Be a Historian: Was 1650–1789 an "Age of Enlightenment" for the World?

Your turn to be the historian

In the first lesson you met the label "Age of Enlightenment" and the warning that period labels are interpretations. Now you have studied absolutism and constitutional government, the Qing, Tokugawa, Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal states, science and the Enlightenment, the world economy, the slave trade, Indigenous diplomacy and resistance, wars for empire, European companies in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, the American Revolution, and culture and religion across the world.

In this lesson you carry out a complete inquiry: Was 1650–1789 an "Age of Enlightenment" for the world? This is the kind of question you will answer in a first-year university history essay.

Step 1: Formulate the question (A1.1)

The big question is evaluative. Break it into sub-questions of different types:

• Factual: What did Enlightenment thinkers argue? Which reforms were made?
• Comparative: How did life change for a French peasant, a Qing scholar, an enslaved person in Jamaica, a Cree trader?
• Causal: Why did rights ideas spread in some places and not in others?
• Evaluative: For whom, and by what criteria, was this an age of "enlightenment"?

Then set criteria. For example: (1) new ideas about reason and rights; (2) changes in government; (3) changes in ordinary people's lives; (4) how many people, in how many regions, were affected.

Step 2: Gather and organize evidence (A1.2, A1.3)

Use at least one source from four regions. Possible evidence from this unit:

• Primary: Locke's Two Treatises (1689); the Bill of Rights (1689); Montagu's 1717 letter on inoculation; Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" (1784); the Declaration of Independence (1776); Equiano's Narrative (1789); the Royal Proclamation (1763) with the wampum and oral history of Niagara (1764); casta paintings; Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV; Burke's speeches against Hastings.
• Secondary: historians' interpretations, such as the "decline vs. transformation" debate about the Mughals, Beik's view of absolutism, Carretta's research on Equiano, and the Slave Voyages estimates.

Organize evidence in a table with columns: source, type, region, what it shows, perspective and reliability, which criterion it supports. Check each source's credibility: who made it, when, for whom, and why? Corroborate important claims.

Step 3: Interpret, analyse and conclude (A1.4, A1.7)

Look for patterns:

• Enlightenment ideas were real and influential, especially in Europe and the Americas, and had parallels elsewhere (Qing evidential research, Japanese Dutch learning).
• Changes in government were limited: constitutional government in Britain and the US; enlightened absolutism with mixed results.
• For many people, the period meant greater suffering: the slave trade peaked; Indigenous peoples lost land; famine struck Bengal.
• In Asia, the most important developments (Qing expansion, Mughal decentralization, Tokugawa peace) had little to do with the European Enlightenment.

Now write a qualified thesis: a clear judgement with limits.

Step 4: Communicate and cite (A1.8, A1.9)

At university, history papers usually use the Chicago Manual of Style notes-and-bibliography system. (Other subjects use MLA or APA; follow your instructor.)

Footnote for a book (first reference):

1. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 15.

(The page number 15 is only an example; always give the page where your information actually appears.)

Bibliography entry for the same book:

Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Website (bibliography): give the author or organization, the page title in quotation marks, the site name, and the URL, with an access date if no publication date is shown. For example: Slave Voyages. "Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Estimates." Accessed 15 October 2026. https://www.slavevoyages.org.

Rules of thumb: cite every quotation, every statistic and every idea that is not your own or common knowledge. Citing protects you from plagiarism, and it lets your reader check your evidence.

Step 5: Skills beyond the classroom (A2)

The skills in this inquiry are used in many careers and in everyday life:

• Law: Indigenous rights cases (such as Marshall, 1999) depend on historical evidence about treaties from the 1700s, including oral history. Lawyers and expert historians analyse these sources.
• Museums, archives and heritage: curators and archivists judge sources, write labels for the public and decide what is preserved.
• Journalism and policy: analysts check claims, find primary sources and explain the background to current events.
• Data and research: projects such as Slave Voyages combine historical sources with databases; digital history is a growing field.
• Everyday life: checking whether a viral post is credible uses the same questions as checking a 1700s pamphlet: Who made this? For whom? Why? Can I corroborate it?

Current events often have roots in this period: treaty relationships and land claims in Canada, debates about monuments to slave traders, reparations, and the history behind Australia Day all trace back to 1650–1789.