Whose Cosmopolitanism?

Sometime early in the seventeenth century, a native Andean named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1530s –c. 1616) decided to write his own account of the Inca past, together with a fierce denunciation of Spanish colonialism.Footnote ¹ An indigenous interpreter fluent in Quechua and erstwhile collaborator of the Spanish religious authorities, Guaman Poma had participated in the campaigns to “extirpate idolatries” in the Andean highlands. More recently, he had also, as part of a team of scribes and artists, helped illustrate the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa’s Historia General del Pirú. The historical work that eventually emerged from Guaman Poma’s hand with the title Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (and preserved today, remarkably, in a single autograph copy in the Royal Library of Denmark) was, in many ways, a reply to the work of Murúa.Footnote ² Denouncing the entire colonial system for its fundamental injustice, Guaman Poma’s work not only placed the Andean kingdom in a novel historical and moral context but also reveals with extraordinary clarity the specific mental universe of a dispossessed but literate Amerindian from Peru, three-quarters of a century after the Spanish conquest.Footnote ³ Guaman Poma’s denunciation of the entire colonial system from the perspective of a literate Andean native showcased the power of local identity and critical faculties developed far from the European metropole, as he reimagined the Inca past not only from a distinctly Andean perspective but also through a Christian version of universal history going back to Adam and Eve.

In order to portray his own worldview most effectively, Guaman Poma also resorted to a cosmographical device of European inspiration, a mapamundi de las Indias, where he merged European and native Andean spatial concepts to describe a continent bordered by a sea full of European symbols (see Figure I.1). Yet Guaman Poma’s world remained essentially the world of the Inca: divided into four parts, each represented a different region of the imperial body, with its capital or “head” (cabeza) in Cuzco – a largely symbolic ordering of the four parts of the world that replicated old Inca hierarchies.Footnote ⁴ What is especially relevant here is that while resolutely Peruvian-centered, Guaman Poma’s vision sought to encompass the wider world under a single imperial system, one headed by the Roman pope and by the Catholic Monarch, Philip III, “monarca del mundo.”Footnote ⁵ This mixing of universal and local identities within a single depiction illustrates one of the central tenets of Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment, the fact that local and global identities need not have been incompatible but, rather, often coexisted and reinforced one another – and that this could be true of a ladino Indian in the colonial Andes no less than of a philosopher in eighteenth-century London, Geneva or Königsberg.

Figure I.1 “Mapamundi del reino de las Indias,”

from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y buen Gobierno, Royal Library, Copenhagen

Guaman Poma’s attempt to place himself within a world that had expanded radically from the world of his ancestors was an exercise that was common, and probably essential, to those who considered themselves cosmopolitans in early modern Europe – by which we mean those who made an explicit effort to imagine themselves as members of a global human community, morally and politically. He did so within the ideological parameters of the very colonial system against which he was seeking to rebel, by denouncing injustices and claiming authority for native local elites (authentic Indians, he insisted, as opposed to mestizos), all in the name of a universal justice defined using the terms that the Counter Reformation Church had taught him.Footnote ⁶ In light of the evidence made possible by the previous century’s geographical discoveries, many of Guaman Poma’s contemporaries in Europe – including all those cosmographers, natural historians, and antiquarians who re-wrote universal history on an increasingly global scale – would have frowned at his geographical and historical perspective; instead, they would have felt more comfortable with Martín de Murúa’s account, or especially with José de Acosta’s extremely influential Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590), also conceived in Peru, remarkably sober in his scientific speculations and imbued with a sense of modernity vis-à-vis the ancient authorities.Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, the point here is not simply that Guaman Poma’s marginal voice would have been dismissed as ignorant (or at least overly local) by those fully trained in European cultural assumptions.Footnote ⁸ Rather, it is to understand that while he rejected the hypocrisy of a colonial discourse about paternalistic royal justice, the Peruvian author embraced the cosmopolitan Christian vision of a universal moral and political order, seeking to mobilize the voice of his ancestors against those of Acosta and other Spanish chroniclers.Footnote ⁹ Arguably, there was as much cultural bias in the strongly hierarchical and religiously exclusivist Catholic universalism of Acosta and Murúa as there was in attempts by ladino or mestizo writers who had accepted Christianity to rescue the Inca past from systematic denigration: whether in Guaman Poma’s version or through the Platonic idealization of the Inca solar cult as a praeparatio evangelica in Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609). Garcilaso’s work, written in elegant Spanish by an elite mestizo writer uncommonly proud of his double heritage, was, unlike the work of Guaman Poma, remarkably influential in the European Republic of Letters and exemplifies with particular clarity how the language of Christian humanism widened the scope of a cosmopolitan historical vision beyond the confines of Europe.Footnote ¹⁰

The example of Guaman Poma de Ayala could easily be interpreted as evidence of the penetration of European culture in a colonial setting, and hence of how an early modern process of globalization centered in Europe, by connecting different parts of the world (however unevenly) across the oceans, offered new horizons for the cosmopolitan ideals of Christian humanism.Footnote ¹¹ As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra observes in this volume (Chapter 5), there were many Guaman Pomas in the Spanish Atlantic, “upwardly mobile urban natives whose literacy and mastery of the legalese and bureaucratic procedures of appellate courts and high courts transformed them into powerful yet ubiquitous brokers in the indigenous world” – and we could certainly find equivalent figures in the late eighteenth century, at the height of the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹² However, what the present collection of essays also seeks to highlight as a necessary starting point is that all cultural traditions – even those that were isolated from one another – produce their own “maps of the world” that transcend their local realities, even if often only symbolically, opening up the possibility of alternative histories of cosmopolitanism – that is, alternative ways of imagining the moral and political fellowship of mankind.Footnote ¹³ As a counterpoint to an inevitably Eurocentric history of the cosmopolitan ideal that follows the contours of its growing prominence from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this volume seeks to emphasize the many forms that cosmopolitanism could take and the many distinctive locales from which it could emerge. This involves a conscious recovery of complex, sometimes unrecorded tales where local and universal perspectives intertwine and where social actors heretofore left out of the traditional (European) narratives are reinserted and used to reimagine the meanings of universal citizenship in a geographically, culturally, and linguistically diverse and multipolar world.

Whose Enlightenment?

