The Global in Enlightenment Historical Thought

Abstract

Modernity and a global perspective were inseparable for Enlightenment historians. The question how to narrate world history, past and future, was more open for Enlightenment historians than it had been for their Christian predecessors, or would be for their heirs, both of whom saw history as moving in a clear and relatively predictable direction. We might think of global history as taking two primary forms during the Enlightenment. Both kinds of global history – the philosophical and the commercial – had a distinct moral purpose and urgency. What we might call European parochial universalism is obvious in the more triumphalist accounts of global history, which portrayed a civilized Europe as rescuing others from backwardness and incorporating them into the progressive movement of history.

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