Contextual Lecture: Enlightenment London
Part of the Contextual Lecture Series: London: The Making of a Global City
The best introduction to London at the beginning of the 18th century was provided by its shrewdest, most enthusiastic observer, Bernard Mandeville, in the Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723). We will see what Mandeville valued London for, and how influential his ideas were elsewhere in Enlightenment Europe. London will then be compared with two other centres of Enlightenment, Edinburgh and Naples, to explore the different characteristics of Enlightenment cities. What was distinctive about London, it will be argued, was the strength of its publishing industry, and the relative freedom of discussion enjoyed by its press and in its coffee-houses. Here was a setting in which men – and women – of letters could publish more freely than anywhere else in Europe.
John Robertson has been Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College, since 2010. Before that he was for thirty years a Fellow, Tutor and University Lecturer in Modern History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 2005), and of The Enlightenment – A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2015). He has also written and edited volumes on the political thought of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, and edited the collection of essays by Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (New Haven and London, 2010). He is currently exploring the use of sacred history – the history recorded in the Bible – by political thinkers between 1650 and 1800.
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