In between the two approaches we have described – one that is primarily concerned with the “Europeanization” of the world and the global impact of its peculiar version of universalism, another that is committed to exploring the underestimated relevance of local contexts (and the potential for cultural pluralism within a cosmopolitan vision) – interpreting the legacy of the Enlightenment remains fundamental. The first intervention that this volume seeks to make is to assert that the grand narrative of Western cosmopolitanism, which continues to be invoked today when discussing globalization, moral universalism, and the international order, can only be properly interpreted by addressing the Enlightenment from a variety of perspectives. This necessitates taking account of, but also going beyond, an intellectual history approach that remains inevitably Eurocentric and which too often has failed to acknowledge a plurality of cosmopolitan discourses, within Europe and outside it. If, as has been argued, competing accounts of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism involve disputes about the meaning of the Enlightenment, and interpretations of the Enlightenment lead, sooner or later, to varying assessments of imperialism and modernity, the stakes of this exercise are high.Footnote ¹⁴ For this reason, this volume seeks to acknowledge the work of a number of scholars who in recent decades have worked to pluralize the Enlightenment, encompassing alternative understandings of eighteenth-century social, cultural, and political thought.Footnote ¹⁵ In particular, the various attempts to “provincialize” European ideas, whether disciplinarily or historically, would seem to be especially pertinent when discussing the ways in which European and non-European actors conceptualized their own place in the cosmos in relation to both the local and the universal, home and abroad. This is especially the case when such attempts to “provincialize Europe,” as emphasized by Dipesh Chakrabarty, do not seek cultural relativism as their end product.Footnote ¹⁶

And yet, pluralizing the Enlightenment after a global turn should not diminish the analytical cogency of the concept or its historical significance. In particular, when discussing cosmopolitanism, we are not suggesting that all versions of moral and political universalism are the same and equally deserve to be analyzed as parts of the same Enlightenment. The Jesuit historians of the New World are a case in point. It would not be helpful, for example, to treat the kind of moral universalism implicit in Counter Reformation Catholicism – the universalism that led José de Acosta to assume that the American Indians must have come from the Old World because the account of common human origins in Sacred Scripture cannot be denied – as a pillar of the Enlightenment. Neither would we wish to find an example of the “early Enlightenment” in the creole society of seventeenth-century Peru on the grounds that a historian like Bernabé Cobo (1580–1657) engaged in activities that are reminiscent, a century later, of a certain set of “enlightened” practices, such as carrying out natural historical inquiries with the tools of humanist antiquarianism or pursuing rational scientific endeavors that involved taking seriously native lore, while making abstraction of the fact that the same Jesuit fully participated in a moral and political vision that was Catholic, monarchical, and hierarchical, and which remained obsessed with denouncing and destroying the demonic idolatry of the natives.Footnote ¹⁷ In the same vein, we would not be comfortable analyzing Joseph-François Lafitau’s great comparative treatise Mœurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724) primarily as a precursor of modern anthropology.Footnote ¹⁸ The Jesuit Lafitau, in his capacity as historian and antiquarian comparatist concerned with analyzing the customs of gentile peoples as vestiges of an Adamic religion common to all mankind, could certainly be described as a notable participant in the Republic of Letters, one whose work was praised by fellow Jesuits such as Louis Castel, used or plagiarized by others such as François-Xavier de Charlevoix or the euhemerist Abbé Banier, read with some skepticism by Jean-Fréderic Bernard and Montesquieu, and cruelly mocked by Voltaire. However, Lafitau contributed to the construction of a “science of customs” from a fundamentally reactionary ideological position, both in terms of his pursuit of Christian apologetics (defending the evidence for consensus gentium among savages) against libertine thinkers such as Pierre Bayle, and in terms of the antiquarian methods and ideas that he deployed: the work of Athanasius Kircher, the interpreter of Egyptian hieroglyphs according to Hermetic and Neoplatonic principles, was Lafitau’s intellectual starting point, and his symbolic anthropology remained a vehicle for a new version of prisca theologia.

How, then, can Enlightenment cosmopolitanism be distinguished from cosmopolitanism more generally? In particular, what did the eighteenth century add to the classical Stoic and Ciceronian traditions of philosophical cosmopolitanism, which sixteenth-century Christian humanists had subsequently appropriated in the light of the new geographical discoveries (as discussed by Rubiés in Chapter 2)? Is it possible to identify a “distinctive mental attitude” that, building upon ancient and early modern formulations of the idea of world citizenship directed by reason, became a “common denominator underlying the variety of eighteenth-century thought,” as proposed by Thomas Schlereth in what remains the standard book on the topic?Footnote ¹⁹ Would, perhaps, the vague ideal of a universal fraternity (articulated through the language of humanity and benevolence) suffice to define this attitude? Or should we rather emphasize the plurality of Enlightenment thought and its contradictions and limit ourselves to acknowledging that, in a context of conceptual volatility, what was new in the eighteenth century was the emergence of a meta-discourse, or conscious reflection, on the cosmopolitan ideal?Footnote ²⁰ While we certainly would not wish to reduce the Enlightenment to a single intellectual tradition or ideological position – for instance, Spinozism and the attack on revealed religion, which was of course highly controversial – nor would we wish to argue that the Enlightenment was necessarily anti-religious (or anti-monarchical), the Enlightenment strain of cosmopolitanism nonetheless usually involved as a condition of possibility the defense of philosophical freedom, indispensable to the pursuit of lumières, and a critique of what was perceived to be fanaticism and superstition.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, while Enlightenment-era thinkers did not invent the rational pursuit of historical erudition and scientific knowledge, they did privilege a belief in the progress of secular learning geared toward public utility, catalyzed by means of the open exchange of ideas and a rejection of religious intolerance. The Enlightenment was complex and ideologically plural, but it was also distinguished by a number of issues and debates, as well as by some cultural institutions that made these debates possible. Most notable among them was the Republic of Letters, an institution open to participation from many different quarters, which, at least in theory, transcended religious and political boundaries and sought to preserve an independent “empire of truth and reason” characterized by freedom of thought, as expressed by Pierre Bayle.Footnote ²² In a world connected by the possibility of global travel but vulnerable to the violent competition between states and empires for lack of common political institutions and divided by a plurality of languages, religions, and customs, this Republic of Letters was, arguably, also the model for realizing the cosmopolitan ideal of the moral unity of mankind through civility, friendly communication, and learning.Footnote ²³ In other words, the capacity of individuals to think of themselves as citizens of the world was more than an optional moral or political ideal: it was the necessary corollary to the context of the Republic of Letters as a transnational and non-confessional institution, one that was not simply universalist in its philosophical and scientific pretensions but also, however imperfectly, in many of its cultural practices as well.Footnote ²⁴

This book proposes to explore the topic of cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment from the intersection of three perspectives: the history of ideas, the new cultural history of empire and encounters, and global politics. With an eye toward interdisciplinary conversations, one of our premises is that the historical significance and continued relevance of the cosmopolitan ideal can be best interpreted if we treat these three perspectives as connected spheres of inquiry. Each of the contributions deals with one of a number of specific themes. These include the limits and foundations of universal reason, the impact of empirical ethnographies on anthropological speculation, the experience of colonial imperialism in the universalizing discourses of natural science and philosophical history, subaltern identities in colonial contexts, gender, commercial globalisation and slavery, patriotism, and civil war. Although we consider the Enlightenment to be a crucial moment for the development of these themes in the European tradition, we also underline the importance of deeper chronological perspectives that consider both the classical and early modern origins of enlightened cosmopolitanism and its more modern legacies. What is more, the essays in this collection seek to illuminate the dialectic between Eurocentric perspectives, traditionally built on an analysis of ideas about cosmopolitanism and the global order, and other perspectives that encompass extra-European geographies and colonial realities, often illuminated through the broader concerns of the new cultural history. While cosmopolitanism remains in many corners a universal moral and political ideal, the contributions that follow keenly identify its conflictive dimensions and how, in very concrete terms, it always functions within a series of social and material contexts. From this perspective, merging the concerns of socio-cultural history with the history of ideas, local contexts can never be ruled out, and the very condition of possibility of a cosmopolitan identity often involves a number of paradoxes and contradictions.

