The Enlightenment is introduced as a “period rich with debates on the nature of man, truth and the place of God, with the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. But did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans?” There are a lot of questions in this summary. Why would any period treat the rich and poor in the same manner? It seems the editor had to fill the space on the back cover, and so he or she just kept typing general ponderings. Then, this editor suggests the book also demonstrates how “historical interpretations of the Enlightenment” are continuously changing based on “contemporary socio-economic trends.” If this is true, it means these historians are writing fiction and not history. A history of the Enlightenment are the facts of what happened in this period. Why would these evens be changing just because socio-economic events develop in our current events? If they are changing, this should indicate that historians need to dig into the archives and base the history more firmly on cited or documented information that will not change with time because it is objectively what happened. In other words, if communists take over American politics, the facts regarding current capitalist corruptions should not completely re-write America’s history.
The chapters are divided into subjects on: the social context and consumerism, government, empirical trade, slavery, gender, religion (two chapters on this one), and on the conspiracy or revolution that ended the Enlightenment. Given the generalizations in all of this front and back matter, the “Chronology” really helps to identify the main events that the author, Dorinda Outram, identifies with the Enlightenment; this list begins with the 1686 opening of a Bible study by a priest, followed by Newton’s Principia Mathematica, several books by Locke, the founding of the Bank of England and the New East India Company and “Defoe’s” Robinson Crusoe. The line ends in 1793 with the Second Partition of Poland and the 1792 Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman. Given the randomness of these scientific and literary ventures and the seeming inclusion of colonialism and spread of the Christian religion as its defining characteristics, a basic summary of the “Enlightenment” might be politically-incorrect in the present, so the author begins the first chapter thus: “The Enlightenment has been defined in many different ways.” As if in a joke, this chapter’s final paragraph repeats this sentence: “Enlightenment had many meanings.” Then the paragraph explains what is going to happen in the following chapters, once again without offering a direct definition. The last sentence in the previous paragraph is: “Botanical decisions were also inevitably bound up in the growth of the large-scale empires of the eighteenth century” (1-9). If this concept is not about botany, then it must be about “empires” in the stated century. In other words, this book is about the glory of European empires, propagating for the grandeur of the enslavement and conversion to Christianity of the populations of the rest of the world: obviously, this does not sound like an acceptable idea in modern times, and this mis-match must have been what the cover was referring to regarding the changes of interpretation regarding history as current political preferences change.
While this book is repetitive, inconclusive, digressive and outdated, it achieves what it promises to achieve in its pages: it describes “The Enlightenment”, as truthfully as this controversial topic can be handled in our touchy modernity.