GHIL Lecture

Patrick Anthony

Terrestrial Enlightenment

Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis

27 July 2023

(0:38 h)

GHIL Lecture

Patrick Anthony

Terrestrial Enlightenment
Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis

GHIL Lecture, given 29 November 2022

Some scholars and scientists identify the Enlightenment as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geological age in which humans act as a planetary force. My talk suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental exploitation, but also by the emergence of climate politics. The naturalist Georg Forster provides a helpful itinerary through this time, from his study of Saxon hydraulics in the wake of the flood of 1784 to his death in Paris during the Terror of 1794. On either side of the Rhine, resource management and disaster mitigation constituted political power.

Patrick Anthony received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2021. He is currently a DAAD PRIME Fellow at LMU Munich and the University of Cambridge and is working on a global social history of Alexander von Humboldt’s science as it developed through extractive industries in Prussia, Mexico, and Siberia.

Don't miss the accompanying interview: Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König talk to Patrick Anthony about the research behind his GHIL lecture on Climate Crises and Politics in the Eighteenth Century.