Reassessing the European Trajectory

In its original form as incarnated by Diogenes the Cynic, who lived in a barrel and masturbated in public, cosmopolitanism represented a philosophical rejection of community rules – the laws and conventions of the polis – in the name of an idea of natural simplicity that pointed toward the pre-civil, hence animal, in people. However, the most significant formulations of the cosmopolitan idea in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy were primarily Stoic in inspiration and more positive in spirit, given that the rejection of local norms was in order to embrace the whole of mankind as a political community, or at least a moral community united by the human capacity for reason. Hence “the natural” acquired a constructive, universalistic role in association with “the rational” and “the human” and was used to relativize, rather than altogether deny, local cultures and political allegiances in the name of a higher good. This positive spirit remained the core of the early modern tradition of cosmopolitanism, with its emphases on a global geographical consciousness, philosophical universalism, and cross-cultural communication. It found its expression, for example, in Montesquieu’s hierarchical principle that the good of one’s family is more important than that of the individual, the good of one’s country more important than the good of one’s family, the good of Europe more important than the good any single country within it, and finally, the good of mankind more important than the good of Europe.Footnote ²⁵ The logic of natural necessity underlying this principle was also made unequivocally explicit: “I am necessarily a man, and only by accident a Frenchman,” he explained.Footnote ²⁶ Quite obviously, given the limitations of even the largest of empires (which were never truly universal in scope and often ephemeral), what came to prevail in the eighteenth century over any political project was the recognition of a common moral identity – the capacity to identify with all men and women in all places, rather than just those in one’s original community of birth or adoption. This identification could be realized through a number of commercial, cultural, and scientific practices that were often transnational rather than international. Nonetheless, while this kind of moral cosmopolitanism could be effective in many practical situations, especially in the context of the European culture of the Enlightenment, the idea of universal legal norms – often supported by the concept of natural law – and the possibility of a political union, however partial, that would eventually embrace the globe and secure international peace did not disappear from the cosmopolitan tradition. It is precisely because of his articulation of a non-imperial, minimalist political cosmopolitanism that Kant is so often taken as a reference point for the transition from early modern to modern cosmopolitanism.

From the emphasis on moral universalism, therefore, cosmopolitanism may point in two directions: toward a positive attitude in relation to cultural diversity, on the one hand, and toward the political structures that may support world peace and help uphold the notion of universal human rights, on the other. Both present problems and contradictions that are apparent in a close scrutiny of the European tradition of cosmopolitan thought and practice. The interpretation of cosmopolitanism as equivalent to cultural diversity, or at least as open to the enjoyment of cultural plurality, may seem to suggest that cosmopolitans embrace some kind of relativism. However, as Joan-Pau Rubiés argues in his essay (Chapter 2), unless there exists a normative limit to diversity, at some point the principle of cultural tolerance will clash with the universal ethical values by which humans recognize each other as bearers of the same rights. It is at this point that the cosmopolitan must part company with defenders of multiculturalism and define a boundary, or legal rule, for assessing which customs and laws are acceptable. In the Stoic and Scholastic traditions, the subjection of local social rules to a higher rational principle found expression in the concept of a natural law that was also rational – and rational in the highest possible manner, through a normative reason shared by gods and men (in Cicero’s expression), or at least compatible with the will and wisdom of God (in the Christian formulation developed by Thomas Aquinas and the late scholastics). It was, for example, this notion that allowed Jesuit missionaries to develop cultural accommodation and embrace the Confucian tradition in China: as long as they did not involve idolatry, which was of course contrary to natural law, Confucian ethics could be perceived as perfectly compatible with Christian ones. This, of course, assumed that Roman Catholic Christianity was truly universal – something that many denied even in Europe. The philosophical transformation of cosmopolitanism in the early modern period was conditioned by a crisis of the religious foundations for natural law, brought about by a persistent division of the Christian church in Western Europe, and largely consisted of offering a broader support for the universality of natural reason in the face of religious diversity and conflicts, one that would be capable of embracing non-Christians or Christians from different confessions. This could be done by appealing to the historical consensus of all rational peoples, as proposed, for example, by Hugo Grotius. This tendency to historicize human rationality – that is, to make the actual expression of a universal capacity dependent on historical conditions – produced one of the core themes of the Enlightenment: the rejection of religious intolerance and fanaticism in the name of civilized humanity.

The historicization of normative ethical reason, however, presented new philosophical problems that threatened the disintegration of the very possibility of a cosmopolitan vision. As Daniel Carey notes in his contribution (Chapter 1), John Locke’s skeptical attack on innate ideas implied that human reason could no longer apprehend natural law – hence the universal moral values for a world citizenship – except historically, through the course of civilization, with all its contradictions. But if the history of the world showed, to begin with, that all possible contraventions of natural law could be documented, and all kinds of absurd beliefs were possible, only an interpretation of the past that identified some cultures as more rational than others – albeit by pure geographical accident or some other historical circumstance – could supply an alternative to deep skepticism about the human capacity to truly attain an understanding of universal moral principles. This was not to deny that all cultures were led by social utility toward a rough understanding of natural law; but by acknowledging plurality, Locke also queried the power of reason unassisted. For this reason, if one were to continue to believe in universal norms (as later philosophers, such as Kant, did) beyond the most basic constraints of necessity, and leaving aside the possibility of interpreting revealed religion as helpful (which Locke personally remained attached to), one needed to assume that the course of Western civilization represented the best attempt at rational morality and politics so far. De facto, this replaced any cross-cultural consensus gentium, imperfectly built around utility rather than true principles, for a rationalized set of European conventions, a position that would find clear articulation among some of the international law thinkers of the eighteenth century. Hence, Emer de Vattel embraced many of the actual practices of European states as an acceptable expression of natural law, often in direct opposition to the more idealistic cosmopolitan thinkers such as his teacher Christian Wolff, who insisted that under ius gentium all religions must be juridically equal, even rejecting the distinction between civilized and nomadic savages when it came to rights over land.Footnote ²⁷ Vattel’s culturally biased idea of equality among nations, which left an important legacy to further developments in international law, has been recently described as an expression of “parochial universalism.”Footnote ²⁸

Enlightened cosmopolitanism thus generated its own hierarchies. A sense of superiority with respect to European civilization and, increasingly as well, racial explanations of cultural diversity were, despite a few honorable exceptions such as Christian Wolff and Georg Forster, common assumptions among the intellectuals of the European Enlightenment, including Hume in relation to “negroes” and Kant in his writings of the 1780s (although he later seems to have changed his mind).Footnote ²⁹ In fact, they represented a growing tendency in the period, as Europeans increasingly found that their military, technological, and scientific progress, supported by a vast global web of navigations, commerce, and colonies, outstripped even the most successful Muslim empires (such as the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals) and gentile civilizations, notably China. This does not mean that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism was not genuine – it is in fact anachronistic to judge these authors according to later versions of liberal cosmopolitanism, especially those shaped by the experiences of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁰ What seems more valuable is to note the contradiction and to account for it in terms of wider intellectual contexts. At the same time, it is important to consider that the contestation of slavery, colonial imperialism, and racial discrimination was also gaining new intellectual ground in the eighteenth century. In effect, having defined the cosmopolitan ideal around the values of European civilization, and largely as a way of overcoming religious and political divisions within Europe, some European writers began to question how this same ideal could live up to its proclaimed aim of embracing humanity on a global scale.

