Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment

Joan-Pau Rubiés is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and was previously Reader at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He directs a research project on the history of Ethnographies, Cultural Encounters and Religious Missions in the Early Modern world and has published extensively on these topics. He is currently writing a monograph on travel writing and the origins of the Enlightenment, and a book on missionary ethnographies in the early modern world. Neil Safier is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, where he served from 2013–21 as Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (2008) and a range of articles on the history of natural history, environmental studies, and the trans-imperial history of the tropical world, especially South America. He is currently working on a book that connects Brazilian natural history with the plantation cultures of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, including sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton.

• Introduction: cosmopolitanism and the enlightenment Joan-Pau Rubiés and Neil Safier; 1. Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in perspective: diversity, natural law and reason in the work of John Locke Daniel Carey; 2. The Cosmopolitan paradox: travel, anthropology and the problem cultural diversity in early modern thought Joan-Pau Rubiés; 3. Diderot's philosophical history and the history of 'monstrous nature' Girolamo Imbruglia; 4. Geographies of cosmopolitanism: cartography, natural history and indigenous knowledge in the long eighteenth century Neil Safier; 5. The imperial, global (cosmopolitan) dimensions of non-elite colonial scribal cultures in the early modern Iberian Atlantic Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra; 6. Gendered Cosmopolitanism? The history of women and the science of man in the Scottish enlightenment Silvia Sebastiani; 7. Cosmopolitanism and the creation of patriotic identities in the European enlightenment: the case of Pietro Napoli Signorelli and his Storia critica de' teatri antichi e moderni Melissa Calaresu; 8. A Cosmopolitanism of countervailing powers: resistance against global domination in the political thought of Immanuel Kant and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano Sankar Muthu; 9. Cosmopolitanism and civil war David Armitage; Afterword: cosmopolitanism and its discontents Anthony Pagden.

'These essays, together with the superb introduction by Rubiés and Safier, provide a probing, thoughtful look at the ever relevant subject of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, informed by cutting-edge research and inspired by the classic works of Anthony Pagden.' David Bell, Princeton University