Maybe thanks to the commerce and surely driven by science, literacy and
critical thinking, european people started to view the world from another
perspective, which was originated with the second half of the sixteen hundreds and
was extended throughout the eighteenth century. Jeremy Adelman illustrates
this shift when he talks about the consumption of tea, coffee or sugar (the old
preciosities from Asia and America) in places like coffeehouses, where people
exchanged their knowledges or studies and defended novel and powerful ideas.
This new pattern of socialization truly modified the understanding of the
individual and perhaps the world, even though states used it to defend slavery
and submission later (treatment of Africans). That’s someway The Enlightenment, 'an
extraordinary cultural flowering that blossomed in Europe during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' (p. 542)
To start with, I would like to point out the role that played commerce and
travel in this evolution, which was crucial. As you probably know, the trade
interdependence along the whole world not only forced some countries to adapt
their economies and policies to the new situation but also helped them to raise
concerns and to study each other anywhere. 'They sought universal and
objective knowledge that would not reflect any particular religion, political
view, class, or gender' (p. 542) For instance, James Cook used his
scientific expeditions in the Pacific Ocean to bring knowledge to Europe in
order to study and classify it to mass consumption (fauna, flora, food, culture
and so on). By the way, it was in the coffeehouses of which I
talked before where this new issues were discussed. However, the spread of
critical thinking did not stopped in public places, being the production of
books to personal consumption (Diderot and his Enciclopedie) another important
factor to understand the emergence of the new ways of thinking (Scientific
Method, p. 545), sometimes quite controversial. That could be the
case of Adam Smith, who criticized Mercantilism in ‘The Wealth of Nations’, or
even that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who claimed ‘Man is born good’ but
‘It is society that corrupts him’ in ‘The Social Contract’ (p. 546)
and that we must link with the respect to other countries, peoples and
cultures.
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| Zu den blauen Flaschen (Anonymous, c. 1900) |
Furthermore, besides Rousseau, Smith or Diderot, it came out women like Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote, among others, a book called ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ in which she argued that they aren’t naturally inferior to men (p. 547). Was it the dawn of feminism? It's highly probable. Meanwhile, Olympe de Gauges worried about women rights and slavery, being ‘L’esclavage des noirs’ her best known play. Otherwise, after two centuries of conquest in America and commercial superiority in other parts of the world like India or China, people began to study the differences, if there were, between european people and the others, even those born of mixtures with natives. The point here was to explain the nature of ‘criollos’, ‘mestizos’ or ‘mulatos’, which nowadays we can analyze observing and studying ‘The Casta Paintings’ in places where spanish were sharing their lives with the aboriginal ones. Sometimes europeans wanted to justify their dominion with this kind of explanations, but at the end this were the basis to ending slavery. As John Locke said at its time, 'cultural differences were not the result of unequal natural abilities, but of unequal opportunities to develop one’s abilities' (p. 547)
Moreover, the ways in which empires were using mercantilism were amply denounced, but this time not from Adam Smith’s economic perspective, but blowing on the crimes and misdemeanors as a result of this sort of commercial and military domain and exploitation which were, above all, in the hands of a few men. What’s more, Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal was accused of corruption in an impeachment in 1787. Although he was acquitted in 1795, the case exemplifies the strains and different opinions of the time. 'The criticism of corruption did not come only from high intellectuals. Pamphlets charging widespread corruption, fraudulent stock speculation, and insider trading circulated widely. Sex, too, sold well. Works like Venus in the Cloister or the Nun in a Nightgown racked up as many sales as the now-classic works of the Enlightenment' (p. 546). Finally, Religion's vision also suffered some changes, because, even though many thinkers were believers, they gave precedence to the reason and defended toleration.
To sum up, I would like to say that the main benefit of the Enlightenment
was to provide devices to the people in order to learn, to think critically for
yourself and to create a framework in which the individual (in opposition to
the State) gain more power and acquires fundamental rights.
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