ABSTRACT
Although the term ‘Atlantic Enlightenment’ is not yet widely used, it should be. The term – and more importantly, the category that it refers to – adds something useful to the study of the Enlightenment as well as the study of the Atlantic world. There is some risk, of course, in stretching the concept of Enlightenment too far or diluting it by adding yet another particular or peripheral Enlightenment to the constellation of Enlightenments that have emerged from the historiography in the last few decades; these Enlightenments range from the large and somewhat concentrated (French, Scottish, English, American, German, Protestant, Jewish, Radical, Vitalist, etc.) to the more modestly sized or dispersed (Socinian, Arminian, Swiss, Neapolitan, Utrechtean, etc.).1 But the risk seems worth taking for several reasons. First, there are signs that there was a distinctly Atlantic Enlightenment composed of individuals whose intellectual development and contributions were deeply grounded in the mobility and uidity, the interconnection and reciprocity, the circulation and contestation that characterized the early modern Atlantic world. The Atlantic contexts of colonialism and slavery profoundly affected the development of most aspects of Atlantic Enlightenment thought – whether political, economic, social, or scienti c – and helped account for many of the differences between ideas emerging from the Atlantic and some European sites of the Enlightenment. Second, a better understanding of this Atlantic Enlightenment will give additional depth to one of the fundamental assertions of the historiography of the Atlantic world – that there was a highly integrated and meaningful circulation and connection in the early modern Atlantic world. Of the three pillars of the Atlantic world historiography – the circulation of people, commodities, and ideas – the history of ideas seems to be the least developed in terms of having a uni ed narrative. While there are excellent works about the circulation and development of ideas in the early modern Atlantic world (particularly in relationship to politics and science), there is still much to be determined about the nature and characteristics of the intellectual context of this circulation and development.2 Finally, I would suggest that we can identify and analyze multiple Enlightenments, while still recognizing a single uni ed Enlightenment, and in fact, bringing the Atlantic world further into the historiography of the Enlightenment gives us a new angle from which to address persistent and important questions about the Enlightenment (which in the
work of most specialists of the Enlightenment is still generally located on the dry land of Europe, despite a historiography of an American Enlightenment).3
