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Notes on video lecture:
Enlightenment or Empire
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on February 3, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
inferior, destruction, verities, colonial, skeptical, history, Casas, abolitionist, racial, human, Africans, faith, Enlightenment, English, empire, natural, Quebec, science, universal, miseries, Wolfe, casta, Europe, oppressions, Christian, Word, good, inferiority, threat, death, society, reform, British, Rousseau, science, Algonquin, nameless, peoples, Cook, 18th, Marx, Québec, barbarians, chains, incompatible
•
Mary Wollstonecraft
•
questioning the aim of               
•
giving voice to an important key to the                           
•
that one had to now be                    of the world
•
skeptical about claims and subject them to rational, scientific inquiry
•
a man of reason had to query all                 , to prove them to be true, not simply to assume them to be true
•
some began to query whether the              was good for the Enlightenment at all
•
empire helped produce               
•
empire was the "backdrop of the Enlightenment"
•
the Enlightenment could contribute to the renovation, reinvention, or              of the empire
•
some began to realize if empire was not, in some fundamental way, a              to the Enlightenment itself
•
that there was a fundamental choice to make
•
we often think that resistances to imperial enlightenment came from the                  peoples
•
Hawaiian islanders who captured Captain         
•
but within Europe, many people were getting the sense that Enlightenment ideas were                          to the practices of the empire
•
as empire spread the Enlightenment, it was also sowing the seeds of its own                       
•
as Europeans ventured out in the world, their conquering and colonizing habits betrayed their own            in reason and science
•
the discourse of the Enlightenment could be used again empires themselves
•
how to believe in universal reason while at the same time ruling people who you do not feel capable of living in               
•
you find many thoughts and theories about              differences between men
•
argued that they were "uplifting the native"
•
"bringing                  peoples into civil society"
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even if they didn't want to
•
it was believed that it was for their own         
•
led to
•
flourishing taxonomies
•
gradations of                       
•
e.g. from            paintings, one could deduce that some mixtures of races were "closer to being able to reason" than others
•
a kind of "classification mania of peoples in the          century"
•
the "noble savage"
•
a character that would loom very large in the social sciences
•
De Las            argued that the noble savage could not be enslaved but had not heard God's word yet
•
therefore they could not be oppressed
•
his view was a new way of seeing people who lived in "               societies"
•
they "lived in a world which God created but had not yet been subjected to God's         "
•
"natural man" as opposed to "modern man"
•
book: "The Social Contract"
•
books create theories and stories and models of the world for other people to consume and think about
•
this book was a blast, a critique against the                  of civil society and property
•
"men are born free but in civil society everywhere we are in             "
•
there was something restraining about civil society that natural man was not subject to
•
the natural liberties of the state of nature vs. the                        of civil society
•
"that first theorist who felt that modernity was an oppressive experience"
•
has a long biography itself which will wind itself to anti-colonial discourses in the 19th and 20th centuries
•
led to theories by Karl         , whose theory of alienation would profoundly shape global history
•
however, there are reasons to resist this straight-line progression from                  to Marx to modern revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries
•
was reading reports like those of Captain Cook
•
not only reporting on natural man, but actually bringing them back in person to be studied, e.g. the Huron and                    people
•
being held up as exemplars of natural man in contrast to civilized, social man of              with an echo of concern and anxiety that there was something pure and good about the savage that the European man had given up by his membership in civil society
•
increasing terms of corruptions of natural man in make that passage to modern society
•
painting: "Noble Savage"
•
by Benjamin West
•
a                  Iroquois
•
caused an immediate sensation
•
was part of a larger work
•
the death of General           
•
died at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham
•
on the outskirts of              City
•
English had just defeated the French armies
•
a pivotal moment in the Seven Years' War and in the history of Canada. A                invasion force led by General James Wolfe defeated French troops under the Marquis de Montcalm, leading to the surrender of                            to the British
•
we see Nobel Savage in diminished pose
•
looking peacefully upon the            of the British commander
•
almost a bystander to the epic of empire and European sacrifice
•
made people ask the question: who is more            in this portrait?
•
colonization is turning men like Wolfe into the very                      that they seek to submit
•
having to practice forms of suppression that they themselves denounce
•
others were worried that empire was bringing corruption home
•
book: "Histoire Philosophique et Politique"
•
examined commerce, religion, slavery, and other popular subjects, all with a perspective from the French Enlightenment
•
a kind of                of the world, one might say one of the first global histories ever written
•
in the end, nowhere does this notion that the Enlightenment was revealing the intrinsic incompatibility of empire with science and civilization than in the treatment of Africans
•
the enslavement of millions of                  was, many Enlightenment men believed, fundamentally a threat, a menace, a danger to the Enlightenment itself.
•
enslavement threatened to undermine the enslavers themselves
•
out of this view that there was something fundamentally incompatible between the enslavement of some of God's creatures that we see the birth of the                          movement
•
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)
•
"The Life of Olaudah Equiano"
•
one of the great books circulating around the                speaking world
•
enslaved and sold and shipped to the Americas
•
released by his                    owner
•
a blast against the slave trade as fundamentally at odds against the                    precepts of Enlightenment thought
•
commerce and trading was fine, but not commerce and trading in               

Vocabulary:

argot, n. [AR-go] a characteristic language of a particular group, as among thieves ⇒ "It was argued that they were "uplifting the native" and "bringing inferior peoples into civil society" even if they didn't want to as it was for their own good, this was the political argot of the time."