Diderot, best known for his role in editing the Encyclopédie (including the entry on “Cosmopolitan”) but also very influential as ghost writer for the third edition of Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1780), offered one of the earliest manifestations of a radical questioning of the contradictions between the humanitarian ideals implicit in the cosmopolitan vision – the capacity for identification with people and their suffering everywhere in the globe – and the actual colonial practices that made a globalized world possible.Footnote ³¹ The genre of philosophical history, marrying facts with non-dogmatic speculation, facilitated a reassessment of the anthropological foundations for human civilization, and what emerged was not comforting: the evidence did not simply reveal that natural capacity for empathy, or moral sympathy, which writers like Rousseau or Smith believed could act as a balance for equally natural selfish interests, but also the roots for apparently “monstrous” behaviour. As Girolamo Imbruglia shows in Chapter 3, beyond the more obviously violent forms of conquest associated with the Spanish Black Legend, the apparently altruistic or at least morally neutral activities of traders and missionaries also evoked the specters of greed and superstition, making it hard to believe in Europe’s capacity to civilize other parts of the world by means of law, religion, and commerce.Footnote ³² The very possibility of a “sensible” civilizing colonization defended by the likes of Charles de Brosses, which would – unlike the Spanish conquistadors – spread Enlightenment among savage nations, was at stake. Nonetheless, while the kind of secular universalism proposed by Diderot was associated with a new understanding of the inhumanity of human nature, he still – as an heir of Montesquieu – kept open the hope of cosmopolitan, humanitarian politics that would help align the will of the people with political institutions, against the ever-present threat of despotism. This was an approach that, as Sankar Muthu shows in his chapter on the anti-slavery writer Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (Chapter 8), would find echoes in radical circles.

Moral history was not the sole exponent of this approach. The natural sciences also exemplified the implicit hierarchies and contradictions underlying the cosmopolitan ideal. In fact, few themes have become so central to the definition of Western civilization as that of a universal science built on the uniqueness of the “scientific revolution,” which, according to the dominant narrative, took place in Europe in the seventeenth century in the mathematical and physical sciences, led to a new confidence in the intellectual and material (albeit not necessarily moral) progress of mankind in the eighteenth, and finally justified liberal imperialism and its civilizing mission in the nineteenth.Footnote ³³ D’Alembert’s “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopédie, which he edited together with Diderot, made it clear that the progress of the system of arts and sciences in Europe, from ancients to moderns, was the key to mankind’s general Enlightenment: “the history of sciences is naturally bound up with a small number of great geniuses who have helped to spread Enlightenment (la lumière) among men.”Footnote ³⁴ The Encyclopédie, in turn, was conceived as a distinctive cosmopolitan project, where a universal spirit could explore all subjects philosophically, without being bound to a single specialized discipline.Footnote ³⁵ The close identification of the cosmopolitan project with a European perspective is also apparent if we consider that for a scientific traveler like Alexander von Humboldt the discovery of the New World by Europeans was an event of universal significance that inaugurated an epistemological modernity, understood as an open-ended, self-generating process of intellectual conquest.Footnote ³⁶ In fact, his great synthetic project, Cosmos, understood that the universal description of nature – an objective, factually-driven scientific endeavor – had to be accompanied by a history of the contemplation of nature, that is, a history of subjective attitudes, which in practical terms became a history of science, discovery, and aesthetics from the Greeks to the “progress of knowledge” characteristic of European modernity. Despite a generous discussion of the various scientific contributions of Arabic-speaking cultures, Humboldt also emphasized that the progress of the arts had gone furthest and been more beneficial in Europe, an analysis permeated by the underlying opposition between the “Aryan” and “Semitic” geniuses.Footnote ³⁷ Humboldt’s genealogy left little doubt that the Enlightenment was built upon a Eurocentric narrative of progress. Two centuries later, global histories of the sciences, like global histories of colonialism and the world-wide economic, intellectual, and religious connections that undergird them, seek precisely to escape from such a Eurocentric trap. This is not to deny, however, that the eighteenth-century natural sciences were increasingly global in their materiality and imbued with a powerful cosmopolitan rhetoric, something that is obvious not only if we consider the universalizing intellectual ambitions of individuals such as Buffon and Linnaeus but also the material histories of the globe-spanning scientific expeditions of the period, or even the manner in which naturalia and ethnographic objects were collected and displayed in cabinets and museums within Europe. In creating the British Museum in 1753, the will of the President of the Royal Society Sir Hans Sloane made explicit that it should be a national institution for the “improvement, knowledge and information of all persons” – that is, not only a collection for the already curious and learned but a free public museum devoted to universal knowledge.Footnote ³⁸ Instead of simply creating a common world citizenship, however, all these practices served instead to strengthen Eurocentrism and buttress increasingly racialized civilizational hierarchies. Thus, as Neil Safier shows in Chapter 4, cartography, natural history, and indeed nearly any scientific endeavor aiming to describe the circumnavigated world and its peoples through the modern conception of a universal science became a locus for contradictions. Most crucially, the need to construct truths that could be valid across different cultural systems, fundamental to the very possibility of a cosmopolitan ethos, necessarily relied upon building those truths from particular realities. We may consider, for example, the status of the armchair cosmographer for whom “local” knowledge was simply the knowledge generated by European travelers in exotic locations, neglecting native or local perspectives. As Diderot occasionally (and often ironically) observed, the discourse of natural history proposed in Europe sometimes seemed to address a superficial desire for epistemic mastery rather than offering a genuinely analytical and truly universal body of knowledge that took account of what would have been meaningful in the local contexts of knowledge production.Footnote ³⁹ There were nevertheless moments and voices that pointed in the opposite direction. As Safier also notes, in South America Humboldt became aware that cosmopolitan knowledge was affected by local conditions of production (not the least of which included European colonial rivalries). And even earlier, in the Pacific, Georg Forster – perhaps the man who had inspired Humboldt most deeply – not only rejected a crude racial dichotomy between civilized and savage nations in favor of a more nuanced gradation that rejected simple explanations and took account of environmental influences and social development, but in addition came to acknowledge that the naturalist’s scientific endeavor, however universal in its aspirations, was still imbued with a degree of subjectivity in the very act of observation.Footnote ⁴⁰

