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The Eighteenth Century Cosmopolis: Global Cities and Citizens in the Age of Sail

A proposal for a conference to be held at Stony Brook-Manhattan, Oct 23-24, 2008

The ‘citizen of the world’ is a famous Enlightenment concept, one that distilled a complex history of intercultural encounter and exchange in unexpected sites across the globe. As the period’s transoceanic crossings brought far-flung communities of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans into contact, and people, practices, ideas and objects jostled en route to new destinations and new destinies, an array of entrepôts emerged that provided the stages for diverse and novel forms of cultural interaction. This interdisciplinary conference, part of The Humanities Institute’s twentieth anniversary celebrations, will bring together a cross-disciplinary and inter-hemispheric group of scholars in history, literary, cultural and theatre studies to explore the eighteenth century cosmopolis as a crucial space of modernity, where mobility and difference were expected, translation was continuous and identity was labile, a product of the ebbs and flows of incommensurability and similitude that shaped the ethics and experience of everyday life.

The slave trading garrison and fledging colony of Senegambia on the coast of West Africa, the Portuguese enclave of Chinese Macau, the Indian Ocean seaport of Surat, the provincial German centre of Koënigsberg, the American Babel of Philadelphia, the British Caribbean capital of Spanish Town, the Pacific settlement of Lima, the Iberian metropolis of Madrid and the Islamic Mediterranean port of Algiers are some of the sites that will be explored through historical, literary and performance culture perspectives. In each location, individuals and groups grappled with local histories of travel, conquest and encounter and deployed techniques of surrogacy, adaptation and impersonation that enabled the cosmopolitan ideal –-that all humanity belonged to a single moral community, sharing a common fund of rights and obligations—to be thought, even as the brutalities of war, slavery and empire prevented its practice. In the eighteenth century cosmopolis, global systems and hierarchies were translated and condensed in ways that forged the conditions of possibility for new collective futures. The complexities of living in and with the cosmopolitan imperative—imaginatively and materially— will be the focus of the two-day conference, which will also include poetry readings and a staged reading of a scene from a period drama, performed by graduate students from the Theatre Department of Stony Brook University.

I. Intellectual Rationale

The rationale for this conference lay in three linked intellectual developments: the chronological relocation of the origins of ‘modernity’; the interest in the historical antecedents of contemporary globalization; and the call, made by Kwame Anthony Appiah among others, for a return to cosmopolitanism as the alternative to present global discontents.

First, our understanding of the historical and geographical locations of ‘modernity’ has undergone a sea change in recent decades. Once seen as the product of objective processes of the nineteenth century western world that generated the structures and textures of ‘modern’ life—industrialization, urbanization, and democratization, for example—the origins of modernity are now seen to lie in the unfolding sets of relationships, cognitive, social and political, that produced the modern self and its expectations of perfection or progress. These relationships unfolded not only in Europe but also in the Americas, in Africa and in Asia, as ancient empires and newly ambitious nation-states collided in the effort to ‘discover’ and claim the riches of the globe. The early modern period, and the eighteenth century specifically, have been identified as the chronological and epistemological sites for the productions of ideas of self and other that have refused to fade, some of which attempted to efface the boundaries between the two. This, then, is the cosmopolitan ideal, expressed by eighteenth century intellectuals as well as performers, painters, clergymen, sailors, novelists, and travelers, who offered theories and descriptions that attempted to map the marvelous multiplicity of the modern world while also appreciating the essential unity of humanity and its common fund of rights and obligations by transcending barriers of nation, race, language and geography. Although borrowing from the ancients, eighteenth century cosmopolites re-visioned Socrates’ ‘citizen of the world’ as a person unfettered by narrow and parochial interests, ‘who carries his researches into the most distant regions of the globe’, as David Hume put it, and so capable of entering into unbounded opportunities for cross-cultural knowledge and exchange. That the entire world could be considered a natural unit of consumption and production—of culture, identity and alterity—was seen as the new ground for human progress. The cosmopolis, defined by Diderot as ‘the world city,’ was deemed the most appropriate place for people interested in or familiar with world travel and multiplicity to mingle, engage, perform or reinvent themselves. The conference will explore how and why this became possible to think, investigating cities and ports where the cosmopolitan ideals could be practiced or re-imagined in material ways, while also attending to the limitations imposed on these ideals through the exigencies of slavery, genocide, conquest, war and revolution.

Secondly, studies of empire and early globalization have directed attention to the very multiplicity of the ‘world systems’ in earlier periods that brought diverse groups into contact for trade, sociability and commerce. Certainly the extent and nature of early modern versions of ‘globalization’ remains a matter of debate. Nevertheless, most scholars would agree that a version of ‘soft’ globalization, producing an increase in contact, interaction and exchange that reduced previously existing barriers and that brought continents into direct and prolonged confrontation for the first time, was established and extended over the course of the eighteenth century. As Adam Smith remarked, ‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events in the history of mankind.’ Trade –in people and ideas as well as commodities--provided the roots as well as routes for heterogeneous notions of subjectivity and forms of servitude and subjection, that spread from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean world, from the Chinese to the Mughal empires, and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. This conference will visit some unexpected sites and subjects of this early world system, where accommodation and self-fashioning according to new circumstances were vital for success, survival and the practices of everyday life.

