The Enlightenment And The Origins Of European Australia

This book surveys some of the key intellectual influences in the formation of Australian society by emphasizing the impact of the Enlightenment, with its commitment to rational inquiry and progress. The first part analyzes the political and religious background of the period from the First Fleet (1788) to the mid-nineteenth century. The second demonstrates the pervasiveness of ideas of improvement across a range of human endeavors, from agriculture to education, penal discipline and race relations. Throughout, the book highlights the extent to which developments in Australia can be compared with those in Britain and the U.S.

“Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values” offers a critical intervention in the continuing effects of colonization in Australia and the structures it brought, which still inform and dominate its public culture. Through a careful analysis of three disparate but significant moments in Australian history, the authors investigate the way the British Enlightenment continues to dominate contemporary Australian thinking and values. Employing the lens of Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, the authors argue for an Australian public culture that is profoundly conscious of its assumptions, history and limitations.

Offers a comprehensive analysis of the European Enlightenment (circa 1720-1800) as both an historical epoch and a cultural formation. This collection begins with the intellectual origins of the Enlightenment, and spans early formations up to both contemporary and modern critics of the Enlightenment.

The Pacific Ocean was the setting for the last great chapter in the convergence of humankind from across the globe. Driven by Enlightenment ideals, Europeans sought to extend control to all quarters of the earth through the spread of beliefs, the promotion of trade and the acquisition of new knowledge. This book surveys the consequent encounters between European expansionism and the peoples of the Pacific. John Gascoigne weaves together the stories of British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian voyages to destinations throughout the Pacific region. In a lively and lucid style, he brings to life the idealism, adventures and frustrations of a colourful cast of historical figures. Drawing upon a range of fields, he explores the complexities of the relationships between European and Pacific peoples. Richly illustrated with historical images and maps, this seminal work provides new perspectives on the significance of European contact with the Pacific in the Enlightenment.

This book examines the radical intervention of the German-Australian Lutheran missionary F. W. Albrecht in the education of Aboriginal children. Albrecht’s ideas about consent, freedom of choice and personal autonomy were expressed in schemes designed to educate and empower Aboriginal people and efforts to find Aboriginal futures through education, training and employment. This book explores how Aboriginal people understood Albrecht’s work and the Enlightenment concepts on which it was based. In the context of an Anglo-Australian settler-colonialism that sought to systematically remove the freedom and autonomy of Indigenous people, this study demonstrates how those who participated in the Albrecht scheme were able to reconstruct themselves in ways that fused their own Aboriginal culture and identity with the ideas and values imported from an enlightened Germany. This book will appeal to students and scholars of cultural history, colonialism, Lutheranism, race and ethnicity and Indigenous studies. It will also be illuminating reading to policymakers searching for a deeper understanding of colonial interventions in Indigenous communities.

Over the course of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, an interior private notion of religion gained wide public recognition. It then spread through settler colonial contexts around the world. It has since been criticized for its abstract, immaterial nature as well as its irrelevance to traditions beyond the European context. However, such critiques obscure the contradiction between religion’s definition as a matter of interior privacy and its public visibility in various printed publications. Timothy Stanley responds by re-evaluating the cultural impact of the exterior forms in which religious texts were printed, such as pamphlets, broadsheets, books, and journals. He also applies that evidence to critical studies of religion shaped by the crisis of representation in the human sciences. While Jacques Derrida is oft-cited as a progenitor of that crisis, the opposite case is made. Additionally, Stanley draws on Derrida’s thought to reframe the relation between a religious text’s internal hermeneutic interests and its external forms. In sum, this book provides a new model of how people printed religion in ways that can be compared to other material cultures around the world.

This book seeks to highlight the influence of the Enlightenment idea of social progress on the character of the "civilising mission" in early Australia by tracing its presence in the various "civilising" attempts undertaken between 1788 and 1850. It also represents an attempt to marry the history of the British Enlightenment and the history of settler-Aboriginal interactions. The chronological structure of the book, as well as the breadth of its content, will facilitate the readers’ understanding of the evolution of "civilising attempts" and their epistemological underpinnings, while throwing additional light on the influence of the Enlightenment on Australian history as a whole.

Debate over the meaning of 'Enlightenment' began in the eighteenth century and has continued unabated until our own times. This period saw the opening of arguments on the nature of man, truth, on the place of God, and the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. Did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? In the second edition of her book, Dorinda Outram addresses these, and other questions about the Enlightenment. She studies it as a global phenomenon, setting the period against broader social changes. This new edition offers a fresh introduction, a new chapter on slavery, and new material on the Enlightenment as a global phenomenon. The bibliography and short biographies have been extended. This accessible synthesis of scholarship will prove invaluable reading to students of eighteenth-century history, philosophy, and the history of ideas.