Practical Cosmopolitanism in Europe and Beyond

By contrast with the difficulty of realizing the philosophical idea of world citizenship cross-culturally, historians of travel, trade, and information have revealed the various spheres in which cosmopolitanism seemed to work. Margaret Jacob has emphasized that the circumstances that made cosmopolitanism possible in eighteenth-century Europe not only varied, notably in the opportunities afforded to middling social groups, but could be quite significant to the overall prospects of a given group or individual as well.Footnote ⁴¹ In this respect, the possibility of circumventing the controls of a confessional religious community (such as the Catholic Church) was a condition of possibility no less crucial than the positive stimulus to travel provided by educational ideas or scientific exchanges. But can we truly compare traders conducting business abroad to freemasons or republican radicals, whose ideas were rather specific, and unique to the experience of eighteenth-century Europe? It seems important not to exaggerate the extent to which practical cosmopolitanism created a single human community or even aspired to it: quite often, it was rather about separate communities learning to coexist for utilitarian reasons. In her exemplary study of the Sephardic Jews of Livorno (in Catholic Tuscany) and their international commercial network, Francesca Trivellato rightly suggests that we need to talk about “communitarian cosmopolitanism” in order to make sense of the apparent contradictions of a system of social and economic exchanges that promoted tolerance and acculturation only to a certain extent.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, in his study of the extraordinarily well-documented community of Armenians of New Julfa in Safavid Iran and their long-distance trade toward India and Europe, Sebouh David Aslanian has emphasized their successful business practices in various (often difficult) political contexts and their system of commercial information across remarkable distances. Nevertheless, he had little to note in relation to the development of intellectual interactions or any other cultural exchanges with outside communities, beyond the most immediate practical accommodations.Footnote ⁴³ The Armenians of New Julfa in Ispahan, who were deeply embedded in their Islamic context and who also operated a far-flung church and developed a fledgling tradition of printing, had in this respect a cosmopolitan experience but no cosmopolitan project, if by the latter we mean the pursuit of a supra-communal moral and political order – a civitas maxima (universal commonwealth) embracing the whole of humankind, in the expression of the German philosopher Christian Wolff.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is not to dismiss the rich tapestry of cultural diversity to be found in many parts of the early modern world, particularly in the courts of multiethnic empires (such as the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals) and in the many cities, particularly port cities, where trade was intensively conducted. This was a form of cosmopolitanism that in reality had existed for centuries in various parts of the world, notably around the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and which in some respects could generate fluid interactions between diverse communities, despite the existence of ethnic, religious, and even caste divisions.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, it seems important in this context not to retrospectively attach Enlightenment (let alone liberal) values to the use of the word “cosmopolitan” when describing the multicultural worlds of medieval and early modern port cities, and to acknowledge that these long-term cosmopolitan practices did not involve the major point of inflection that we can detect during the eighteenth century in European intellectual history. This is especially relevant when the various “nations” of foreign merchants, speaking separate languages and practicing different religions, conducted their own affairs according to the will of a ruler, someone who could enhance their rights and privileges or eliminate them – or indeed, as eventually happened in New Julfa in the eighteenth century, bring a community to complete ruin through excessive or arbitrary exactions.Footnote ⁴⁶ Some of the most influential voices of the European Enlightenement – like Montesquieu and Diderot – defined their cosmopolitan ideals precisely against such potential forms of political despotism.

This brief consideration of the cosmopolitan experience of port cities over many centuries provides an important counterpoint to the Eurocentric emphasis that is revealed in any account centered on the Enlightenment, but it also helps clarify what might have been distinctive of the European intellectual tradition. As we have seen, the European tradition of cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment was quite different from the management of cultural differences within one state or empire: in both its ideas and in practice, this project was also, necessarily, transnational. Such a realization invites consideration as to whether a particular form of internationalism is also characteristic of the European tradition. In this respect, the political implications of cosmopolitanism in an Asian setting are more clearly delineated if we also consider its imperial and trans-imperial dimensions.

For example, it would be possible to contemplate a powerful and long-lasting non-European form of cosmopolitanism if we were to consider the Muslim œcumene and, in particular, the trans-imperial courtly connections that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries linked Safavids, Mughals, and the Deccani Sultans – or the Ottomans to a lesser extent – around a linguistically Persian cultural legacy.Footnote ⁴⁷ By contrast with the imperial-centered multilingual cosmopolitanism of a single dynasty (such as the Ottomans, or even the Mughals when considered from a more localized perspective), such a highly mobile international conquest elite shared common cultural and political traditions and to a large extent defined itself trans-regionally, seeking legitimation against local subject populations that were often non-Muslim. But these subjects also had to be accommodated, either by means of established sharia principles (which particularly applied to Christians and Jews as the oldest dhimmīs) or by developing new ones. For this reason, we might refine the model by distinguishing two complementary cosmopolitan tendencies here: one was transnational – the communication between Muslim dynasties and cultural elites of Central Asian (Turkic and Mongol), Iranian, and sometimes Arab origins sharing religious, literary, and artistic traditions – while the other was internal and is best exemplified by Akbar’s project of integrating non-Muslims (especially Hindus) as loyal subjects by means of a syncretic courtly ideology that pointed toward religious tolerance, the dīn-i ilāhī’ (divine religion, as opposed to superficial normative Islam), which aimed at ṣulḥ-i kull (“universal peace”).Footnote ⁴⁸ Akbar’s project, in effect a royalist religious cult inspired by messianic Sufism, might be explained as a personal response to the peculiar circumstances of the Mughal Empire. It was ultimately unsustainable because its remarkably high dose of overt syncretic pretensions stood in open tension with the principles of Muslim orthodoxy that otherwise connected the Mughals to the wider Islamic world. For this reason, it was resisted during Akbar’s reign and slowly died out in his successors.Footnote ⁴⁹ In any case, the kind of universal peace to which it aspired was limited to subjection to a single charismatic royal authority, which became the focus of a kind of imperial cult – in the end not very far from other examples of sacred kingship, most immediately the Safavids of Iran, who had exploited similar messianic themes.Footnote ⁵⁰

This suggests that there was not one single coherent tradition of Muslim elite cosmopolitanism but rather a number of cosmopolitan tendencies that could sometimes point in opposite directions. In fact, when considering the case of early modern India we could complicate the picture further by noting the participation of non-Muslim dynasties, such as the Hindu rulers of the multiethnic empire of Vijayanagara in South India, in a wider “Islamicate” (rather than Muslim) world of diplomatic and courtly conventions.Footnote ⁵¹ This aspect of Vijayanagara cosmopolitanism can be seen as a form of limited accommodation to a dominant international culture, rather than a fully fledged embracement of Persianization: for this reason, the external and internal codes of courtly ritual, and even architectural styles, were often different – only the former were increasingly “Islamicate.”Footnote ⁵² That a monotheistic religion was not the key to this process of cosmopolitan integration is made clear if we consider that at an earlier stage in Indian history, Sanskritization had performed a similar role of creating trans-regional cultural codes that were adopted by political and social elites.Footnote ⁵³ It was the importance of this previous legacy that prompted Mughal rulers to also embrace Sanskrit literature within their system of patronage. Sanskrit from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, and Persian from the eleventh to the eighteenth, articulated transregional models of worldy power that transcended any particular religion or ethnic group – and these two worlds partly overlapped and often interacted.Footnote ⁵⁴ Not surprisingly, the East India Company would in turn emulate Mughal cosmopolitan practices of Persian proficiency, etiquette, and gift-giving after they conquered Bengal.

