Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, ed. Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt. Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert Supplementa. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. 408 pp. EUR 48.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8353-0021-7.

Reviewed by Bradley Naranch (Department of History, Stanford University)
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

The Enlightenment's Global Histories

Scholars who specialize in the history of the European Enlightenment have long appreciated the complex social networks through which ideas, texts, and writers in the "republic of letters" circulated. Indeed, the movements of few groups in early modern history have been as thoroughly tracked across political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries as those of the Enlightenment philosophes and their allies. Situating the Enlightenment within the framework of eighteenth-century colonial history, however, especially outside of an Atlantic context, has proven a more difficult undertaking. Identifying influential texts that make explicit references to overseas settings is not the problem, as many undergraduate readers of Voltaire's Candide (1759) or Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) can testify, let alone those familiar with the writings of Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, or Johann Gottfried Herder. The primary challenges to assessing the Enlightenment's significance for global history have been interpretive in nature. The most significant of these come from postcolonial critics, who argue that all Enlightenment thinkers, even the most radical among them, were complicit in perpetuating discourses that confirmed notions of racial superiority, supported Eurocentric views of civilizational exceptionalism, and enabled "enlightened" versions of European colonial power to emerge.

Given the hostility of such intellectual debates in the past, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink's edited volume of essays on the Enlightenment and the colonial world is a refreshingly civil treatment of a delicate and still controversial subject. It showcases a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of history and literary criticism that engages respectfully, if often critically, with postcolonial interpretations of the Enlightenment. Its approach to the history of overseas expansion through an analysis of European textual encounters with the non-European world invites comparison with that of Anthony Pagden, although its inclusion of numerous Danish, Dutch, and German sources is a welcome addition to Pagden's earlier, pioneering work.[1] As Lüsebrink makes clear in the introduction, his overriding interest lies in documenting a wide range of colonial attitudes within Enlightenment texts, which were written during periods of major political upheaval in Europe as well as overseas. He argues that the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented production, circulation, and transfer of knowledge in Europe about the non-European world. The rapid dissemination of this new knowledge was motivated by an intense desire for intercultural communications and global interaction rather than by rising public support for colonialism. The profusion of Enlightenment print culture, particularly its voluminous travel literature, newspapers, and encyclopedic compendia, constituted an immense and highly differentiated archive containing critical discussions of colonialism, the slave trade, and the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. These negative views of colonial practice, in turn, were closely linked to concerns about political despotism, religious intolerance, and cultural decline within Europe.

While acknowledging the colonial genealogies and future political implications of such knowledge, Lüsebrink emphasizes the unexpected results and enduring value of Enlightenment intellectual engagement with the non-European world. "Knowledge about the colonial world during the eighteenth century was always knowledge for ruling others--even when it simultaneously fulfilled other functions and satisfied other needs: curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, fascination, and the search for social progress and scientific cognition" (p. 16). In comparison to the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideas flowed more easily across national boundaries. This cosmopolitan fluidity encouraged the rapid translation and circulation of texts written about--and by--colonial subjects or former slaves. Overriding curiosity in eighteenth-century Europe about foreign cultures and peoples renders it a "prehistory of contemporary intercultural relations between Europe and the non-European world" (p. 17). The Enlightenment created normative categories and philosophical concepts that anti-colonial revolutionaries and human rights activists would later appropriate in the twentieth century, even as it forged a polarized language of civilization versus barbarism that radical nationalists and modern-day imperialists use to divide, rather than unite, the world's diverse populations. "The paradoxical legacy of the Enlightenment movement and its connections to the non-European world," writes Lüsebrink, "lies therefore in the contradictions that it brought forth and the disappointed expectations that it created" (p. 18).

