Spaces of Enlightenment: From Domestic Scenes to Global Visions

Enlightenment thought is usually considered to be primarily concerned with time and temporalities, not least because of the emphasis on “progress” as an organizing concept across so many domains of its intellectual activity. From political economy to aesthetic theory, “improvement” was a key word of the long eighteenth century, despite contemporary debate about its character, impact, and ambiguities.³ “Improvement” or “progress” could involve transforming the appearance of cities, or exchanging information about plants, reforming public recreations, or decorating domestic interiors; in any case, such improvement was also conceived as a spatial phenomenon.⁴ This collection joins a revisionary scholarship that shows how the Enlightenment was organized by space as well as time. Building on the work of historical geographers, among others, it aims to help develop our analytic tools for thinking about the spatial aspects of eighteenth-century culture through a selection of case studies, which chart changing ideas and practices across local, national, and international contexts, from elite London print rooms, to distant Pacific islands. This is to say that the collection is also interested in complicating the conventional distinction between space and place, where “space” refers to an “abstract” dimension, and “place” to the particularity of actual sites.⁵ The following essays show that the imbrication of these categories was fundamental to how the Enlightenment understood self, nature, society, and empire.

In this collection, we are concerned with space in three discrete but overlapping senses: (1) as a locality or named place where events happen, such as a specific city, region, nation, territory, ocean, and so on; (2) as the setting for a designated social practice—for example, the theater, the print room, the battlefield, or the picturesque tourist destination; and (3) as an abstract (and often metaphysical) category, which may be either infinite and universal, or finite and bounded, as theorized by Immanuel Kant, who thought of space as one of the preconditions of understanding and of practical reason per se.

During the last few decades, a preoccupation with space has become an increasingly marked feature of scholarship in the humanities. This “spatial turn” was, to some extent, an inevitable consequence of the broader “cultural turn,” for it was premised on the understanding that space is a social and cultural construction rather than an inert entity.⁶ Accordingly, space is now routinely regarded as an arena in which power relations are encoded and contested, bodies and minds are moved, social perceptions are shaped, communicated, and challenged, and personal and collective identities are fashioned through a combination of local, national, and global factors. From science to religion, reading to shopping, the meanings of both ideas and practices have a spatial dimension in contemporary analysis. Furthermore, once space is seen to be a condition for social practices and meanings, it becomes apparent that the relationship is reversible: practices, meanings, and affects shape actual physical environments.⁷

But it is not as though the spatial turn is, in fact, recent. To a large extent, Enlightenment writers and thinkers themselves recognized the importance of space to the culture of improvement, whether this entailed spreading politeness, expanding knowledge, or transforming nature. Most famously, perhaps, Joseph Addison acknowledged the need to reconfigure the spatial orientation of civility when, in 1711, he expressed his intention to bring “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses.”⁸ If this attempt to fuse knowledge and sociability required a shift from private or formal to public or convivial spaces, such spaces also reinforced the connection between politeness and global commerce, as conversation transpired amidst the consumption of coffee or tea, products associated with empire.⁹ Like politeness, stadial theory was another key component of Enlightenment culture, and this notion of social development also acquired an increasingly spatial dimension, especially in the wake of the exploration of the Pacific by James Cook, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and others. Travelers to both America and the Pacific world applied stadial theory to the indigenous peoples they encountered, plotting different groups on a common scale of civilization.¹⁰ In this way, civilization, along with the concept of progress, was reclassified as a function of geography as well as history, in a process based on racism and Eurocentric observation.¹¹ Accordingly, Enlightenment philosophers came to regard cultural difference as a matter of space no less than time, while the study of human history became inseparable from the knowledge of global geography. As John Locke pronounced as early as 1690, “In the beginning, all the world was America.”¹²

Our understanding of the Enlightenment, especially the complex interrelationship between its local and global aspects, has been enhanced, thanks to historical geographers as well as the recent emphasis on space in social, literary, and art history. In his pioneering scholarship on the geography of eighteenth-century culture, for instance, Charles Withers has asserted that such a spatial approach to the Enlightenment refigures it as “dynamic, mobile, and cosmopolitan, not just static and national” (Placing the Enlightenment, 21). Across the period, an unprecedented increase in geographical knowledge aided and legitimized imperial expansion. This consciousness of global space exerted a profound influence on various kinds of intellectual activity, opening up new modes of aesthetic appreciation and scientific inquiry, while generating new forms of racial thought through the transformation, in various colonial contexts, of natural history, medicine, political economy, and theories of the imagination.¹³

