Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe

by Margaret C. Jacob

The mingling of aristocrats and commoners in a southern French city, the jostling of foreigners in stock markets across northern and western Europe, the club gatherings in Paris and London of genteel naturalists busily distilling plants or making air pumps, the ritual fraternizing of "brothers" in privacy and even secrecy—Margaret Jacob invokes all these examples in Strangers Nowhere in the World to provide glimpses of the cosmopolitan ethos that gradually emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jacob investigates what it was to be cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern period. Then—as now—being cosmopolitan meant the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds, and colors with pleasure, curiosity, and interest. Yet such a definition did not come about automatically, nor could it always be practiced easily by those who embraced its principles. Cosmopolites had to strike a delicate balance between the transgressive and the subversive, the radical and the dangerous, the open-minded and the libertine. Jacob traces the history of this precarious balancing act to illustrate how ideals about cosmopolitanism were eventually transformed into lived experiences and practices. From the representatives of the Inquisition who found the mixing of Catholics and Protestants and other types of "border crossing" disruptive to their authority, to the struggles within urbane masonic lodges to open membership to Jews, Jacob also charts the moments when the cosmopolitan impulse faltered. Jacob pays particular attention to the impact of science and merchant life on the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal. In the decades after 1650, modern scientific practices coalesced and science became an open enterprise. Experiments were witnessed in social settings of natural inquiry, congenial for the inculcation of cosmopolitan mores. Similarly, the public venues of the stock exchanges brought strangers and foreigners together in ways encouraging them to be cosmopolites. The amount of international and global commerce increased greatly after 1700, and luxury tastes developed that valorized foreign patterns and designs. Drawing upon sources as various as Inquisition records and spy reports, minutes of scientific societies and the writings of political revolutionaries, Strangers Nowhere in the World reveals a moment in European history when an ideal of cultural openness came to seem strong enough to counter centuries of chauvinism and xenophobia. Perhaps at no time since, Jacob cautions, has that cosmopolitan ideal seemed more fragile and elusive than it is today.

Genres: History

200 pages, Hardcover

First published June 12, 2006

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book to help me revise my book. It discusses the rise of cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (1650-1800). The book contains chapters about the Masonic Brotherhood, merchants, alchemists & scientists, and liberal thinkers.

I enjoyed Jacob's book and found its chapter on merchants to be particularly helpful. I also enjoyed the break from my normal reading. Most of the history books I read deal with early America (1620-1830). As a result, I don't know a lot about European history and this book provided a nice overview.

I learned that Avignon, France held a more intense period of Inquisition than Spain. I also learned a great deal about the origins of the Masonic Brotherhood and that women used to stand in their ranks--at least in parts of the Netherlands and England. Many chapters in France resisted their brothers' calls to admit women and Jews.

I thought the last chapter on "Liberals, Radicals, and Bohemians" was a bit light. Jacob omitted an important discussion of the role the "Republic of Letters" (the increase in letter writing between like-minded individuals throughout the Atlantic World) played in the spread of republican ideals during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. No doubt cosmopolitanism played an important role in bringing forth the revolutions in America, France, Haiti, and later South America, but it was enhanced by the transmission of ideas through the written word.

Of course, one needed to be a cosmopolitan to be open to grappling with different ideas from different people of all sorts of religious, economic, and nationalistic backgrounds.