The Atlantic Enlightenment was born out of a series of seminars and a closing colloquium at the University of Edinburgh in 2002 that posed the general question, “Was there an Atlantic Enlightenment?” The answer, Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano as editors assert, is an emphatic “yes”: “the connections … are so intrinsic and so far-reaching that the Enlightenment cannot be understood apart from its Atlantic context” (xiii). While such boldness of argument is refreshing, it chafes against the more nuanced approaches and conclusions offered by the essays that follow. Moreover, it rings a bit hollow when one is made aware that the essays focus on an Atlantic that is almost entirely Anglophone and an Enlightenment that is primarily Scottish. Reflecting, as the editors freely admit, their own geography and scholarly interests, such a focus is perfectly justifiable—especially given the richness of the volume's essays. But without case studies that reveal similar impacts on the Francophone world and explain why the Atlantic experience failed to thrust its greatest territorial power, Spain, into the Enlightenment, the editors’ bold conclusions remain unproven. As it stands, The Atlantic Enlightenment provides an important, substantive mingling of the fields of Atlantic studies and the Enlightenment, one that hopefully will provoke further needed inquiry.

The cast of contributing scholars is an impressive and carefully constructed mixture of established and emerging scholars from a range of disciplines. All of the essays are well written, accessible to scholars outside their respective disciplines, and thoroughly researched, and they combine to demonstrate the benefits of what the editors refer to as “methodological flexibility” (9) when tackling the subjects of either the Atlantic world or the Enlightenment. The volume itself is handsomely produced, and it concludes with a useful works cited of primary and secondary sources.

Paul Giles begins the essays with a provocative overview of recent scholarship on the Enlightenment with a particular emphasis on its manifestation in the British North American colonies and United States. Declaring that the “Atlantic world of the eighteenth century was a radically mixed-up environment” (35), Giles questions the usefulness of strait jacketing the discourses into the rigid framework of an “American Enlightenment.” Charles W. J. Withers shifts the volume's thematic question to one of “where was the Enlightenment in the Atlantic?” (60). He narrows the Atlantic aspect of the topic by explaining that Africa hardly figured into the thoughts of Anglophone Enlightenment philosophers, but he then counters this with a fascinating description of how the Atlantic Ocean itself, particularly the Gulf Stream, was an important subject of scientific Enlightenment inquiry. Daniel Walker Howe reveals the usefulness of a biographical approach to the subject through an in-depth look at the life and evolving thought of John Witherspoon, who arrived in America in only 1768 yet became the lone clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. In Witherspoon, Howe finds both “the compatibility of Evangelical Christianity with rationality” (77)—a model that proved more prevalent in nineteenth-century education than Thomas Jefferson's secular one—and the forerunner to the modern American college president (Witherspoon was president of what would be renamed Princeton) as public intellectual and fund-raiser. Through David Hume, Emma Rothschild describes how philosophers who never crossed the Atlantic were nevertheless greatly affected by what she refers to as an “Atlantic milieu” (95) and how, in turn, this inflected the discourses on commerce and empire. Thomas Ahnert breaks with the British-American focus of the book to examine how the public ideology of the American Revolution played out in Germany. The essay is an important addition to the current internationalizing of the American Revolution and serves as a reminder that the American revolutionaries underwent careful intellectual scrutiny on the European continent. Sarah F. Wood offers an interesting transatlantic examination of the place of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the British Atlantic world, explaining that it reveals continuities and clashes between British and American writers and describing how the classic literary figure came to be a key figure in critiquing the impossible ideals of the revolutionaries. Wood's literary turn is followed neatly by James Chandler's acute examination of the largely unknown William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, a sentimental epistolary novel that was the first novel to be published in the United States after the ratification of the Constitution. In Brown's work, Chandler locates and explores the influence of the ethics of sympathy developed by David Hume and Adam Smith. Peter S. Onuf examines how Americans from divergent political viewpoints equally drew support from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations during the decades leading to the American Civil War. Everyone—from free traders to protectionists and promoters of states’ rights to nationalists—invoked Smith. In the final essay Paul A. Gilje reminds us that the Enlightenment was not the reserve of the highly educated social elite with a careful study of how the Enlightenment penetrated the world of the men who worked on the ships that traveled the Atlantic, transporting people, commodities, and ideas.