Lüsebrink's dialectical interpretation of how the eighteenth-century Enlightenment affected long-term relations between Europe and its former colonies is followed by a provocative and wide-ranging essay by Jürgen Osterhammel, a distinguished scholar of East Asia and influential participant in debates over transnational and global history.[2] He begins by questioning the applicability of terms like the "eighteenth century" and the "Enlightenment" to the non-European world. "The age of the Enlightenment," he unequivocally states, "was an epoch in European, not world history" (p. 20). Outside of the Atlantic world, the late eighteenth century did not constitute a dramatic break in world history separating one distinct epoch from another. Osterhammel outlines the limited reach of European influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific during much of the eighteenth century. He provides a useful overview of the colonial crises in the Americas and Caribbean, particularly in Haiti, that cast into doubt the viability of slave-based, plantation economies and mercantilist models of colonial commerce. Aligning himself with the work of Christopher Bayly, Osterhammel regards intercultural communication and political collaboration with non-European elites as necessary preconditions for European overseas imperialism.[3] Given their limited geopolitical power and the escalating internal crises that European states faced, efforts by Enlightenment writers, scientists, and explorers to acquire knowledge of the non-European world did not sustain a new wave of colonial dominance: "Conquests in the name of enlightened principles did not take place. Scientific colonization through measuring cartographers, collecting botanists, and note-taking ethnographers is not the same thing as military subjugation" (p. 35).

After these programmatic statements by Lüsebrink about the extensiveness of Enlightenment interest in the colonial world and by Osterhammel about the contingent nature of European global power, the burden falls on the remaining contributors to the volume to provide sufficient textual documentation to support these contrasting but interconnected claims. Based on papers presented at a conference hosted by Lüsebrink at the University of the Saarland, the chapters are specialized presentations drawn from larger projects, the full appreciation of which requires a fair amount of familiarity with both the Enlightenment and European colonial history. Three of the eighteen chapters are written in English. The remainder are in German, although several chapters quote heavily from French-language sources. While the volume lacks an index and bibliography, each chapter is footnoted with references to relevant secondary and primary literature. The chapters make for challenging but rewarding reading. Collectively, they illustrate the productivity of Lüsebrink's approach while also underscoring the importance of Osterhammel's claims about its limits.

The first eleven chapters fall under the category of "knowledge transfer" and deal primarily with the translation, circulation, and production of books written about the non-European world. Fittingly enough, Cecil P. Courtney's first chapter discusses the reception and controversies surrounding Guillaume Thomas François Raynal's Histoire Philosophique et Politique des deux Indes (1770), a text whose encyclopedic breadth, political sentiments, and widespread diffusion throughout Europe best embodies Lüsebrink's arguments about the Enlightenment's critical engagement with colonial history. Courtney and Lüsebrink both serve as lead members of a committee overseeing the publication of a new critical edition of Raynal's multivolume work, a project directed by a third contributor to the volume, Anthony Strugnell.[4]. Other chapters offer textual analyses of Enlightenment-era dictionaries, encyclopedias, travelogues, essays, and dramas. These include one of two chapters in the volume on Georg Forster (by Helmut Pleitsch); an innovative postcolonial reading by Gudrun Loster-Schneider of Heinrich von Kleist's Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo (1811) using Homi Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity; a comparative look at French and German dictionary entries about Africa (by Ute Fendler and Susanne Greilich); and an analysis of Herder's "Neger-Idyllen" (1792) by York-Gotthard Mix. Several other contributors discuss lesser-known works by German writers, such as Christian Oldendorps's intriguing account of missionary life and the slave trade in the Danish Caribbean (by Peter Stein); an early account of imperial Japan by the German doctor and Dutch East Indies employee Engelbert Kaempfer, which Teruaki Takahashi discusses as part of an informative chapter on early modern European-Japanese encounters; and Horst Walter Blanke's detailed comparison of a German-language travelogue collection, Allgemeine Historie der Reisen (1747-74), with similar editions published in Britain, France, and the Netherlands.

Three chapters in this section, by Clorinda Donato, Annelore Rieke-Müller, and Ingmar Probst, deserve special mention for their convincing efforts at showing how specific political, religious, and economic factors influenced the production and organization of Enlightenment-era texts about the colonial world. Donato offers a fascinating account of how Spanish translators of the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1782-1832) responded to allegations of Spanish and Catholic cruelty towards African slaves and indigenous populations by creatively editing the original French text, even as they urged government officials in Madrid to embrace liberal economic reforms that would overturn monopolistic trading restrictions in the colonies. Probst shows how commercial rivalries within the Hudson Bay Company, combined with British public debates about the existence of the Northwest Passage, allowed geographic information about the Canadian West to reach European readers, despite efforts by company officials to keep such details confidential. Rieke-Müller's chapter on the ethnographic and natural scientific collections housed in the Frankesche Stiftungen in Halle, including objects acquired from the Danish South Asian colony of Tranquebar, is the only one in the volume devoted to material culture. Her detailed analysis of Gottfried August Gründler's reorganization of the collection for pedagogical purposes reveals, for example, that Gründler grouped together Catholic and Islamic religious objects with those from China, Peru, and Lapland. This taxonomy reflected Lutheran and pietist beliefs on idolatry that called into question a clear division between internally homogenous European and non-European worlds.

