Enlightenment
Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
Roy Porter
728 pages with notes, bibliography and index
published in 2000

The eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment is usually seen as a French affair, as exemplified by Voltaire and Rousseau with the vast English contribution often overlooked. In Enlightenment, Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Roy Porter sets the record straight. In twenty one chapters all major components of what constituted the English Enlightement are touched upon, working extensively from the writings of people like John Locke, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestly and others.

This book occupies a comfortable niche halfway between a pop science book and an original work of historical research. It's easy to follow for an interested lay person like me, while grounded in good historical scholarship, as the large notes and bibliography sections show. It's hard to do a good overview of an era, especially such a long and busy era like the English Enlightenment. You need to be able to both see the big picture and enough details of the era to get a feel for it, but not so much that you lose the narrative and drown in a morass of unrelated facts. Fortunately, Roy Porter was up to the job.

Porter starts the book with giving a general overview of the English enlightenment, fixing it in history as well as giving an overview of history writing on the subject, which is meager. Despite the great significance of the English enlightenment, most attention has always focused on the enlightenment elsewhere in Europe, in France and Germany.

The key aspects of the Enlightenment, its emphasis on reason, belief in education and science, its politics come back again and again, each time embedded in a different context. Apart from a few general overview chapters at the beginning and end of the book, each chapter deals with a different subject and how it was influenced and changed by the ongoing Enlightenment process. Politics, literature, arts, education, everyday life and so on are examined in greater or lesser detail. Each chapter not only shows how these things were during the Enlightenment, but how they came to be and evolved during this period.