At the same time that imperial expansion was spatializing thought, urban commercial modernity produced spatial transformations that reflected and promoted widespread social, economic, and cultural change. In London, for instance, as Miles Ogborn has shown, modernity was experienced as distinctively geographical when new physical sites, from pleasure gardens to city streets, were constructed, improved, and advertised to facilitate the fashioning of new personal, social, and national identities.¹⁴ This modernization of space was gendered so that, for instance, one intriguing result of the proliferation of soft, luxury furnishings in the elite home was a tendency to invest female bodies with qualities associated with highly sexualized locations.¹⁵ However, through letter-writing in parlors, closets, and other rooms, domestic space facilitated female intellectual activity and scholarly exchange.¹⁶ Thus, it seems apposite to concur with Charles Withers and Robert Mayhew that most of the key concerns of eighteenth-century culture, from politeness to empire, the fiscal-military state to the Industrial Revolution, science to tourism, can now also be considered as issues of geography.¹⁷

By attending to a wide variety of spaces, a subsidiary aim of this collection is to contribute to current interdisciplinary scholarship on the Enlightenment's plurality. It has long been acknowledged that the Enlightenment was a complex, contradictory movement, which functioned differently in different nations and across different denominations: for instance, Protestantism and Catholicism had their own Enlightenments.¹⁸ Inside nations, too, there were different forms of Enlightenment in different places, as recent research on the Industrial Revolution has shown in relation to Birmingham, Manchester, and other provincial towns.¹⁹ Even within the same places, the Enlightenment could take popular as well as elite forms, involve private and public domains, and operate at different levels of political intensity.²⁰ Despite being excluded from many spaces, pursuits, and positions of power, women contributed to Enlightenment ideas in distinctive ways, with some novelists and thinkers representing the home as both a refuge from national and imperial affairs, and as a vital source of patriotism in a modern, commercial polity.²¹ The distinction between public and private cannot be regarded as identical to the difference between domestic spaces and those outside the home. The French Revolution even created an evolving “juvenile Enlightenment,” as small children and young adults became politicized, challenging the justice of the contemporary world.²² Sexuality, too, shaped Enlightenment spatiality. Connecting free thought to libertinism and pleasure, sexuality bridged elite and popular spheres, bringing philosophes, intellectuals, and politicians in contact with prostitutes, pornographers, and radicals.²³ In all these ways, Enlightenment was realized by and in the settings in which it was experienced, whether these involved reading sentimental novels at home, discussing politics at a debating club, enjoying bawdy satire in a salon or at a gentleman's club, collecting botanical specimens during a tour, or viewing scientific demonstrations at a public, urban venue. If, as J. G. A. Pocock has argued, there is no single Enlightenment, this is as much to do with its multiple scales, spheres, and locations as with its disputes, fissures, and ambiguities.²⁴

Our collection invokes a pluralized Enlightenment. It does so by charting the ways in which different scales—local, national, and international—overlap and connect with one another across both actual places, and imagined, even virtual, spaces. It focuses on the spatial dimensions of books and objects in addition to exploring the circulation of ideas and practices in the usual Enlightenment hot spots, such as the Pacific or the metropolis, the coffeehouse or the landscape garden. From this perspective, the ship, the home, the battlefield, the Catholic monastery, the natural world, and the printed poetic miscellany are all treated as significant “spaces of Enlightenment.”

The current transnational orientation of contemporary Enlightenment scholarship does not limit itself to Europe. Recent scholarship has examined the networks of knowledge, trade, production, and consumption that connected peoples throughout a globalized, commercial world.²⁵ Such networks had long characterized Atlantic imperial regimes as well as trade routes into South and East Asia, but, increasingly, the Pacific region was also brought into this international system of economic, cultural, and ecological exchange.²⁶ As we have already noted, during the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the Pacific functioned as a laboratory for testing, modifying, and advancing ideas conveyed in natural and social philosophy. Specifically, European voyagers attempted to synthesize Enlightenment knowledge with their empirical observations of plants, animals, climates, and the customs of indigenous peoples. Moreover, their published travel accounts not only fostered public interest in the Antipodes, but also informed subsequent theorization about, among other things, penal transportation, colonial settlement, and the development and differentiation of humankind.²⁷

