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Mary Wollstonecraft

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questioning the aim of science

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giving voice to an important key to the Enlightenment

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that one had to now be skeptical of the world

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skeptical about claims and subject them to rational, scientific inquiry

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a man of reason had to query all verities, to prove them to be true, not simply to assume them to be true

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some began to query whether the empire was good for the Enlightenment at all

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empire helped produce science

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empire was the "backdrop of the Enlightenment"

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the Enlightenment could contribute to the renovation, reinvention, or reform of the empire

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some began to realize if empire was not, in some fundamental way, a threat to the Enlightenment itself

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that there was a fundamental choice to make

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we often think that resistances to imperial enlightenment came from the colonial peoples

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Hawaiian islanders who captured Captain Cook

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but within Europe, many people were getting the sense that Enlightenment ideas were incompatible to the practices of the empire

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as empire spread the Enlightenment, it was also sowing the seeds of its own destruction

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as Europeans ventured out in the world, their conquering and colonizing habits betrayed their own faith in reason and science

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the discourse of the Enlightenment could be used again empires themselves

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how to believe in universal reason while at the same time ruling people who you do not feel capable of living in society

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you find many thoughts and theories about racial differences between men

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argued that they were "uplifting the native"

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"bringing inferior peoples into civil society"

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even if they didn't want to

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it was believed that it was for their own good

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led to

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flourishing taxonomies

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gradations of inferiority

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e.g. from casta paintings, one could deduce that some mixtures of races were "closer to being able to reason" than others

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a kind of "classification mania of peoples in the 18th century"

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the "noble savage"

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a character that would loom very large in the social sciences

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De Las Casas argued that the noble savage could not be enslaved but had not heard God's word yet

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therefore they could not be oppressed

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his view was a new way of seeing people who lived in "natural societies"

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they "lived in a world which God created but had not yet been subjected to God's Word"

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"natural man" as opposed to "modern man"

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book: "The Social Contract"

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books create theories and stories and models of the world for other people to consume and think about

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this book was a blast, a critique against the miseries of civil society and property

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"men are born free but in civil society everywhere we are in chains"

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there was something restraining about civil society that natural man was not subject to

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the natural liberties of the state of nature vs. the oppressions of civil society

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"that first theorist who felt that modernity was an oppressive experience"

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has a long biography itself which will wind itself to anti-colonial discourses in the 19th and 20th centuries

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led to theories by Karl Marx, whose theory of alienation would profoundly shape global history

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however, there are reasons to resist this straight-line progression from Rousseau to Marx to modern revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries

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was reading reports like those of Captain Cook

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not only reporting on natural man, but actually bringing them back in person to be studied, e.g. the Huron and Algonquin people

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being held up as exemplars of natural man in contrast to civilized, social man of Europe 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

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increasing terms of corruptions of natural man in make that passage to modern society

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painting: "Noble Savage"

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by Benjamin West

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a nameless Iroquois

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caused an immediate sensation

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was part of a larger work

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the death of General Wolfe

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died at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham

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on the outskirts of Quebec City

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English had just defeated the French armies

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a pivotal moment in the Seven Years' War and in the history of Canada. A British invasion force led by General James Wolfe defeated French troops under the Marquis de Montcalm, leading to the surrender of Québec to the British

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we see Nobel Savage in diminished pose

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looking peacefully upon the death of the British commander

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almost a bystander to the epic of empire and European sacrifice

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made people ask the question: who is more human in this portrait?

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colonization is turning men like Wolfe into the very barbarians that they seek to submit

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having to practice forms of suppression that they themselves denounce

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others were worried that empire was bringing corruption home

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book: "Histoire Philosophique et Politique"

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examined commerce, religion, slavery, and other popular subjects, all with a perspective from the French Enlightenment

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a kind of history of the world, one might say one of the first global histories ever written

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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

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the enslavement of millions of Africans was, many Enlightenment men believed, fundamentally a threat, a menace, a danger to the Enlightenment itself.

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enslavement threatened to undermine the enslavers themselves

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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 abolitionist movement

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Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)

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"The Life of Olaudah Equiano"

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one of the great books circulating around the English speaking world

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enslaved and sold and shipped to the Americas

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released by his Christian owner

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a blast against the slave trade as fundamentally at odds against the universal precepts of Enlightenment thought

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commerce and trading was fine, but not commerce and trading in peoples