Despite the potential contradictions of experiments in religious syncretism such as Akbar’s, the most immediate benefit of imperial cosmopolitanism in the great Asian empires was the openness of court cultures to foreigners and tolerance of their different creeds – or, in other words, a sophisticated enactment of the right to travel, communication, and hospitality. As Edward Terry, the chaplain of the British ambassador Thomas Roe at Jahangir’s court, wrote in relation to the religious tolerance that he had enjoyed, “I never went abroad amongst that people” – a remarkable precursor of the famous definition of a cosmopolite as “a stranger nowhere in the world” from the Encyclopédie.Footnote ⁵⁵ Arguably, in this case the Mughal example was a positive inspiration for Europeans eager to overcome religious confrontations, in sharp contrast to the negative portrayals of “oriental despotism” that emerged in this period (Edward Terry himself wrote about the “tyrannical government” of India in the same passage).Footnote ⁵⁶ However, beyond the existence of a wide range of practical accommodations to cultural diversity in court and urban settings, and the corresponding ability of individuals to adapt to new codes, the fundamental comparative question is identifying the ideological foundation of the cosmopolitan impulse: was it simple political and economic calculation or did it have a positive ethical and educational value? And, if the latter, was this value inspired by religious universalism – at the potential cost of activating the principle of exclusion against idolaters, infidels, and heretics – or by a moral and political idea of world citizenship and, perhaps, international peace? We could argue that the transnational practices of the imperial courts of Asia offer no precise equivalent to the European idea of an actionable principle of universal human fellowship independent from religion, the kind of citizenship of the world that led from the idea of a universal reason to reimagining an international world order according to the values of civilization. On the other hand, the international elites of Asia shared with European cosmopolitans the rejection of exclusively local cultural horizons, their curiosity for new types of learning, and their capacity to transcend political and confessional boundaries. In addition, inspired by tradition and driven by necessity, Muslim and non-Muslim dynasties were often better at accommodating cultural and religious variety within the state than most European countries. Courtly cosmopolitanism did not amount, however, to fostering the values of an alternative “Enlightenment,” neither in terms of cultural structures nor of intellectual attitudes.

Cosmopolitanism from the Margins

Cultural distance from Europe was not the only factor that created distinctive versions of cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century. In the context of a discourse of universal fraternity and world citizenship proclaimed by travelers, philosophers, and natural historians who were not only usually European, but also white and male, one of the crucial questions to address is whether more marginal groups in Europe and its colonies – Indians, slaves, freed people of color, and women – could, or not, be encompassed within the vision of a world community. One possibility is to look at the European colonies as spaces where, at the very least, extreme Eurocentrism could be challenged. The study of colonial identities (pioneered in an Atlantic context by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden in the 1980s) offers an avenue for assessing the construction of alternative narratives that involved both proximity and distance with respect to the dominant intellectual and cultural discourses in Europe.Footnote ⁵⁷ As various studies have also shown, the very idea of the New World as a potential space for natural and anthropological exceptionalism became one of the great debates of the Enlightenment and, indeed, one that generated questions about the importance of local perspectives in the face of the limitations of Eurocentric universalism, with a number of Creole intellectuals in the British and Spanish colonies emphasizing the specific value of their superior access to local sources of natural and ethnographic knowledge, and even their unique capacity to correctly interpret indigenous sources.Footnote ⁵⁸

There are, however, limitations to an approach focused on Creole elites, whose views were very closely connected to the metropolitan intellectual traditions that, in many ways, they sought to replicate (or even enhance) in a colonial context, whether within the Catholic discourse of religious universalism or by embracing the Enlightenment themes of religious tolerance, scientific progress, political liberty, and human rights. These themes eventually contributed to legitimizing the successful wars of independence, led precisely by those Creole elites of European extraction – not Indians or slaves. Even the libertine culture of free-thinking in matters of religion, including the critique of civilization from the perspective of the “savage,” emerged from a close interaction between colonial experiences and metropolitan debates of ideas, as exemplified by Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, the largely fictional Canadian dialogues of the Baron de Lahontan, or Diderot’s supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this context, the real challenge is tracing elements of the cosmopolitan ideal among those subaltern groups that the Creole elites defined themselves against at the local level. The chapter by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Chapter 5) shows, nonetheless, that in colonial Spanish America some members of relatively marginal social groups participated in the cultural horizons of the learned elites – for example, through their appeal to European cosmographical knowledge and antiquarian scholarship – in order to construct their political and religious identities. In this respect, there were as Cañizares-Esguerra argues hundreds of Guaman Pomas in the Spanish Atlantic: that is, literate ladinos acting as cultural brokers for a wider native population, a situation one might explain by considering the powerful legal structures of the imperial monarchy of Spain. A parallel story can be told about Afro-Atlantic cofradías in the Catholic world and their efforts to promote particular devotional practices by means of literacy and theology – here again, relying on a religious culture of European origin but also seeking to appropriate its universalistic narratives. One might query whether this is cosmopolitanism as conventionally understood, that is, as an appeal to a concept of world citizenship that transcends the local. But the novel point here is that global communities of learning had a remarkable capacity for social and geographical penetration, rendering problematic the assumption that the most vulnerable ethnic and social groups were invariably parochial and inward-looking.

The Eurocentric aspects of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism also need to be connected to its gendered assumptions and limitations, as argued by Silvia Sebastiani in Chapter 6. In particular, the influential discourse of civilization of the Scottish Enlightenment can be shown to have been full of anxieties about female influence and agency. While the feminization of civil society distinguished the cosmopolitan and commercial culture of modern Europe, in effect becoming an index of social progress, it also opened up the danger of a confusion of the sexes and the risk of a collective loss of “virility.” Arguably, rather than a complete liberation of the social institutions, what was required was a new emphasis on gender balance, represented, for example, by the ideal of the monogamous marriage. Hence, the cosmopolitan culture of the late Enlightenment defined its values yet again in a manner that emphasized European traditions by opposition to the savage and the traditions of Asia. In parallel with the mythological construction of a Western political and religious ideal imbued with balance and moderation, which defined itself against the dangers of despotism and superstition, a new gender ideal also identified its point of equilibrium by rejecting not only the monstrosity of female enslavement in the most primitive societies but also the imminent danger of luxurious decadence among the civilized.