While the considerable impact of Pacific exploration on Enlightenment philosophy has been discussed by a number of scholars, there has been an almost exclusive focus on elite voyagers. Kate Fullagar addresses this issue in an analysis of the experiences and observations of some ordinary mariners who were on board Captain James Cook's third expedition to the Pacific between 1776 and 1780. These men were not trained in stadial theory or natural philosophy, and yet their empirical observations of Pacific peoples and ecological processes enabled them to formulate something akin to an Enlightenment ethic, often critical of European imperial attitudes and practices. By examining the views of these voyagers, Fullagar reveals the value of undertaking a kind of “global enlightenment from below.” Such an approach redefines modernity as a transnational rather than European phenomenon by revealing the complex contributions of Pacific peoples.

An ambivalence to progress, empire, and modernity was also a notable feature of writings about London's appearance in the middle of the eighteenth century. In an examination of architectural treatises, imaginative works, and a range of other texts, Alison O'Byrne surveys debates about the state and effect of urban development in London, where magnificent buildings and monuments testified to Britain's imperial power and prestige, but also revealed its inevitable decline. According to O'Byrne, advocates of urban improvement argued that new buildings and modern streets would provide evidence to present and future generations that a combination of commerce, empire, and Enlightenment, as reflected in its refined and opulent metropolis, made Britain the most civilized, advanced, and prosperous nation on the planet during this period. However, as London was given over to construction, the sight of scaffolding, incomplete structures, and upturned streets conjured up images of ruins rather than riches to some observers. Informed by ideas of luxury, poets and imaginative writers intriguingly saw such “memorials” as signs of imperial excess and national degeneration.

The relationship between luxury, commerce, and empire was a source of considerable debate throughout the eighteenth century, reaching something of a climax in the controversy over sugar, which gripped both Britain and France during the revolutionary era. Garritt Van Dyk adopts a comparative approach to the politicization of this colonial culinary commodity, examining the British sugar boycotts alongside the French sugar riots. Despite involving the same food item, these virtually concurrent events were staged for disparate reasons, again revealing how Enlightenment concerns took different forms in different nations. In Britain, sugar had originally been an exclusive (if addictive) luxury commodity, but by the late eighteenth century, it had not only entered the mainstream diet but also, chiefly through tea drinking, became a crucial aspect of cultural identity. But sugar was produced in the Caribbean by African slaves, so for abolitionists, it meant slavery, and they mounted an anti-saccharide movement that promoted abstention from sugar by imagining its consumption as the degrading ingestion of bodies in distant places. By contrast, in France, the Jacobin Society advocated abstention, but its primary objective was to stop the unscrupulous, profiteering behavior of merchants, not to end the exploitation of slaves. This led to sugar riots in Paris in 1792, when women protested against the high price of this consumer good and seized it at a fair price, in an enactment of taxation populaire. And yet, despite the distinctions between these British and French experiences, both events were, as Van Dyk illustrates, connected by the interaction of political revolution, household consumption, and global trade, especially after the slave revolt in Saint Domingue affected the price, availability, and significance of sugar in both nations.

War, no less than improvement, commerce, or global discovery, was a crucial sphere of Enlightenment. The battlefields and the bivouacs of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, in particular, shaped the distinctive practices and experiences of the so-called “military Enlightenment,” through which ordinary soldiers and officers alike could be humanized, as Eleanor Morecroft makes clear. Military spaces and the modes of conflict and community they generated engaged the senses and feelings of all participants, thereby shaping affective relationships among and across ranks and regiments, or even between adversaries. Also, the immersive and impressionistic work of a new generation of military authors and artists brought the sensory and emotional dimensions of conflict to prominence, shaping the British public's understanding of war. Surveying contemporary battlefield accounts and imagery, Morecroft shows that even as they represented violence, suffering, and death with visceral intensity, participant-chroniclers and painters like William Napier and George Jones understood military space to be grounded in the affective practices associated with enlightened modes of virtue, sensibility, and civility.

