The philosophical turn and the rise of mass literacy
Over the course of the seventeenth century more universal historians endeavoured to establish a proper ‘scientific' or ‘philosophical' foundation for history. What these terms meant varied from place to place.
In Scotland, for instance, ‘conjectural historians' such as Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), Adam Smith (1723-90), Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), John Millar (1735-1801), William Robertson (1721-93), Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) and David Hume (1711-76) worked to explain the origins of human sociability, a ‘moral sense' that would account not only for human community, but also for human progress. The Italian scholar Giambattista Vico (1688-1744), on the other hand, saw the Latin language, Roman law and the Homeric poems as a point of entry into the ‘scientific' study of the course and recourse of nations' histories. French historians like Fontenelle (1657-1757), Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-80), the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94), Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-81) and Jean Etienne Montucla (1725-99) tracked the history of the ‘human spirit' or mind from barbaric beginnings to the height of enlightened, mannered ‘civilisation'. In Germany, G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) noted, the Enlightenment was not against religious belief, as he believed it was in France. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) adopted an organic view, outlining the unique features of cultures in childhood, infancy, manhood and old age. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) detected reason in the long history of humanity's ‘unsocial sociability', Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) sought the ‘holy hieroglyph' or mark of God and meaning in world cultures and Hegel detected ‘progress of the consciousness of freedom' in the movement of world history from the East to the West.[13] Later in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx (1818-83) inverted Hegel's philosophical programme, suggesting that the material conditions of life shape human freedom, not the other way round. Chinese historians, too, including Guo Songtao (1818-91), Xue Fucheng (1838-94), Wang Tao (1828-90), Yan Fu (1854-1921) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929) increasingly urged the recognition of world history as a narrative of struggle for technological supremacy.Universal histories designed for mass consumption were also produced. Reader, reviewer and publisher demands for morally edifying works favoured the production of overtly didactic texts, often in the form of biographical catalogues. This type of writing proved particularly popular with middle-class women, who were given access to works designed to describe a world order in which women were the domestic companions of men. Notable examples include Mary Hay's Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (1803), Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations with Miscellaneous Poems (1810), Anna Jameson's Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1832), Laure Junot's Memoirs of Celebrated Women (1834), Mary Elizabeth Hewitt's Heroines of History (1852), SarahJosepha Hale's Woman's Record (1853), Mary Cowden Clarke's World-Noted Women (1858), Sarah Strickley Ellis' The Mothers of Great Men (1859) and Clara Balfour's Women Worth Emulating (1877). While often dismissed as methodologically impoverished, many of these works acted as conduits for womanist and reformist thought. Lydia Maria Child's The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1835), for example, is underpinned by arguments against slavery and for female suffrage. Hester Piozzi's Retrospection (1801) is also an important example, revealing how history written on the largest scales could serve one person's desire to achieve social acceptance.