Finally, the cultural geographies of cosmopolitanism also had its centers and peripheries within Europe and amongst the participants of the Republic of Letters. The core regions of the Enlightenment in that respect were located in the Western and Northern parts of the sub-continent, generating particular dislocations in the East and the South – including cities and courts that, by any account, actively participated in some of the intellectual debates of the Enlightenment. Naples is a case in point: one of the largest cities in Europe, it was at the same time one of the key destinations of grand tourists and an environment where philosophical, legal, economic, and political thinkers flourished, with authors like Giambattista Vico, Pietro Giannone, Antonio Genovesi, or Gaetano Filangieri.Footnote ⁶⁰ At the same time, the sense of institutional dysfunctionality and social imbalance was pervasive among many of these authors – one reason why they were interested in reform and some went into exile. The paradoxes of the experience of cosmopolitanism in the context of a city that was an object of antiquarian observation by northern European travelers (such as Montesquieu) claiming to be cosmopolitan but who were also imbued with obvious cultural prejudices about the poor, superstitious, and lazy people of the south have often been noted.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, if the key tension generated by the cosmopolitan ideal was between patriotic sentiments and participation in a wider cultural community that aspired to encompass the whole world (or at least the civilized world), the perspective from the periphery necessarily brought out the difficulty of defining what a cosmopolitan culture was really about. While it was possible to envisage future participation in a union of all the peoples of the world (with a common legal code) led by the civilized nations of Europe, a project that could be achieved through enlightened reform, and in particular by focusing on economic prosperity and programs of national education inspired by the universal principles of natural law, such a vision was not only deeply Eurocentric but also naïve when it came to negotiating cultural diversity and political hierarchies within Europe.Footnote ⁶² In the Bourbon courts of Naples and Madrid, for example, could cosmopolitanism be simply about privileging French taste and norms over local traditions in the name of “enlightened impartiality”? Or should the classical ideal still be defended as a universal model? Napoli Signorelli’s work and life, discussed by Melissa Calaresu (Chapter 7), is symptomatic because he was a man of letters at the heart of a transnational network of communication centered on Italy and Spain, rather than a prominent philosopher. His case – and in particular his attempt to write a universal history of theater – illuminates a reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Neoclassical underpinnings associated with eighteenth-century culture were increasingly questioned by emerging patriotic discourses looking for national distinctiveness.

Patriotism and cosmopolitanism were, however, usually meant to be complementary, as Franco Venturi and others who have worked on enlightened reformers have emphasized. But was moral cosmopolitanism sufficient as a counterbalance to the possibility of international anarchy? This was in fact the central problem of cosmopolitanism as a political project: how to create an international order respectful of universal human rights and capable of producing peace on the basis of national interests defended by sovereign states.

Cosmopolitanism and Politics

A schematic approach to the problem of global politics in the eighteenth century would pit Vattel’s pragmatic reduction of the common bonds of international society to some shared, non-enforceable notions of natural law (a voluntary form of ius gentium) against the denunciation of the historical experience of global injustice, which as we have seen was articulated by Diderot in his contributions to Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. This critique of the limitations of pragmatic minimalism led some more idealistic authors, such as Wolff and Kant, to demand that in the same way that individuals gave up some of their natural freedom when forming civil societies in order to obtain the protection of the state (against the threat of a chronic war of all against all described by Hobbes), civilized states should also be willing to abandon the state of nature and give up a degree of sovereignty – to begin with by means of a federation of free states – so that justice could be upheld internationally.Footnote ⁶³ In most accounts, this should not lead to a world state that annihilated political and cultural pluralism, since that would quickly degenerate into soulless despotism. The point, rather, was to institute the rules of equity internationally by means of global Enlightenment. In this respect, the force of the cosmopolitan vision was in its very proclamation of an international sphere of public opinion.

If, then, rather than a simple denial of patriotic attachments, cosmopolitanism – as defined, for example, by Kant – in reality sought to simply balance unavoidable local commitments with a global sense of human solidarity, the issue would then turn on defining the forms that global commerce and global sociability should take, so as to avoid the specter of imperialism and domination (which could still of course be perpetrated in the name of the good of mankind – for example, by arguing that one had to create the conditions for the spread of Christianity and Civilization). In Chapter 8, Sankar Muthu argues that one of the fundamental keys to the analysis of this subject by the philosophers of the Enlightenment was the acknowledgment that there existed an intrinsic element of human resistance to the creation of social bonds – what Rousseau described as amour propre, a tragic deformation of the natural instinct of amour de soi, and what Kant defined as “unsocial sociability.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The interesting point was that this resistance need not be suppressed but, rather, should be cultivated to the extent that it sought equality rather than superiority, and could offer a productive counterbalance to the human instinct for domination. This idea became a core element in the Enlightenment critique of imperialism and other forms of corporate domination (since “the worst savages” were in fact European). Remarkably, the principle was also relevant to the cosmopolitan discourse of resistance to the ills of modern global commerce, developed by those whose lives were ravaged by the early modern expansion of trans-oceanic commerce, notably the African slaves on whose behalf the abolitionist Cugoano wrote in the late 1780s. The radical critique of slavery and the slave trade – the critique of European dehumanization as well as that of the slaves – could, Muthu emphasizes, lead to a constructive pursuit of equality on the basis of a new model of social and commercial relations that would potentially benefit all, the former masters and the former slaves.

Cosmopolitanism, therefore, potentially had a radical component. Another way of assessing Vattel’s minimalist version of cosmopolitanism, rooted in natural law and commercial sociability, is by emphasizing his positive vision of a future of international peace, rather than the limitations of the actual system that prevailed in Europe – the violent interactions between rival states that dominated much of the long eighteenth century, from Louis XIV to Napoleon. As David Armitage argues, Vattel was in fact rather close to Kant in his willingness to argue for cosmopolitan pacifism, against the classical alternative of conflictual cosmopolitanism – a world in a state of civil war, in fact.Footnote ⁶⁵ From this perspective, the broader the cosmopolitan vision, the wider the definition of war as a war among citizens, as opposed to a war against absolute foreigners. If the eighteenth century no longer aspired to recreating a single “republican empire” modeled on ancient Rome, but rather to stabilizing a balanced system of nation-states, it had to come to terms with the fact that a transnational cosmopolitan vision inspired by the worldwide expansion of commercial civilization also created the foundations for a global civil war. Hence, no cosmopolitan vision could escape the fact that international conflicts eventually become civil ones, and even the Kantian vision of perpetual peace carried an implicit shadow of conflict.