In drawing on recent work in the history of emotions, the historiography of multiple Enlightenments has increasingly come to conceive of space as a field of multiple environments—or what Susan Broomhall has termed “spaces for feeling”—through which identities, sociabilities, and communities are made.²⁸ Like the battlefields or home fronts of the Napoleonic Wars, such immersive spaces could take the form of specific locales, such as Busaco or Waterloo, or, rather differently and more abstractly, evoke the metaphysical category of space itself (as articulated most notably by Kant in the quotation at the beginning of this essay). Amir Minsky turns to the example of the late German Enlightenment to trace the development in the period of a “spatial imaginary” that, among other things, enabled political reform projects to be imbued with emotional properties and values that helped to universalize their causes. These projects included the popular literacy movement, which aimed to educate and reform the lower classes by ridding them of ignorance and superstition and inculcating them instead with affective refinement, but also with German middle-class values, specifically domestic virtue, as an antidote to French modes of aristocratic or revolutionary excess, and which, finally, involved the demarcation of national space through a concept of “home” or Heimat. Each project subjectivized and moralized social space, which, as Minksy argues, furthered Enlightenment values by reversing religious intolerance, enabling individual emancipation, and, most importantly, building secular emotional regimes in which new cultures of justice and equality could thrive.

If some spaces of the Enlightenment enhanced new popular movements focused on the individual, others were primarily shaped by the object-oriented courtly aesthetics and elite artistic tastes of the rich and powerful. Matthew Martin's analysis of the Zwettler Tafelaufsatz, a great porcelain table centerpiece commissioned in 1768 as a part of an elaborate multimodal celebration of the Abbot Rayner Kollmann's jubilee at the Cistercian monastery at Zwettl in Lower Austria, shows how the culture of baroque display bolstered monasticism while also contributing to a new project of Catholic Enlightenment. In the Zwettl library, ceiling frescoes, music, and porcelain—three very different modes of artistic expression—shared an iconographic program that allegorized the cardinal virtues, thereby creating a new kind of rhetorical space that defended the role of monasteries and monastic scholarship in Enlightenment learning. Yet, the spectacle of the Tafelaufsatz itself functioned ambivalently in this context, since porcelain, only recently mastered in Europe, was both a wondrous material and a technological achievement. It revealed monastic culture's continued attachment to a divinely ordained absolutist world order even as it embraced scientific progress.

Another striking example of what we might term liminal enlightened space is offered by the print rooms that flourished in Europe, particularly England and Ireland, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the early nineteenth century. Print rooms were a popular and short-lived mode of interior decoration for the elite, created by pasting prints and paper ornaments directly onto the walls of domestic interiors. Drawing on the unpublished journals and correspondence of the English print connoisseur and collector, Elizabeth Seymour Percy, first Duchess of Northumberland, Louise Voll Box brings to our attention an important yet unnoticed contrast between the function and understanding of prints displayed in print rooms and those found in collectors’ portfolios and albums. Even as Enlightenment principles of order, taxonomy, and erudite display informed both practices, if to rather different degrees, their reception was significantly divergent. Print rooms did not typically engage viewers’ knowledge and learning, but instead elicited a semi-scripted response, which usually took the form of acknowledging their fashionability and appreciating the overall sensory impression created by monochrome prints displayed against colored wallpaper. This divergence meant, somewhat counterintuitively, that the traditional print collector's album was, in effect, much more a space of Enlightenment than the print room itself.

If the distinction between art and decorative display was important to Enlightenment cultures of collection and learning, that is partly because of the increasing connection between art and science. Their closeness is aptly demonstrated by the way in which natural history and landscape appreciation overlapped and influenced each other, with both fueling an appetite for travel. Through travel, as Emma Gleadhill shows, elite and even middle-class women were able to pursue an interest in botany or geology no less than fulfill a desire for the sublime or the picturesque. By collecting specimens from myriad locations, including the countryside as well as cities, and recording, testing, and communicating their empirical observations, women travelers could contribute to the circulation of knowledge. Their pursuit of natural history sometimes, like Enlightenment philosophy, stimulated speculation on human civilization, while the seriousness with which they represented their investigations challenged the masculine exclusivity of polite science.

