Spaces of Enlightenment: From Domestic Scenes to Global Visions

Abstract

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.