Traditional scholarship mapped the Enlightenment as a uniquely European experience, but recent research has revealed the eighteenth century as a period of axial change across the world. The relativization of cultural systems, the unseating of religious certainty, the development of civic publics, and the rapid advance of technological innovation marked the leading European societies of this period. But these developments unfolded within, and were in many ways dependent upon a context of global trade and exchange. Expanding interest in non-European ideas, religions and techniques, the increase in mobility, and ultimately the colonization of societies outside Europe, brought ever greater contact. Nowhere was this more evident than in relation to the Muslim world which overlapped with Europe at its borders and in many areas into which Europeans were moving. The great empires of Islam dominated much of the world at the beginning of the century, and Europeans often built upon long-established Muslim trading networks.

What was the nature of the exchange between these two worlds in transformation? What did the Enlightenment mean to Muslims of the period, and what did Islam mean to the Enlightenment? This workshop will map out directions for developing this rich area of study. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

- Muslims in Europe/Europeans in the Muslim world
- The role of intermediary groups and minorities
- Cultural, intellectual and technical borrowings
- Global trade and consumption
- Exchange in mixed and border societies
- Print culture and the public sphere
- The coffee house and secular urban culture
- Leisure gardens and the culture of urban recreation
- Postal systems and the culture of correspondence
- Gender issues in transforming urbanity
- Philosophical challenges and continuities
- Religious challenges and continuities
- Shared and parallel modernities