Crafting Enlightenment

A groundbreaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment argues that artisans of the long eighteenth century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans—some anonymous, some outside the margins, and others eminent—translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illumination, and mining.

In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired essays are followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both contributions.

Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.

This project developed from a colloquium titled “Artisanal Praxis and State Power” that was hosted by the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in December 2017.

Contents:

Lauren R. Cannady and Jennifer Ferng, Introduction: assembling artisanal identities across geographies

I. Envisioning artisanal histories

Chandra Mukerji, Sovereign Sun King

Emine Fetvaci, Visualizing urban festivals in the Ottoman Empire: a comparison of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries

Richard Taws, Telling artisanal time

II. Collaborative objects

Frédéric Dassas, The secret to success: urbanization and luxury decoration at the place Louis-le-Grand

Dennis Carr, The Spanish colonial world in microcosm: a Puebla desk-and-bookcase

Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, Artisanal agency, anonymity, and power

III. Religion and the commerce of empire

Neil Kamil, Mark of disgrace or matter of politeness? Materiality, trust, and expectation in early-eighteenth-century Virginia

Lauren R. Cannady, Interregna: the Société des arts and the scale of time

Thomas Crow, Confessional complications in maritime trade

IV. Corporeal ecologies

Sugata Ray, A “small” story of the jasmine flower in the age of global botany

Dorothy Ko, Fire walk with me: tales of artisanal body (parts) and innovation in early modern China

Nancy Um, Grounded terrains and vertical landscapes in eighteenth-century Asia

V. Enlightenment technologies

Valérie Nègre, Craft knowledge in the age of encyclopedism

Jennifer Ferng, Miniature domination: mining the worlds of goldfields jewelry and emu eggs

Kaijun Chen, Artisans as thinkers in the early modern world

Summaries

Bibliography

Index

New Books Network Podcast

New Books in Intellectual History, December 2021

Reviews

Reviewed by Dominic Bate in Journal of British Studies, July 2023

Reviewed by Marco Storni in Technology and Culture, July 2023

Reviewed by Sarah R. Cohen in The Art Bulletin, March 2023

Reviewed by Jason Nguyen in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, September 2022

Crafting Enlightenment: A Review by Katie Scott in Journal18, June 2022

Reviewed by David Andress in French Studies, April 2022

Public Presentation

“Making Time: Competition and Collaboration in Early Modern European Artisanal Networks,” Keynote Lecture, Skillful Hands: Apprentices and Networks of Learning, 1650-1950, Rienzi Symposium, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 2024