This chapter examines the reciprocal development of climate understanding and intervention in the long nineteenth century. It studies the colonial practices of deforestation, cultivation, and drainage that philosophers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Baron de Montesquieu, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder hoped would induce a global, Westernised utopia of climatological temperance. It examines how the emergence, institutionalisation, and development of the scientific practices, theories, and models of climatology provided empirical documentation of climate as a global system subject to natural as well as anthropogenic change. Providing a century-long history of science, it concludes that John Tyndall’s small-scale investigation and Svante Arrhenius’s large-scale calculation of the heat-trapping agency of carbon dioxide led to the emerging insight that the global climate needed anthropogenic correction.

The long eighteenth century saw two opposed tendencies in Christian expression in the English-speaking world. On the one hand was the religion of the Enlightenment, which emphasised reason and tolerance, while on the other hand were those sometimes called ‘enthusiasts’, who valued emotion in their relation to the deity. In this chapter texts by major religious writers of the period – Joseph Butler, John Wesley, and George Whitefield – are examined, with a view to determining how their distinctive lexical choices aligned with their theology. All three were at one time members of the Church of England, but their thinking diverged markedly as the century progressed; Wesley and Whitefield are now recognised as leaders in the emergence of Methodism, although they too came to differ about basic matters of belief. The chapter ends with an examination of the ‘language of feeling’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, showing how ‘exemplary fiction’ was impacted by the contemporary religious lexicon.

This chapter provides an overview of music in Spain during the Age of Enlightenment. It first focuses on several transversal aspects, such as musicians’ professional profiles, networks of circulation and mobility, and the reinterpretation of popular music as a symbol of Spanish cultural identity. It then examines the principal musical genres, along with their most significant works and authors, such as Domenico Scarlatti, José de Nebra, or Luigi Boccherini, among others. On the one hand, sacred music, which held great importance in such a Catholic country, reflected the tension between continuity and aesthetic change. On the other hand, a rich variety of stage genres flourished in the theatrical sphere, including the zarzuela, although a distinct ‘Spanish opera’ never emerged. In these, the dramaturgy inherited from the Golden Age was enriched through the influence of imported European models. Finally, instrumental genres first gained prominence in keyboard repertoire, before expanding into chamber music and orchestral works, as instrumental music became increasingly autonomous in the final third of the century.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.

The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his ‘Defense of the Indians’ in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s ‘On the Just Causes of War against the Indians’. Both Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle as a source for their arguments. This chapter approaches the debate as a way to think through the relationships between race and Indigeneity. First, I introduce the concept of Indigeneity and the ways it has been negotiated between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialists. I then move to critically analysing Casas’ arguments, showing how his understanding of Aristotle’s notion of ‘barbarians’ has had a lasting legacy on the definition of Indigeneity. Finally, I turn to the absence of Indigenous voices in Casas’ account as a broader moment to consider Indigenous future(s) in Classics and possible areas for re-negotiating reception and Indigenous scholars’ agency in those negotiations.

This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between multiculturalism and genealogy within the secularism debate. It shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up space to engage with religion in new ways. The chapter continues to show how that space became filled with a particular kind of scholarship seeking to rehabilitate the concept and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this scholarship has narrowed rather than broadened the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies of religion. It is necessary to explore this legacy in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship on religion as well as enable an assessment of the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of current scholarship on religion in other disciplines. This connects to the main argument as it forecasts the inherent issues and costs entailed in efforts to recognize and engage with religion in IR more broadly.

Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.

Abraham Lincoln's political writings were the works of a practical politician, not a political philosopher. Yet, his understanding of American politics was deeply informed by wide and penetrating reading in 19th century liberal political economy. This reading convinced him to be a determined opponent of slavery, and a vigorous promoter of henry clay's 'American system.' both of these programs retained their hold on Lincoln, and when, after his election to the presidency of the United States in 1860, the republic was plunged into civil war over slavery, Lincoln guided the nation toward the erasure of legalized slavery and to an economy favourable to commerce and manufacturing. His victory in the civil war, cut short by his assassination in 1865, nevertheless changed the political culture of the nation for the next sixty years, and set the country on the slow but inexorable path of civil equality for the freed slaves.

