Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

The Swing Plow as an Eighteenth-Century Universal Machine

This chapter talks about cases of many intellectually complex, socially ubiquitous, and highly significant technological innovations, such as the development of fore and aft rigging for sailing vessels that intensified coastal trade in Europe and later the Caribbean. The majority of the blacksmiths who experimented with plows do remain anonymous, but the contribution of James Small was so striking that he left behind a written record as well as a material object. Small was a blacksmith and cartwright from Berwickshire in southern Scotland, who in 1764 introduced a wheel-less iron plow inspired and provoked by his adjustments to the Rotherham plow patented in 1730 by Joseph Foljambe and Disney Stanytown. What made Small stand out was that he was able to articulate the thinking that underpinned his innovations in design. He defined the plow not as an object but as a function.

The Natural Province of Reason

This chapter explores how the project of improvement, which extended far beyond the elites who operated in the university and the scientific society, disseminated new standards of judgment and rationality. In recent years, historians have found new ways to understand the popular Enlightenment, that curious zone between authoritative knowledge and diverse opinion. All of those routes are useful in approaching the popular experience in the Languedoc. The hypothesis of the “public sphere” inspired historians to rediscover the public use of reason by theatre audiences, newspaper readerships, and crowds at exhibitions without the prominent writers who were important sources of authoritative ideas. The chapter also explains how progress could be marketed in the form of medicines, clothes, or foods. Consumption was a practice that went far beyond objects; there was a sphere of public science, and a market for scientific lectures and displays, in eighteenth-century Paris and beyond.