Enlightenment on America, America on Enlightenment: historical writing in debate and the shaping of eurocentrism at the end of the Eighteenth century

Periodic Report Summary - AMEN (Enlightenment on America, America on Enlightenment: historical writing in debate and the shaping of Eurocentrism at the end of the eighteenth century)

The project 'Enlightenment on America, America on Enlightenment' (AMEN) investigated how the dispute about the New World in the 1770s and 1780s addressed both the construction of a European consciousness and the attempt to provincialise Europe, as a first result of the crisis of the European, i.e. Spanish and British, Empires. I proposed a dual track enquiry, focussing on the confrontation between the 'History of America', 1777, by W. Robertson, a Scottish historian of the strongest and richest existing European empire, and the 'Storia antica del Messico', 1780-1781, by F.S. Clavigero , a Mexican Jesuit who was exiled to Europe. Both raised important and problematic issues, which yielded two alternative competing conceptions of history and mankind.

The analysis of the two texts constituted the first step of my work, which allowed me to move towards a more general interpretation of Eurocentrism, within the frameworks of Enlightenment or Christian universalism. As a further step, I reconstructed Clavigero's reception in Europe, and particularly in Britain and the United States of America, after the translation of his work in English in 1787. What emerged was a network of 'counter-Enlightenment', or else Catholic or Episcopalian Enlightenment, in Britain, which challenged the mainstream of the British Protestant Enlightenment on its proper field, i.e. history. Clavigero's History became the main source of the entry 'America' in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1788, which constituted the most important attempt to summarise existing knowledge about natural world and history in the British context. It reversed the same article of the second edition of 1778, which was entirely based on Robertson. Furthermore, it emerged a privileged connection between Aberdeen, the cradle of the philosophy of common sense, and Philadelphia, which was almost unknown by this time.

For this aim, I worked on printed documents, as well as on private, and often manuscript, letters, minutes of debating societies and notes of university lectures, sermons and papers held in literary clubs. This allowed me to find evidence of still unexplored connections between Clavigero and northern American writers, like Thomas Jefferson, whose 'Notes on Virginia' shared both the structure and the polemical targets with the Mexican Jesuit, Benjamin Smith Barton, who studied medicine in Edinburgh, where he wrote a dissertation against the Principal Robertson's view of America and used Clavigero as a model, as well as with Samuel Stanhope Smith, author of the most important treatise about physical anthropology in America. I then started to study the relationship between Clavigero and the other erudite Jesuits arriving in Europe after the expulsion of the order from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, who wrote histories of other parts of the New World. The comparative perspective provided by the Clavigero-Robertson debate highlighted two universal histories dominated by Europe. Nevertheless, their diverging Eurocentric conceptions of mankind offered a new vision of the world with Europe representing just one among different and competing provinces.

In addition, my training activity might be resumed in:
1. a seminar for Master and PhD students on 'Expériences de l'altérité et idéologie de la race à l'âge moderne', with Prof. Schaub, at the 'École des hautes études en sciences sociales' (EHESS), which was a crucial opportunity for me in order to develop my teaching experience and enlarge the scope of my work.
2. participation in other activities and seminars within the EHESS.
3. work in European and American libraries and archives.
4. participation in international conferences in Europe and America, where I could present my work in progress.

The expected outcomes of such a work were articles to be published in peer-reviewed journals and chapters for collective books. As a final step I aimed at completing the plan for a monograph on 'Enlightenment on America, America on Enlightenment: historical writing in debate and the shaping of Eurocentrism at the end of the Eighteenth century'.

Periodic Report Summary - AMEN (Enlightenment on America, America on Enlightenment: historical writing in debate and the shaping of Eurocentrism at the end of the eighteenth century)

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