Enlightenment and empire

The Enlightenment, as an intellectual movement and a set of sociocultural practices aimed at the improvement of humanity through useful knowledge, coincided with crucial developments in the exploration and penetration of overseas territories by Europeans, including colonial expansion. In taking account of this new experience, 18th-century thinkers also looked back to indigenous traditions in formulating important theoretical positions both in favor of and against the growth of empire, and ones designed to provide for efficient imperial governance. Enlightenment social science and natural history supplied taxonomies of human and natural diversity, some of which underpinned while others questioned hierarchies of empire, and thanks to their infiltration of the domestic contemplation of empire via the forums of the 18th-century public sphere, were instrumental in the shaping of contemporary imperial identities.