Finally, while the relocations of modernity and the limits and possibilities of early global trade are of most immediate relevance to the proposed conference, the third source of inspiration, that of contemporary readings of the usefulness of cosmopolitan ideals, is also of great importance. In a bracing three-day event organized by E. Ann Kaplan in October 2007 in honor of the Humanities Institute’s twentieth anniversary, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Globalization: Memory, Spaces, Cities, Images,’ philosophers, sociologists, media and literary specialists convened to discuss the ways in which cosmopolitanism can and cannot mediate the outcomes of globalization and its relentless movement of capital. Its distinguished speakers made it very clear how essential it remains to pursue epistemologies based on a plurality of knowledge, that brings ‘the west and the rest’ into the same frame. In addition, a number of subsequent speakers invited to the Stony Brook campus to address the same themes from different perspectives, from Lisa Lowe of UCSD to Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton, grappled with the complexities of global tolerance and its limitations. Appiah argued that cosmopolitanism is particularly necessary at this sociopolitical juncture because it requires that we, as members of a global community, recognize our responsibilities to one another as human beings, positioning ourselves as ‘citizens of the world’ rather than as purely national ones. With all due respect to Appiah, the inhabitants of the eighteenth century cosmopolis were there before him, revising Diogenes’ arguments to fit the novel and inexpressibly ‘modern’ circumstances of their own age. Hence, in addition to historicizing the conditions of possibility for thinking the cosmopolitan ideal, ‘The Eighteenth Century Cosmpolis: Global Cities and Citizens in the Age of Sail’ also aims at sketching in some of the close and far-flung projects of knowledge, intimacy and power that made contemporary developments possible.

II. Conference Plan

The format of the conference is as follows: each speaker will present a 25 paper to be followed by 30 minutes of open question and discussion with the audience. The two speakers at the Keynote session will speak for 45 minutes each with 20 minutes for questions and discussion.

The Reports of Illiterate Men': Sailors, Seaports, and Global History

Abstract: This lecture will analyze a strange voyage in recent scholarship: how the deep-sea sailor, who was "marginalized" by national narratives of history, is emerging as a central historical actor in new narratives of transnational and world history.

Brief bio: Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of several books including (with Peter Linebaugh) THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA: SAILORS, SLAVES, COMMONERS, AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC (Boston: Beacon Press 2000) and THE SLAVE SHIP: A HUMAN HISTORY (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007).

Spanish American Urban Sacred Histories and the Global Imagination. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (UT) Like their Italian, Spanish, and French Catholic peers, early-modern Spanish American clerics sought to link the history of their all-too-obviously new Christian local churches to a glorious paleo-Christian past. Miraculous crosses and images allegedly left behind by Christ’s apostles contributed to developing narratives of ecclesiastical continuities. Pre-colombian indigenous sources and “archeological” remains also helped to demonstrate early apostolic visitations. Studying these cults and sources, in turn, required tracing the global itinerary of Christ’s apostles. The greater the efforts to provide local urban histories with glorious paleo-Christian origins, the greater the demand on historians to develop detailed global histories of early Christendom. In Spanish America local identities worked in tandem with the cultivation of global imaginations.

Immanuel Kant (1725-1804) is unquestionably one, if not the, most important philosophical figures of the 18th century. He is surely the height of what is now called the German enlightenment. Most of the central ideas we associate with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism can be directly traced to some of Kant’s political and ethical writings. In fact, the project of a political and legal cosmopolitanism found their most eloquent expression in two of his better known essays: “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective (1784)” and “Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1796). What is not well known and remains relatively understudied, is that Kant lectured more on Geography and Anthropology than on any of the disciplines we associate his name with. Kant’s lectures on anthropology were published shortly before his death, and he actually saw them through publication. His lectures on geography were published shortly after his death, and were not edited by him. The lectures on Anthropology have began to received scholarly attention in the last half a decade, in particular thanks to the philological and reconstructive work of Allen Wood and Robert Louden. The lectures on Geography, on the other hand, have received almost no attention. An English translation has been made and is scheduled to appear in the Cambridge edition of Kant’s work in English. In this paper, I will analyze Kant’s relationship to Köningsberg, his birth city, and the city where he spent his entire life. Köningsberg is a port city on the Baltic Sea, which linked the North with Central and Southern Prussia via the Pregel River, was a major cultural, commercial, educational and military capital of the Eastern Prussian Empire through the end of the 19th century. Köningsberg was renamed Kaliningrad after 1946. As Kant remarked in a footnote in the preface to his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Köningsberg is a city “which, by way of rivers, has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighboring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an approximate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without even traveling.” (4). I will focus my analysis of Kant’ relationship to the city, in which it is said that citizens used to set their watches by Kant’s daily walk, through an discussion of Kant’ lectures on Geography, which he gave over 40 years, with only one interruption. I will specifically discuss Kant’s use of Köningsberg location as a mercantile port as a source of travelers account, which he exploited judiciously in the development of what he call Knowledge of the World. I will rely on the very recent scholarship of Werner Stark, who has been editing the extant manuscripts of Kant’s lectures on Geography, as well as the work of Charles Withers, who has recently written an account of Kant’s relationship to the geographical knowledge of the 18th century. While Kant himself may not have traveled outside Köningsberg, his cosmopolitan world knowledge presupposed his residence in one of the best-located cities in the 18th century.

Suvir Kaul teaches courses in Eighteenth-century British Literature, Contemporary South Asian Writing in English, and in Literary and Critical Theory. He has published two books, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; Stanford University Press, 1992) and has edited a collection of essays entitled The Partitions of Memory: the afterlife of the division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; London: C. Hurst, 2001; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). He has also coedited (with Ania Loomba, Antoinette Burton, Matti Bunzl and Jed Esty) an interdisciplinary volume entitled Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005; Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005). He is the Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania.