Sebastian Conrad
Biography
Sebastian Conrad is professor of history at the European University Institute, Florence. His fields of interest include modern Japanese history, the history of colonialism and postcolonialism, and global history. Recent publications include Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) October 2010; The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, Berkeley (California University Press) 2010; and the edited volume Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s, New York (Palgrave Macmillan) 2007 (with Dominic Sachsenmaier).
Title of Paper
Reworking the "Enlightenment": Actors, Appropriations, and Concepts
Abstract
The Enlightenment has secured itself a pivotal place in the standard narratives of world history. Typically, these are narratives of uniqueness and diffusion. The assumption that the Enlightenment was a specifically European phenomenon remains one of the foundational myths of Western modernity, and of the modern West. This perspective has recently been challenged under the impact of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and of the multiple modernity paradigm on the other. In my presentation, I will challenge these approaches, and then propose an alternative reading of the history of the Enlightenment in a global perspective. If the Enlightenment had a global impact, it was not because of the universal aspirations of the Parisian philosophes, but because it was itself a global phenomenon. On the one hand, cultural transformations in eighteenth-century Europe were not the work of Europeans alone and need to be understood as specific responses to global conjunctures. On the other hand, the global character of the Enlightenment was due to the work of social actors around the world who appropriated, modified, and re-articulated what they saw as its core.