Obviously, many of these eighteenth-century debates remained relevant for subsequent generations. Thus, while it is important to define and specify the intellectual contents and historical contexts of this eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, the “cosmopolitan ideal” must also be examined and understood as one of the defining legacies of the Enlightenment with regard to modern culture and politics. In particular, resolving the tension between patriotism and cosmopolitanism remained at the heart of international liberal politics for at least 150 years after the end of the eighteenth century, and became particularly dramatic at specific historical conjunctures, notably during the Age of Revolutions (1770–1840) and following the First World War.Footnote ⁶⁶ But cosmopolitanism is also a very contemporary concern, whose relevance has only increased at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the context of a new wave of globalization that has seen unprecedented levels of trans-cultural and trans-national mobility, whether voluntary or forced, new challenges to the international liberal consensus have emerged among parliamentary democracies after the Second World War. This consensus might be described as seeking a balance between the claims of the nation-state to the loyalty of its citizens – what some have analyzed as constitutional patriotism – and the commitment to international institutional cooperation inspired by common values (such as economic progress, world peace, and human rights). There are some cases, notably the European Union, where this consensual governance even extends to the partial pooling of sovereignty. In recent years, the fresh challenges have increasingly taken the form of expressions of nationalism, even xenophobia, that overtly target cosmopolitan ideals. Far from being restricted to non-democratic states or fringe right-wing movements, they have increasingly permeated mainstream democratic politics. Many were shocked, for instance, when British Prime Minister Theresa May, in charge of administering the British departure from the European Union (following a narrow referendum victory for those wishing to leave), used her first significant speech in 2016 to assert a dramatically reduced understanding of citizenship: “Today,” she claimed, “too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street. But if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You do not understand what the word ‘citizenship’ means.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The attempt to portray cosmopolitanism as elitist and somewhat incompatible with local attachments is not new. However, these attacks seem the more surprising when they are articulated by the leaders of Western liberal countries, precisely because their moral claims to international leadership have often in the past relied on extending the values of European (including of course Anglo-American) civilization globally and widening the scope for secular human rights, as exemplified by the Atlantic charter of 1941, the creation of the UN, and the subsequent universal declaration of human rights, all of which require the capacity to think beyond local political identities. More controversially, some have also claimed that it is the Western tradition that best provides the common intellectual ground upon which cultural differences can be negotiated with a reasonable degree of mutual respect – a somewhat paradoxical argument in defense of the uniqueness and enduring value of the European legacy against fully fledged multiculturalism that, irrespective of its merits, inevitably loses its force whenever democracy and human rights are defined as “American,” “British,” or “French” (often in opposition to Islamic extremism), rather than as potentially universal.Footnote ⁶⁸ A facile opposition between local patriotisms and a cosmopolitan world order certainly ignores one of the key legacies of Kant’s vision, which was precisely to argue that in order to secure international peace, the pursuit of the common good within states (through constitutional right) had to be complemented not only by international legal principles, upheld through a voluntary federation of states, but also by the notion of a cosmopolitan right that would allow individuals to participate in a global public sphere through travel, trade, and communication – in essence, the right to hospitality.Footnote ⁶⁹

Given that in the post-Enlightenment, Kantian formulation, the moral and political values of European civilization are the foundation upon which a cosmopolitan world order aspiring to “perpetual peace” may be constructed, an even larger challenge is whether this project, too often tainted with double standards (as the nineteenth-century experience of imperialism, pace Kant, makes clear), can ever truly be an international one. Simply proclaiming some values or rights as universal on rational grounds does not make them universal, of course. A consensus of all “rational beings” (whatever that might mean) is also needed, as natural law theorists of the seventeenth century, notably Grotius, already understood. Such a consensus must be constructed and is always elusive. In fact, in the current context, the primacy of the West and its values seems less clear-cut than it may have been for the previous two centuries, and this may affect the way we conceptualize any “citizenship of the world” or indeed its very possibility. From this light, the retreat into local patriotisms and crude attempts to restrict Western liberal values to the confines of national citizenship, however misguided, may be seen as a defensive reaction at a time of crisis, in the face of new global challenges and higher levels of cultural complexity. Simplistic attitudes toward the future are often supported by simplistic accounts of the past.

This is therefore a particularly important moment to interrogate the historical sources of the cosmopolitan ideal in the European Enlightenment, from the perspective of a new historiography that has increasingly emphasized the global connections underlying the early modern experience. It is no longer satisfactory to limit the topic to the critical analysis of the contribution of the great thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe, however relevant the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, Raynal, Diderot, Kant, or the historians and philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment continue to be. If we are to continue to deploy the concept as a politically useful corrective to the excesses of patriotism, as many (such as Martha Nussbaum in an influential article published in 1996) have done, we must begin by accepting the complexity of the eighteenth-century discourse and avoid a naïve idealization.Footnote ⁷⁰ Anthony Pagden has been at the forefront of this historical reassessment by emphasizing the need to come to terms with the imperial dimensions of European cosmopolitanism and belief in a universal human nature. From a slightly different but complementary angle, Georg Cavallar has noted that the classical early modern writers on international law – Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and Wolff – can neither be interpreted collectively as unproblematic cosmopolitans nor as self-serving colonialists, but need to be discussed on a case-by-case basis.Footnote ⁷¹ In reality, acknowledging the complexity of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism in both its theory and its practice is an opportunity for enriching the potential of the concept, not an obstacle to its future use. As Mary McMurran usefully noted in a recent review of the topic, cosmopolitanism was often a contested rhetoric rather than a consistent set of values (in fact, the statement that “a cosmopolitan is not a good citizen” has a distinguished eighteenth-century pedigree, illuminated by Rousseau’s work and most clearly articulated by the 1762 [4th] edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française).Footnote ⁷² Beyond the defense of the Enlightenment legacy or its rejection, both of which often rely on caricatures, we suggest that it may be more helpful to seek to mobilize a deeper historical understanding of these contradictions.Footnote ⁷³

We began with the voice of a self-identified indigenous author, the Peruvian ladino Guaman Poma de Ayala, to remind ourselves that cosmopolitanism is larger than the Enlightenment and its legacy and has many local variants. At the same time, we have emphasized that the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment was both distinctive and full of complexities. The essays in this volume also show, it is hoped, some of the ways in which understanding this historical complexity enhances our ability to articulate the kind of cosmopolitan vision that may be relevant today, beyond the crude dynamic between patriotism and cosmopolitanism or cultural plurality and moral universalism.

It is in fact the view of the editors that a cosmopolitan vision remains today a necessity, given that the pursuit of the common good of humankind in the face of global economic, political, and ecological challenges requires action that goes beyond the logic of competing national interests and identity politics – let alone xenophobic appeals to the restoration of the national grandeur of particular states. Whether we consider the global threats posed by climate change or those brought into being by new pandemics, it seems obvious that no lasting solution can be forthcoming on a purely national basis and that the lack of progress or even weakening of key international institutions, apparent in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, seriously limits humankind’s ability to respond effectively. The same is true of the longue-durée challenges of fostering global security and reducing economic inequality. At the same time, any cosmopolitan consciousness must also be embedded, local, culturally sensitive and non-elitist for it to generate a sufficient amount of consensus gentium. It must be, therefore, able to accommodate cultural diversity, yet without failing to articulate a clear understanding of which rights and norms must be universal and thus subject to a higher moral vision and institutional appeal than those provided by each separate local culture, religious tradition, or national legal system. If the Enlightenment “still matters,” as Anthony Pagden has argued, it is not because it can be studied ahistorically as something equivalent to modern values or embraced as a secular philosophy, let alone reduced to the legacy of Kant’s positive vision of the future of “mankind” (in this respect, critiques of Kantian cosmopolitanism as anthropologically naïve cannot be simply dismissed). Rather, it is because the writers of the Enlightenment raised issues that continue to be relevant today, and they did so in a manner that continues to address, if not necessarily resolve, our own modern dilemmas.Footnote ⁷⁴