Over the last two decades, historians have devoted much energy to refining and diversifying our understanding of the Enlightenment, most recently with regard to the contributions and perspectives of craftspeople. Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks builds upon this trend with a group of case studies that span four continents and push the concept of the long eighteenth century to its limits. To justify this scale of analysis, the editors, Lauren R. Cannady and Jennifer Ferng, make two main arguments: first, that the Enlightenment was “not an exclusively European phenomenon” but rather “symptomatic and evidence of a rapidly accelerating world of mobile people, things, and ideas circulating across sovereign borders that were perpetually being reconnected” (13); and second, that the concept of Enlightenment was (and is) a rhetorical tool. Taken together, these arguments explain Cannady and Ferng's emphasis on a Marxian idea of “artisanal praxis” in the sense of creative processes of transformation that encompass both material things and social relations (10). It is this attention to process—as opposed to mere practice—that unites the contributions to Crafting Enlightenment, along with their authors’ commitment to a broad definition of who and what counted as artisanal in the early modern period, a definition indebted to Pamela O. Long's concept of the “artisan-practitioner” (Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 [2011]).
Crafting Enlightenment is structured as a series of thematically paired essays, each followed by a response from a third scholar. Readers of this journal will probably be most interested in those contributions that touch on the history of Britain and its entanglements with peoples and places across the globe as a result of colonization, migration, and trade.
In a deeply erudite and methodologically sophisticated contribution, Neil Kamil considers “what frustrated expectations can reveal about the material culture of empire” (156). He examines the case of the Huguenot traveler John Fontaine and his visit in 1715 to the Virginian home of the creole planter Robert Beverley, from whom he wished to purchase a plot of land for the permanent settlement of his family. As Kamil relates, part of their failure to reach a deal involved cultural differences that expressed themselves in the absence of cosmopolitan and hygienic caned chairs from Beverley's house, which Fontaine found disappointing as an artisan with high social aspirations and familial experience of religious persecution. Kamil thus shows how the cultural biography of a particular commodity could influence perceptions of people and places, and ultimately important life choices, on the part of craftspeople who were peculiarly sensitive to the meanings of certain skills and materials.
A similar sensitivity to materials is at issue in Sugata Ray's innovative and ambitious account of the sacred jasmine gardens of eighteenth-century Vrindavan. In this essay, which draws on art history, ecocriticism, and postcolonial theory, Ray attempts to recover the “small” voice of artisanal praxis in South East Asia “that has been systematically obscured by the double violence of silence and statist din” (251). What emerges from Ray's account is a form of horticulture whose practitioners tried to create “an inclusive habitus of inventive play where sentient plants and humans could share a contingent correlation of equivalence,” in contrast to the extractive logic of contemporary European botany, whose practitioners defined it in relation to a “picturesque geoterrain that could be mapped, ordered, and possessed” (272).
Resource extraction of another kind is the topic of Ferng's essay on the “miniature worlds” of goldfields mine models, epergnes, and inkstands in nineteenth-century Australia (336). Ferng is interested in “how these objects came to represent forms of domination related to European settlement, land contestation, and territorial expansion,” arguing that they modeled a concept of Enlightenment as economic improvement that emphatically excluded aboriginal peoples (337). This exclusion was figured in a particularly striking way by gilded emu eggs, whose makers transformed objects that were of religious, epistemic, and comestible significance to indigenous communities into decorative ornaments that might have found their way into European curiosity cabinets in an earlier period.
In keeping with recent studies of early modern artisans, such as Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (2017), many of the contributors to the volume discuss how craftspeople advanced the power of the state. This theme is most explicit in the first paring of essays, by Chandra Mukerji and Emine Fetvaci, which show how artisans articulated visions of enlightened sovereignty in France and the Ottoman Empire respectively. It is refreshing, though, that this emphasis on the instrumentality of artisanship is qualified by an awareness of artisans’ ability to resist programs imposed from above, as in the case of the Jingdezhen ceramic workers studied by Dorothy Ko or that of the French master carpenter Nicolas Fourneau, whose career is analyzed by Valérie Nègre.
Another way in which Crafting Enlightenment stands at the forefront of current scholarship is in the attention many of its contributors pay to the temporality of making, or what Edward S. Cooke Jr. has called “artisanal time” (“Artisanal Time: Cumulative, Partially Invisible, Nonlinear, and Episodic,” in Marking Time: Objects, People, and Their Lives, 1500–1800, ed. Edward Town and Angela McShane [2020], 83–89). Most notably, Richard Taws's reflections on this topic extend the discussion in fruitful ways by considering how the experimental nature of artisanal praxis and the possibility of failure might reinforce or undermine “Enlightenment rhetoric about artisanal, and by extension human, perfectibility and improvement” (91).
Despite the inevitable limitations of any edited volume, the absence of African artisans from Crafting Enlightenment is regrettable, especially given Cannady and Ferng's stated aims of decentering Europe and exposing the “transnational conditions” of the Enlightenment (13). To see how African artisans might be integrated into the entangled histories presented here, readers of this journal may wish to consult Malike Kraamer's research on West African weavers, whose sophisticated textiles of global material origins played a role in the abolitionist movement in eighteenth-century Britain (“Abolitionism and Kente Cloth: Early Modern West African Textiles in Thomas Clarkson's Chest,” in In-Between Textiles, 1400–1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters, ed. Beatriz Marín-Aguilera and Stefan Hanß [2023], 139–62).
Lacunae aside, Crafting Enlightenment is a useful, exciting, and provocative contribution to a growing body of research at the interstices of art history and the history of science that promises rich rewards to those who wish to understand the deep origins of our globalized world and the artisans who helped make it.