The last seven chapters of the volume are thematically more varied than those contained in the first section. Four appear under the category of "intercultural forms of encounter." In their respective chapters, Bernd-Peter Lange and Anthony Strugnell take issue with postcolonial assessments of British Orientalists in late-eighteenth-century Bengal. They argue for a more nuanced appreciation of the personal connections that East India Company officials maintained with Hindu and Mughal elites, from whom they learned about Indian culture, history, and society. Christiane Küchler Williams and Stefanie Arendt show greater sympathy for postcolonial methods of textual criticism in their respective chapters on South Seas sexuality and cannibalism. Both use close readings of a wide range of primary sources to analyze European attitudes about gender, civilization, and human nature, not the history of the non-European societies encountered. By contrast, Michael Harbsmeier, in the first of three chapters on "vantage points of others," uses Lutheran missionary interviews with two native Greenlanders who visited Denmark in 1724 to discern indigenous perspectives on European society and religion. While his contention that Danish pietists were more sensitive than French Jesuits, or English scholars to the voices of colonial peoples is difficult to verify--Harbsmeier speaks of a "Danish-Greenlandic Sonderweg" (p. 369)--his discussion of how religious differences affected perceptions of foreign culture resonates well with Donato's earlier emphasis on Catholic and Protestant tensions within Europe over matters of colonial practice. Along with the chapters by Stein and Rieke-Müller, Harbsmeier's work underscores the importance of Danish overseas expansion in the eighteenth century, a subject often neglected by colonial historians. The last two chapters add additional layers of complexity to the global pathways by which texts and people traveled during the late eighteenth century. Wiebke Röben de Alencar Xavier tells the story of how Brazilian writer Tomás Antônio Gonzagas was forced into exile in Mozambique for his critical views of Portuguese colonial practice. Jörg Esleben examines the reception of Georg Forster's 1791 German-language translation of Śakuntalā, a classical Indian dramatic epic, for which he relied upon an English-language version translated by the British Orientalist, William Jones, in 1789. Like many of the other contributors, however, Esleben comes to no consensus about whether European knowledge of the colonial world was an "intercultural accomplishment" and "appropriation of the vantage point of another culture" or an "instrumentalized appropriation of foreign knowledge for ... imperialist purposes" (p. 406).

Lüsebrink, Osterhammel, and their talented team of contributors do not propose any new paradigms for studying the relationship between the Enlightenment and colonialism, but they succeed in clarifying the global worlds in which Enlightenment Europe existed.[5] Detailed coverage of German writers and sources makes this volume of essays an important addition to ongoing efforts at rethinking the history of modern Germany as part of a larger process of global expansion and cultural encounter.[6] The diversity of conflicting viewpoints discussed in the volume about colonialism highlights its prominence as a topic of debate in eighteenth-century print culture. Given the serious structural weaknesses that plagued its existence and the overt public criticism that many of its economic practices received, the resiliency of European colonialism in the post-Enlightenment era is all the more noteworthy. Enlightenment intercultural encounters did not prevent the subsequent expansion of European empires into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, but neither did the forces of liberal nationalism and post-Darwinian racism close off all forms of cultural exchange or silence colonial critics. The widespread circulation of knowledge about the non-European world during the eighteenth century dramatically influenced the dynamics and direction of colonial practice, but genuine curiosity about and appreciation for foreign cultures did not suffice to usher in a new era of postimperial history. The same holds true today.

Notes

[1]. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), and Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

[2]. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die Asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998); Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001); idem and Niels Peterson, Globalization: A Short History, trans. Dona Geyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008).

[3]. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (New York: Longman, 1989), and The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1919: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell, 2004).

[4]. Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, http://c18.net/ra/ra_pages.php?nom=ra_equipe. Accessed January 15, 2009.

[5]. Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

[6]. Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers' World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tuska Benes, In Babel's Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008).

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Citation: Bradley Naranch. Review of Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, ed., Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24139

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