Gabriel Sánchez-Espinosa – författare

‘Enlightenment’ is a universal concept, but its meaning is most clearly revealed by seeing how it was engaged with, reconfigured or rejected, on a local level. Peripheries of the Enlightenment seeks to rethink the ‘centre/periphery’ model, and to consider the Enlightenment as a more widely spread movement with national, regional and local varieties, focusing on activity as much as ideas.The debate is introduced by two chapters which explore the notion of periphery from vantage points at the very heart of ‘enlightened’ Europe: Ferney and Geneva. Through thirteen ensuing chapters, the interaction between ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘periphery’ is explored in a variety of spatial and temporal contexts ranging from Mexico to Russia. Drawing on urban and provincial as well as national case studies, contributors argue that we can learn at least as much about the Enlightenment from commentators at the geographical and cultural borders of the ‘enlightened’ world as from its most radical theorists in its early epicentres.Crossing the boundaries between histories of literature, religion, science and political and economic thought, Peripheries of the Enlightenment is not only international in its outlook but also interdisciplinary in its scope, and offers readers a new and more global vision of the Enlightenment.

The long eighteenth century was a period of major transformation for Europe and India as imperialism heralded a new global order. Eschewing the reductive perspectives of nation-state histories and postcolonial ‘east vs west’ oppositions, contributors to India and Europe in the global eighteenth century put forward a more nuanced and interdisciplinary analysis. Using eastern as well as western sources, authors present fresh insights into European and Indian relations and highlight:how anxieties over war and piracy shaped commercial activity;how French, British and Persian histories of India reveal the different geo-political issues at stake;the material legacy of India in European cultural life;how novels parodied popular views of the Orient and provided counter-narratives to images of India as the site of corruption;how social transformations, traditionally characterised as ‘Mughal decline’, in effect forged new global connections that informed political culture into the nineteenth century.