World History Journal Entry

The Enlightenment History 111 – World History since 1500

Spring 2022

Jorge Minella (jminella@umass.edu)

Late Modern Era (~1750-Today)

 Accelerated rate of change.  Technology.

 Demographics.

 Consumerism.

 Industrial Revolution.

 New forms of government.

 Independence in the Americas, new Imperialism, World Wars, Cold War and Decolonization, consequences of inequality.

The Enlightenment and the Atlantic Revolutions

 Enlightenment.

 Enlightenment in local context.

 Revolutionary.

 Yet contradictory.

 Later: American, French, and Haitian Revolutions; Independence of Spanish and Portuguese America.

The Enlightenment

Eighteenth Century Europe

 Intellectual novelties.

 Scientific Revolution.

 New explanations.

 Contact with different regions and cultures.

 New perspectives and models.

 Expanded literacy and print culture.

 Broader audience/participants. Reading of Voltaire's tragedy of the Orphan of China in the salon of Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, by Lemonnier, 1812.

The Enlightenment

 18th-Century European cultural and social movement.

 Wide-ranging reconsiderations.

 Philosophical base: people born free, equal, and rational.

 Natural rights.

Contract Government

 John Locke, English philosopher.

 “a government that stems from the people, who agree to surrender a measure of personal freedom in return for a government that guarantees protection of citizens’ rights and property.”

 Experience of seventeenth century England: kings ousted, constitutionalist regime.

Anti-Aristocracy and the Modern Citizen

 Voltaire and Montesquieu, French philosophers.

 Hereditary nobility not necessary.

 Jean-Jacques Rosseau.

 Education of the modern citizen.

 Well versed in many areas.

 Rational and independent.

Free Market

 Adam Smith, Scottish philosopher.

 The Wealth of Nations (1776)

 Laissez-faire.

 Basis for liberalism.

The Encyclopedia (1751-1772)  Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alambert

 Machine-based prosperity.

 Natural Rights.

 Not God-given or based on religious authority.

 Not nobility titles.

 Some essayists defended racial and gender equality.

Encyclopedia’s frontispiece.

Tensions and Contradictions

 Freedom and natural rights vs. colonialism and exploitation.

 Enlightened rulership.

 More efficient taxation and productivity in the colonies.

 Colonies based on slave and native draft labor.

 “Scientific racism”.