The Global Eighteenth Century (review)

At times, it seems that an ever-growing impulse to go transnational, global, and imperial has left eighteenth-century studies — forgiving the pun — all over the map. The Global Eighteenth Century, an outgrowth of a series of conferences at the UCLA/Clark Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, can be read as an attempt to celebrate this turn of events as well as to give some order to chaos. The result is both a manifesto (Nussbaum’s stimulating, if at times dense, theoretical introduction) and a manual (twenty-one wide-ranging exemplary essays) for “critical global studies,” an interdisciplinary and de-centered approach to the eighteenth century. Central to this approach is a rejection of the rigid bifurcation of “metropole” and “colony,” and a sensitivity to complexity and ubiquity of cross-cultural encounter, inflected as it is by issues of race, gender, politics, and culture. In this sense, this book is self-consciously aligned to other such efforts like the new imperial history and postcolonial criticism, though it aspires to be more broadly global than the former and more historically-grounded than the latter. The eighteenth century that emerges from all this is one articulated and understood in terms of global “mappings,” experienced in the form of “crossings,” and located literally and conceptually on and between “islands” —not coincidentally, the three conceptual headings that subdivide the book. The essays range widely in subject, though a number of essays are predictably concerned with the nature of knowledge and identity, both in the ways eighteenth-century Europeans understood the world as well as the ways in which the globe informed European politics, cultures, and identities. At the same time, the volume as a whole embraces the presentist concerns that most likely drove the eighteenth century global in the first place, hoping to find in “critical global studies” a more nuanced genealogy of globalization and a more complex vision of the relationship between colonialism and modernity as well as postmodernity.

If at times it might be hard to pinpoint exactly what “critical global studies” is, this is likely because the idea itself permits for a very broad church indeed. As a methodological treatise, the book is quite aware of its own restrictions. In Nussbaum’s own words, “At its best critical global studies tacks back and forth between and among various territorial levels to examine the ways in which the local, regional, national, transnational, and global are mutually implicated while remaining reflective about its methodologies, humbled by its ignorance, and attuned to its investments” (10–11). Almost from the first word, for example, Nussbaum reveals a sensitivity to what is an obvious methodological limitation: in the end, the global eighteenth century of the title is really a global European (and predominantly British) eighteenth century, even if such “globality” is clearly constituted by the give-and-take of “cultural convergences and reciprocal enculturation.” (11) Moreover, given the scope and the shape of the volume, at times the globe that Europeans encounter seems to be geographically uneven. For example, one wonders whether the fact that four of the six essays in the section on “islands” focus on the South Seas suggests that the methods of “critical global studies” may simply lend themselves more readily — conceptually, historically, or archivally — to some subjects rather than others. Or is it that the Pacific may just serve as a “sublime and intriguing stage” for the kinds of cross-cultural encounters and imaginings at stake in this book, to borrow words from Greg Dening’s riveting semi-autobiographical conclusions on the relationship between history, replica, and re-enactment (p. 309)? Anyway, this can remain an open question, and in any event such an unevenness may in the end be more a blessing than a curse, or at least more asset than liability. This volume thankfully resists textbook-like coverage, so what it may lack in comprehensiveness it remedies with an inductive theoretical coherence and deliberately suggestive rather than definitive conclusions.

However, as the book sufficiently succeeds in problematizing the...