People:

######################### (1484-1566)
A Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar who wrote "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies", a chronicle of the first decades of colonization of the West Indies which focused particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples
  • became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians
  • as one of the first European settlers in the Americas, he participated in the atrocities committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists
  • in 1515, he reformed his views, gave up his Indian slaves, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives
  • In 1522, he attempted to launch a new kind of peaceful colonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but this venture failed, causing Las Casas to enter the Dominican Order and become a friar, leaving the public scene for a decade
  • he continued lobbying for the abolition of the encomienda (a grant of a specified number of natives of a specific community to a specific Spanish colonizer), gaining an important victory by the passing of the New Laws in 1542
  • the remainder of his life was spent at the Spanish court where he held great influence over Indies-related issues
  • in 1550, he participated in the Valladolid debate in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that they were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was unjustifiable
######################### (1713-1796)
French writer and iconoclastic Jesuit who in 1770 wrote the popular and controversial "L'Histoire des deux Indes", which examined commerce, religion, slavery, and other popular subjects from the perspective of the French Enlightenment
  • it indicated that empires, especially the Spanish and the Portuguese, in colonizing the East and West Indies, were turning their backs on their fundamental purpose of the Enlightenment and were thus eventually doomed to corruption and decline
  • the book principally examines the East Indies, South America, the West Indies, and North America
  • the full title of the book was "L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes" and was a ten-volume set and one of the first global histories of the world
  • the final chapter comprises theory around the future of Europe as a whole
  • it was translated into the principal European languages
  • its publication in France was forbidden in 1779
  • the book was burned by the public executioner, and an order was given for the arrest of the author
######################### (1745-1797)
A prominent African in London, freed slave who supported the British movement to end the slave trade
  • known in his lifetime as Gustavus Vassa
  • his autobiography, published in 1789 and attracting wide attention, was considered highly influential in gaining passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which ended the African trade for Britain and its colonies
  • his last master was Robert King, an American Quaker merchant who allowed Equiano to trade on his own account and purchase his freedom in 1766
  • he settled in England in 1767 and worked and traveled for another 20 years as a seafarer, merchant, and explorer in the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, South and Central America, and the United Kingdom

Spelling Corrections:

resistences ⇒ resistances
empirial ⇒ imperial
Hawaian ⇒ Hawaiian
suppresion ⇒ suppression

Ideas and Concepts:

Via tonight's History of the World Since 1300 class, how did I miss this painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art back in the day: "Ben Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky", 1816 by Benjamin West, with cherubs! Brilliant!"
Via tonight's History of the World Since 1300 class: "In the end, nowhere does this notion that the Enlightenment was revealing the intrinsic incompatibility of empire with science, civilization, and the rights of man than in the treatment of Africans. The enslavement of millions of Africans was, many Enlightenment men believed, fundamentally a threat, a menace, a danger to the Enlightenment itself. Enslavement threatened to undermine the enslavers themselves."
Columbus and the New World
1500-1700 Indian Ocean Trading system
Da Gama, Pepper and World History
Portuguese Indian Ocean Empire
16th Century Colonialism Fueling European Violence
Global Food: European Sugar, Caribbean Plantations, African Slaves
16th and 17th Century Merchant Trading Companies
17th Century Interdependence of Trade and Investment
Francis Drake and Mercantilist Wars
The Apex and Erosion of the Mughal Empire
The Treaty of Westphalia as the Hinge of Modern History
The Influence of Silver on the Ming Dynasty
Political Reverberations of Ming Consolidation
18th China Resurgent as Qing Dynasty
18th Century Tea Trade, Leisure Time, and the Spread of Knowledge
Cook and Clive: Discoverers, Collectors and Conquerors of the Enlightenment
Strains on the Universality of the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, Empire, and Colonization: Burke vs. Hastings
Enlightenment or Empire
18th Century Land Grabbing
The Industrial Revolution and the Transition of Non-Renewable Energy
The Seven Years' War and Colonial Revolutions
Napoleon, Spain, the Colonies, and Imperial Crises
Human Rights and the Meaning of Membership within Societies
Napoleon, New Nations, and Total War
The Ottoman Empire's 19th Century Tanzimat Reform
The Early 19th Century Market Revolution
The Global Upheavals of the Mid-19th Century
The Train, the Rifle, and the Industrial Revolution
Transition in India: Last of the Mughals
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and Its Ramifications
Darwin's Effect on 19th Century Ideas
Factors Which Led to the Solidifying of Nation States
1868 Japan: The Meiji Restoration
1871: Germany Becomes a Nation
North American Nation-Building
19th Century Changing Concepts of Labor
The Benefits of Comparative Advantage
Migration after the Age of Revolutions
Creating 19th Century Global Free Trade
The Expanding 19th Century Capitalist System
The Second Industrial Revolution
The Closing of the American Frontier
Africa's Second Imperial Wave
Early 20th Century American Imperialism
1894-1905: Japan's Imperial Wave in Asia
Rashid Rida and 19th Century Islamic Modernization
19th Century Pan-Islam and Zionism Movements
19th Century Global Export-Led Growth
Indian Wars and Mass Slaughter of Bison
The Suez Canal's Effect on the Malayan Tiger
1890-1914: Savage Wars of Peace
1900-1909: Russian and Turkish Dynasties
1899-1911 The End of the Qing Dynasty
The 1910 Mexican Revolution
The Panic of 1907
Turn-of-the-Century Civilization and its Discontents
20th Century Questioning of Reason
Late 19th Century Anxieties of Race
The First World War
The End of WWI and the Attempt at Global Peace
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919
The Wilson-Lenin Moment
1919 Self-Determination Movements in India
Post-WWI European Peace and Global Colonial Upheaval
1929 Economic Collapse
Changes in Capitalism between the Wars