences
equals an F.

Week One: Conceptual Frames (1/21)

- Sebastian Conrad, “The Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical
Critique,” The American Historical Review 117: 4 (October 1, 2012), 999-1027
- Mary Hellen Mcmurran, “The New Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth
Century” 47:1 (Fall, 2013), 19-38
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.swarthmore.edu/journals/eighteenth-
century_studies/v047/47.1.mcmurran.html

Week Two: A Global Narrative of the European Enlightenment (1/28)

- Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment: A History (2005)

Week Three: The Conquest of Knowledge (2/4)

- Larry Stewart, “Global Pillage: Science, Commerce, and Empire” in The
Cambridge History of Science: The Eighteenth Century (2003), 825-844
- Richard Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” Oxford History of the British Empire
(2001), 231-253
- Francis Bacon, “New Atlantis,” (selections)

Week Four: Hemispheric Cosmologies (2/11)

- Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New Worlds, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and
the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America 1600-
1650”, American Historical Review 104 (February 1999, 33-68
- Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, “Mythohistories of Ibelele and Tiegun: The Power of
the Leres,”The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial
Rivalry in the Darién 1640-175 (2005)

Week Five: Gardens of Knowledge (2/18)

- Richard Grove, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West
India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature,” Modern Asian
Studies 30:1 (1996), 121-143
- Londa Schiebinger, “Introduction” and “The Fate of the Peacock Flower in
Europe,” Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2007)
- India Mandelkern, “How Turtle Became Haute Cuisine,”
http://homogastronomicus.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-first-turtle-season.html

Week Six: Epistemologies of Slavery (2/25)

- Joyce Chaplin, “Race” in David Armitage, ed, The British Atlantic World, 1500-
1800 (2002)
- James Delbourgo, “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic
World,
“http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/news/hans_sloanes_atlantic_world.
aspx
- Oliver Goldsmith, Natural History of Sharks (1774)

Week Seven: Enlightenment on the Waves (Or Piratical Truths) (3/4, 3/6)
- Gillian Weiss, “Barbary Captivity and the French Idea of Freedom,” French
Historical Studies 28:2 (Spring, 2005), 231-264 (JSTOR)
- Marcus Rediker, “The Political Arithmetic of Piracy” from Villains of all Nations:
Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (2004) (BLACKBOARD)
- James Delbourgo, “Divers Things: Collecting the World Under Water,” History
of Science 49 (June 2011), 149-185
- Excerpts from Robinson Crusoe and Dialogue avec un Savage

SPRING BREAK

Week Seven: (3/18, 3/20): Postcolonial Encounters with the Enlightenment

- Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey, The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century
Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (2009)

Week Nine: Collecting India (3/25, 3/27)

- Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On the Window that was India” and “On Indian
Views of the Portuguese in Asia,” in Explorations in Connected Worlds: From the
Tagus to the Ganges (2005)

Week Ten: No class (4/1, 4/3)

I will be in Finland this week for a conference. Please meet without me this week.
I will have a list of questions to answer in groups and post on Moodle.

Week Eleven: Go-Betweens (4/8, 4/10)

- Maya Jassanoff, “Part One: India, 1750-1799” in Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture,
and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005) (LIBRARY EBOOK)

Week Twelve: Hemispheric Cosmologies Redux (4/15, 4/17)

- Simon Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy in The
Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, ed. Schaffer, et al. (2009).
- Kapil Raj, “Mapping Knowledge Go-betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820,”
in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, ed. Schaffer, et al. (2009)
- Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Global Encounters, Earthly Knowledges, Worldly
Selves,” L’Inde des Lumières: Discours, Histoire, Savoirs (XVIIe-XIXe siècle) (2013),
359-391

Weeks Thirteen-Fourteen: Primary Source Presentations and Peer Critique

(4/22, 4/24, 4/29, 5/1)