No tour in the late eighteenth century would have been complete without an experience of the sublime, even if the traveler was motivated by a primarily scientific purpose. After all, the new concept of deep time, uncovered by geology, sparked interest in mountains and rock formations as sources of sublimity. As Miranda Stanyon shows, sublime space was conceived as much in acoustic as in visual terms, and its various sounds, of roaring waterfalls, cracking thunder, or whistling winds, revealed the underlying processes of this aesthetic experience. Specifically, the sublime was not only associated with feelings of awe or astonishment, but also became a kind of “habit” or “second nature,” exercised in a sonic space in which sounds acculturated individuals to particular responses and settings. Combining an interpretation of the “Romantic” Piercefield estate, a key destination on any picturesque tour along the Wye River, with the theories of habit formulated by Kant, Schiller, Herder, and Félix Ravaisson, among others, Stanyon unearths a novel notion of sublimity at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, and actual sensory experience. If the sublime was believed to have the potential to overwhelm the self by evoking intense passions, it also, as Stanyon shows, could be thought to have a habituating effect through repetition. As vibrations and resonances, sounds were paradigmatic of this kind of sublime experience, since they communicated shocks to the nerves, setting bodies in motion even in everyday locations. Thus, the sublime came to be regarded as a necessarily spatial, sonic phenomenon, one that transformed the perception of extreme nature into a matter of “second nature.”

English literature, especially poetry, would soon be reshaped by the Romantic engagement with the sublime. In the midcentury, however, and after the loss of an earlier generation of recognized great poets (most recently, Alexander Pope, who died in 1744), poetry increasingly relied on the power of the print marketplace to reach modern enlightened readerships. Alison Horgan reminds us that the verse miscellany was one of the most successful and innovative commercial print genres of the era, and it presented a staggering volume and variety of poetry to contemporary readers. Indeed, it was a genre that both aimed to educate literary audiences and to shape the English poetic tradition using principles of variety and multiplicity, on the one hand, and meticulous selection, order, and redaction, on the other. Two of the most widely read miscellanies of the period, Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), exemplified very different editorial visions. While Dodsley's miscellany attempted to capture the poetic present for a future audience, Percy's project was one of preservation and recovery. Yet, as Horgan argues, each treats the miscellany form as a “virtual textual space” for the curation, exhibition, and engagement of different modes of literary enlightenment. For Dodsley, the miscellany was a container for poetry that reflected a polished, polite taste and a well-ordered worldview, while Percy's volume, with its “promiscuous” antiquarianism, found free rein for dissonance, obscurity, and uncertainty.

The variety and capaciousness of the poetic miscellany can serve as a useful metaphor for what, in conclusion, we might term the miscellaneous spaces of Enlightenment. As the essays in this volume attest, spaces of Enlightenment existed across a spectrum, from domestic scenes to global visions; they included popular and elite spheres, secular and sacred spaces, and they accommodated a wide variety of identities, discourses, and practices (religious, scientific, aesthetic, literary, emotional, political, etc.). Indeed, the spaces of Enlightenment were settings both for new discourses, technologies, and practices (amateur travel and science, sugar consumption, food riots, porcelain making, stadial theory, domestic sentiment, revolutionary politics, abolitionism, etc.), as well as for the channeling and reinvention of older traditions (such as alchemy, antiquarian poetry, warfare, slavery, Aristotelian virtue schema, print connoisseurship, concepts of the sublime, classically inflected projections of imperial ruin, etc.). This meant that even as Enlightenment spaces exemplified the modes of progress, empiricism, humanism, and secularism that we conventionally associate with enlightened modernity, they were rarely singular or fixed, nor can they be reliably understood in exclusively progressivist terms. Instead—like the battlefield, the monastery library, the memorial, or the print room, to take just a few examples—they were likely to accommodate the plural and the hybrid, along with the various identities, practices, and concepts that constitute the Enlightenment. In these complex and inconclusive terms, involving the network of places and spaces explored in this volume, we hope to extend our understanding of how plural or multiple Enlightenments helped to define the spaces of our modernity.

The articles in this special issue derive from papers presented at the sixteenth David Nichol Smith Seminar in Brisbane, Australia, in December 2017. The editors would like to express their gratitude to the organizations that supported this event, including the Ian Potter Foundation, the National Library of Australia, the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, the University of Queensland Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, and the Sydney Intellectual History Network at the University of Sydney. We also owe enormous thanks to Jennifer Milam, Susan Forde, and Peter Holbrook for their unfailing commitment to the conference, and to the many participants, who made it such a stimulating, enjoyable occasion.

Notes