stresses Enlightenment, even enlightenments,
as a socialprocessor processes. As study of
the Enlightenment has become more diverse –
embracing, for instance, medical knowledge,
questions of gender, exoticism, race and
sexuality– so studies of the Enlightenment
have diversified (Outram, 2005). Questions of
geographyare central to these revised and
revitalized conceptions of the Enlightenment
(Livingstone and Withers, 1999).
Intraditionalinterpretation,littleattentionwas
paid to the geography of the Enlightenment.
Whereitwas,emphasiswasgiventoitsdistinc-
tive features and differences at the level of
the nation-state, chiefly within Europe.
Attention concentrated upon the idea of the
Enlightenment’s originatingcultural hearth
or its ‘core’ nations – France, England,
Scotland, Holland, Germany – and to a ‘periph-
ery’wheretheEnlightenmentwas evidentlater or
in different form: in Russia, for example, or in the
Scandinavian countries. Relatively limited atten-
tion was given to the Enlightenment in theamer-
icasand to its presence and making in Portugal,
Spain or the Greek-speaking countries of Eastern
Europe (Porter and Teich, 1981). More recent
work has moved beyond these concerns and
scales of analysis. Three distinct but interrelated
themes may be noted.
The first isgeographical knowledge and the
Enlightenment. Geographical knowledge,
gleaned through oceanic navigation, terrestrial
exploration, mapping and natural history
survey, was crucial in the Enlightenment to
new ideas about the shape and size of the
Earth, terrestrial diversity and the nature of
human cultures. In this first sense, the
Enlightenment depended upon new geograph-
ical knowledge about the extent of what
European contemporaries understood as
terra incognitaand then called the ‘fourth
world’, the Americas, and, crucially, about the
‘fifth division’ of the world, the Pacific world
or, in modern terms, australasia. For
example, one distinctively Enlightenment idea
(and ideal), that of society’s development
through a series of stages, was profoundly
shaped by the ‘discovery’ of new peoples on
the islands of the Southern Oceans, and by the
extent of human cultural difference.
Contemporaries referred to these geographies
of humandifferenceas ‘The Great Map of
Mankind’ and devoted considerable time to
theories explaining the development of human
societyin relation to factors such asclimate,
the role of custom and commercial capacity.
In such ways, Enlightenment was closely con-
nected withempire(see alsotravel writing).
We may secondly think in terms ofgeography
in the Enlightenment. Geography as one form of
modern intellectual endeavour was itself
shaped by the evolving encounter with new
peoples and lands during the Enlightenment.
This was apparent in terms of emphases upon
realism in description, systematic classification
in collection and comparative method in
explanation. Geography in the Enlightenment
was adiscourse, a set of practices by which the
world was revealed and ordered, and it was a
discipline and a scale of study, the whole Earth,
in which formal education was possible, in
schools and universities. It was also a popular
subject, taught in academies and in public
lectures alongside history, astronomy and
mathematics, in order to educate citizens
about the extent and content of theglobe
(Mayhew, 2000). In these ways, geography in
the Enlightenment was part of what thinkers
then called ‘The Science of Man’, that con-
cern to understand the human world through
the same observational and methodological
principles as the natural world (see alsogeog-
raphy, history of).
Finally, it is now commonplace to refer to
the differentgeographies of the Enlightenment.
These different geographies are distinguished
by attention to the intrinsic diversity of the
Enlightenment,tothe social processes and
contradictions underlying its intellectual
and practical claims and, above all, by sensi-
tivity to the importance of geographicalscale
in locating and explaining the Enlightenment
and its constituent practices. Although the
Enlightenment continues to be much studied
in national context, greater attention than
before is now paid to its global expression
and consequences, to the local institutional
sites and social settings in which the
Enlightenment’s defining ideas were produced
and debated, to the uneven transmission of
those ideas across geographicalspaceand to
the variant nature of their reception (Clark,
Golinski and Schaffer, 1999; Livingstone and
Withers, 1999; Can ̃izares-Esguerra, 2001).
Questions to do with the ‘where’ of the
Enlightenment are thus as important as those
of its ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘who’. Many of the
architects ofpostmodernismhave speculated
ontheendofwhat,ignoringitsdiversity,
they have sometimes clumsily termed the
‘Enlightenment Project’ (Geras and Wokler,
2000). Whilst initially critical of Enlightenment
writers’ emphases upon rationality, reform
and the power of critical argument, many such
theorists would now confirm the enduring
significance of the Enlightenment as a setGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 194 1.4.2009 3:17pmENLIGHTENMENT