The Enlightenment is Complicated

In high school history”The Enlightenment” is like water. Ubiquitous, essential, and simple. It is a universal solvent¹ capable of breaking down any happening, anywhere on Earth after John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his treatises on government in the late Sixteenth Century. Never mind that Locke accepted monarchy and proclaimed property sacrosanct, all phases of the French Revolution can be connected back to him, if many high school students and some teachers are to be believed.

My impressions come from decades of working with students in World and European History classes, discussing curriculum with colleagues, and, recently, tutoring high school history students from across the United States and sometimes the broader world. As an online tutor with students all over the US, and sometimes beyond. October through January, is my long season of Atlantic Revolutions as I discuss them with US, European, and World History students. Helping students to appreciate the nuances and contingency of historical developments is one of my primary goals as a tutor. Students with a grasp on the basics of the Revolutions are able to take in the complex legacies of Enlightenment thinking. For six or seven years, I’ve used this slide with European and World History students in class and while tutoring. I have also included how the Enlightenment generate both feminist and anti-feminist ideas.

With this, I am pushing back against the a crush of content on Youtube, textbooks, and, in the case of tutoring students, other teachers. Even when I explicitly discuss the complications of the Enlightenment, some students will use it singularly to explain events beyond Europe in their writing. It’s a fascinating phenomenon to me, as is obvious from the number of times that it pops up here. The overuse of the Enlightenment as an explanatory factor privileges ideas as causal agents, which simplifies events and centers European ideas in global developments. My teaching and tutoring aim to do the opposite.

All of this popped back into my head after reading AP World free-response questions, reviewing my notes from Charles Walker’s Smoldering Ashes, and reading Gwenn Miller’s Kodiak Kreol this summer. I’m not revealing much about which questions I read, by the way, just that at least one involved the modern world in some way. I recommend both books for World History teachers. Among other insights they show how rebels both used and pushed back against varying Enlightenment ideas (Smoldering Ashes) and how an embrace of Enlightenment ideas was a feature of Russian absolutism (Kodiak Kreol).

Smoldering Ashes and Kodiak Kreol include dimensions of Enlightenment thinking in different parts of the Americas in the same time period. Students and teachers could use this excerpt from Kodiak Kreol (emphasis added)

Leaders at this time did not simply want to secure Russian society; they wanted to make it appear more cosmopolitan. Catherine was a Francophile. Not only did French become the language of the nobility under her reign, but French enlightenment thinking seeped into her understanding of how her empire should be administered. She was an avid reader of the French philosophes and was known in Western Enlightenment circles for her extreme enthusiasm regarding education of the masses, toleration of diverse peoples, and material progress for the empire. The Russian American records repeatedly mention Catherine’s “intentions…that the welfare and peace of the aborigines should be maintained,” and more than once, she indicated her desire that they should be educated. She continually addressed this issue in her communiques with fur trade company members.

Catherine and members of her retinue may have been enamored of certain aspects of enlightenment thinking, but by the 1790s they also feared that the revolutionary movements occurring in the Western world, such as the uprising of rebellious American colonists and the French Revolution, would infiltrate the Russian populace. In a letter to [chief Russian merchant in Alaska] Shelikov dated 1794, the governor of Siberia warned that the French “should be considered enemies of Russia until the time that legal authority is reestablished in France.”

Gwenn A. Miller, Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America, 2010. 58-59

By referring to “certain aspects of Enlightenment thinking,” Miller reminds readers of the complexity of Enlightenment.

Students and teachers discussing revolutionary resistance to Enlightenment-influenced imperial reforms could use this excerpt from Smoldering Ashes to understand the role of the Bourbon reforms in the Spanish America (emphasis added).

The Bourbon reforms dramatically changed relations between Andean society and the state. Dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century, this series of modifications was implemented in Spain’s American holdings primarily during the reign of Charles III, 1759-88. Influenced by Enlightenment thought and compelled by frequent wars with the French and the English to extract more revenue from the American colonies, the Spanish state centralized its colonial administration and increased its demands on the population.

Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-1840 (p. 22) . Kindle Edition.

I rarely hear or read students directly mentioning the Bourbon reforms, although some mention the distinction between peninsulares and criollos that these reforms largely created. Without getting into the whole topic of the Spanish Bourbons, World History students and teachers would benefit from considering how an emphasis on rational, efficient empire provoked resistance across the Americas.

A Better Way Forward

The Enlightenment was not one thing; so the first step forward is treating the relevant aspects more specifically. One problem seems to be a reluctance to emphasize the term “liberalism.” I can understand why teacher and influential YouTubers do this. The term liberal is slippery and fraught. In AP European History, especially, and in World History, the many “isms” of the 19th Century can overwhelm students. The term changes meaning, as all ideologies do, across time and space, up to a present in which some students have strong emotions attached to the term.

A further complication is how many students learn about Adam Smith as a capitalist theorist, instead of an Enlightened liberal advocating free markets and railing against the most prominent capitalist enterprise of his time: the East India Company. Even Enlightenment liberalism is oversimplified by shearing it of its economic aspects. Looking at liberalism more specifically is also an opportunity for discussing how its emphasis on property rights and citizenship for property owners could entrench slavery. I’ve used an excerpt from Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions and another from the US Constitution as the bases for multiple-choice question sets that make this point.

More importantly, using “the Enlightenment” to explain all revolutionary activity elides the agency of colonized people. I have used Crystal Eddins approachable article “The First Ayitian Revolution” to help students to see how how enslaved people in the Caribbean sought freedom from the very beginning of the European empires in the Americas. Eddins describes the resistance of enslaved Taino and African people beginning even before the Atlantic Slave Trade directly connected West Africa and the Caribbean. Teachers could also use this excerpt, which gets to the heart of the matter:

By studying marronnage in Haiti in its longue-durée, it becomes apparent the Haitian Revolution of 1791 was perhaps an outcome of the failure of both European imperial powers to fully subdue black resistance. Though we cannot explicitly connect armed maroon bands to the revolutionary forces of 1791, the tactic of marronnage informed the organizational structures of the revolution.[4] And given that the island was essentially a black space from the mid-1500s forward, we can think of this historical trajectory not in terms of the maroons fighting back against empires, but as empires attempting to repress – and in some cases to co-opt – those who had already liberated themselves.

If using the whole article, I have a quick pre-reading activity that helps some students to read the article closely.I have also used this article as a text in which students find claims and evidence. Eddins developed this argument in her excellent book: Rituals, Runaways and the Haitian Revolution, which is now open access. Enlightenment writings were important context for the political claims of Haitian Revolutionaries, and teachers and tutors should help students understand that this was just one contingent factor in the unfolding of the Revolution.

1. NB: I last studied chemistry in 1984 ↩︎