Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (review)

In this richly documented book, Withers makes the intriguing argument that “Enlightenment itself was geographical” (6). Respectfully bypassing recent discussions about the meaning of “the” Enlightenment (“what was it” and “what’s left of it”) and its historical context (“when” and “how” did it happen), Withers rephrases these standard questions by asking “where was it” and how do we “place” it? Once addressed in these terms, the Enlightenment was as much a spatial event as a “geographical thing” (5); it was as much an intellectual movement in whose wake European culture effectively redefined the meaning of space for non-Europeans, as it was a movement that had a geography of its own. Adapting familiar analytical models developed by such book historians as Darnton (the communication circuit) and science historians as Latour (centers of calculation), the book traces the enterprise of the Enlightenment geographically through an inter-European network of correspondence and global exchange of geographical information.¹ It pays special attention to mapping projects and a burgeoning culture of geographical letters.

The book’s basic approach is as simple as it is effective. By substituting “geography” for “history,” Withers illustrates in Part 1 how definitions of the Enlightenment shaped and, in turn, were shaped by national interest and international rivalry in an increasingly decentralized European world between 1685 and 1815. Whereas in traditional historical accounts, Enlightenment theories and practices tend to be identified as individual contributions to a national collective, a geographical account demonstrates how European modes of knowledge production were a cosmopolitan enterprise beholden to the transnational dictates of communication (for example, the republic of letters and/or the world of belles lettres) and sociability (professional societies and salons). Having thus directed the focus to the spatial locales hosting Enlightenment practices, Part 2 of the book shows—using a wide range of sources, from travel accounts to natural history books and from geological theories about the origins of the earth to climatic theories determining the status of civilizations—how Enlightenment thinking was formed out of the nexus of geographical mobility and geographical discourse.

By the end of Part 2, Withers has delivered a general survey of European Enlightenment networks. On the one hand, he links the narrative and mapping habits that informed Royal Society members in London, middle-class travelers abroad, and even Native American elders, and, on the other hand, he presents a broad overview of English, Dutch, German, Italian, and French theories about the physical world and human difference. Joining with others who studied the literary foundations of the Enlightenment, Withers uses Part 3 to address the ultimate geographical locus of Enlightenment culture, the geographical text (maps and books), and the cultural institutions surrounding it—schools and academies, publishing houses, and the international book trade. The production and consumption of geographical writings become the book’s final setting. It thus suggests that the Enlightenment happened geographically, somewhere in the space between authors and readers or between pedagogic methods and popular demands.

This conclusion hardly comes as a surprise. Withers’ statement, two-thirds of the way into the book, “Geography was science as a form of knowledge—descriptive, locational, classificatory knowledge—not science as certainty grounded in demonstration” (179), offers the best description of how to make sense of the Enlightenment geographically. Throughout the book, Withers applies the term geography loosely and even ahistorically. It remains unclear, for example, how geography differs from such terms as place, locale, container, or field—all of which have been employed by a generation of scholars showing globalized modes of knowledge production during the period called the Enlightenment. But from the moment when Withers attends to the written forms of geographical knowledge, showing how maps and books circulated among philosophes and politicians, social societies and school children, the book assumes a compelling analytical framework. Because this framework comes late, the book’s sweeping synthesis of all things geographical can seem disorienting. But this sense of disorientation becomes a [End...