1 - Worldly Provincials

Summary

The century between 1750 and 1850 was less a Sattelzeit than one of accelerating trends. Germans from a wide variety of provincial places gained an increasingly global consciousness— articulated in German science, travel, trade and the flows of information that accompanied Germans’ mobilities.Those mobilities, as historians of early-modern Germany have demonstrated, were much greater than we once supposed, and the circulation of knowledge about the world that accompanied it increased substantially with every decade.Germans during this period generally had little problem recognizing unity among their great variety, even if few of them felt the need to define it precisely. Merchants’ efforts, combined with those of naturalists, physicians, travelers, and scientists, stimulated discussions of Germanness and the German nation in scientific and medical circles as well as among artists, musicians, and philosophers. Moreover, as recent work on this period demonstrates, there was a great deal more inclusion, tolerance, and worldliness in German-speaking Europe than previous histories have taught us to expect.