This Introduction offers a brief review of the central arguments and issues that arise in Hume’s Dialogues. It considers why Hume used the dialogue format to present his views and it also considers how the content of the Dialogues relates to Hume’s other philosophical works and his historical context. It concludes with a brief summary of the various contributions and an account of the way that the collection is structured and organized.

Many early Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were educated in Jesuit schools and served absolutist monarchs pursuing political centralization in the early eighteenth century. They embraced the Jesuits’ idealized image of China and Confucianism, viewing China as a model of rational Deism and enlightened despotism for Europeans to emulate. The Physiocrats drew inspiration from China’s vast internal market, perceived as free from bureaucratic interference, to shape their ideas on laissez-faire economics. Some linguists even promoted Chinese as a universal language, claiming it was the language of God, while Leibniz suggested that ancient Chinese texts held keys to important mathematical principles. These early Enlightenment thinkers had not yet discarded their reverence for antiquity, believing that older ideas were inherently superior, and thus hailed China as the world’s oldest and hence greatest civilization.

Idealized views of China were challenged by other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu, who represented the aristocratic opposition to absolutism and saw China as an example of extreme despotism. These contrasting views on China in the early eighteenth century reflected conflicts between absolutist monarchs and the aristocracy. The idealized portrayal of China as a model for Europe, championed in Voltaire’s writings, gained ground with the rise of absolutist states. The debate about China and the dominance of the idealizing view among early Enlightenment thinkers eventually gave way to widespread disdain for China in the late Enlightenment, seen in the works of Diderot, Kant, Hegel, and others. This late eighteenth-century contempt for China was linked to Europe’s growing confidence stemming from renewed economic and geopolitical expansion, as well as the rise of the bourgeoisie as the new patrons of intellectual pursuits. Under the idea of Europe as a progressive continent, all ancient civilizations – including China and Christianity – were attacked as stagnant, superstitious, and obstacles to human reason and progress.

This chapter is, for the most part, devoted to an appraisal of Greek art as a school of humanity. Herder applies the model of nature’s force to the work of art. The force that produces the human form in the work of art also conditions the possibilities for viewing and understanding art. Art grounds visible categories of humankind and it renders visible the ideas that make these categories intelligible. Greek statuary is seen as a formalization of timeless categories of human life, but these categories are subject to the contingencies of interpretation. He discusses the Greek idealization of childhood, heroism, the gods, fauns, satyrs, and centaurs. He then concludes that there is no such thing as formless goodness and truth. This is followed by an appraisal of allegory. A text by Johann Christoph Berens is cited as an example of practical moral enlightenment. In this connection, the question of public morals is raised with respect to Homer and Montesquieu. Kant’s pursuit of truth is praised. The chapter closes with thoughts on freedom of thought and the state.

Today, the Treatise is Hume’s most well-known work. But that was not so in the eighteenth century. Hume could even famously claim that his Treatise “fell dead-born from the press.” Still, modern scholarship has shown that the Treatise had a more significant early reception than Hume’s comment suggests. This chapter sheds new light on the reception of Hume’s Treatise in eighteenth-century Britian. It surveys the existing historiography and considers Hume’s relevant surviving correspondence. But it also explores overlooked dimensions of the Treatise’s early reception, partly by employing data mining in electronic databases, particularly Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Analyzing that data in various ways, we illuminate new dimensions of this topic. They include unpacking close engagements by familiar figures, like Lord Kames; casting light on the many who invoked, critiqued, anthologized, or otherwise absorbed and broadcast the Treatise; and identifying the larger trends of eighteenth-century reuse to which all of those individual stories contributed.

The chapter provides a summary history of the Jews in Berlin following their readmittance in 1670 through to the period of the births of Fanny and Felix. It notes the relationship of Moses Mendelssohn with figures of the Berlin Enlightenment and the consequent parallel development of the Haskalah movement with the growing interest by prominent Jewish families in Gentile culture and Bildung, exemplified by the Berlin Jewish salons. The decision – or rather attempt – of Abraham Mendelssohn to dissociate from Judaism on the part of himself and his family is placed in the context of the development of German nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.