by Matias X. Gonzalez
Diego Pirillo is a Professor and Chair of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley, where he also serves as the Director of the Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (REMS) graduate program and as an Affiliate Faculty member in the History Department. His work explores how mobility, displacement, and colonialism shaped the intellectual and cultural life of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. Among his recent publications: The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Cornell University Press, 2018, awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies), Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, ed. by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli and Diego Pirillo (Oxford University Press, 2025). His forthcoming book, The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the intellectual history of colonialism in early America, showing how Enlightenment scholars served as agents of empire, silencing their ties to chattel slavery and coordinating the dispossession of Indigenous people.
He spoke with Matias X. Gonzalez about his recent JHI article How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 86, no. 1.
Matias X. Gonzalez: In your article, you argue that periodicals became crucial vehicles for the exchange and collection of knowledge in the Republic of Letters, particularly for intellectuals in early America. How did scholars such as James Logan and Isaac Norris II engage with periodicals? Was the life of the mind connected to politics and the colonial enterprise?
Diego Pirillo: In my article I examine the American reception of European learned periodicals such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the Acta eruditorum, and Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la république des lettres. Although the presence of these periodicals in early American libraries has long been known, very little attention has been given to how readers encountered and appropriated them. Using marginalia and archival records, I show that reading a periodical was an active rather than a passive pursuit, during which the reader selectively appropriated the information pen in hand, taking extensive annotations that were often shared with friends and colleagues and conceived for public rather than simply for private use.
I also argue that gathering scholarly information was not a disinterested activity. Indeed, my main goal in this article—and especially in my forthcoming book (The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026)—is to bring together two interconnected histories. First, I engage with the history of books and information and recover the place of British America in the Republic of Letters. I study not only single individuals such as Logan and Norris but the larger communication system that facilitated the transatlantic circulation of knowledge. Despite being separated by an ocean from European intellectual life, colonial savants used a variety of tools—from letters to journals and encyclopedias—to engage with the most recent scholarly trends and to actively contribute to the production of knowledge.
Second, I bring to light the Republic of Letters’ entanglement with Euro-American colonialism and show how knowledge was weaponized in the effort to survey and control North America. Not only were books, libraries and cultural institutions funded by the wealth created by the slave trade and the expropriation of Indigenous land, but the very taxonomies and classification systems that Euro-American scholars devised directly shaped the colonial enterprise. I maintain that the ‘taxonomic impulse’ defined the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters and I show that various disciplines and intellectual practices, such as botany, lexicography, historiography, antiquarianism, and bibliography, served as the instruments of European order, facilitating the classification and subjugation of North America’s nature and peoples. Thus, while this book builds on the work of those scholars who have studied the Republic of Letters in early America, it is not concerned exclusively with intellectual history. Rather, it focuses on the relationship between books, intellectuals and colonial governmentality, and explores the ways in which knowledge circulated and shaped conquest.
MG: Your article is a valuable contribution to intellectual history and the study of knowledge formation. One of its most compelling arguments concerns the nature of the Republic of Letters, which became increasingly bilateral by the late eighteenth century. Can you expand on that? Did early American scholars correspond exclusively with the metropole or were they part of a broader intellectual world?
DP: One long-standing assumption that I tried to challenge is the idea that the intellectual history of early America can be reduced to the “bilateral exchange” between British scholars in the imperial metropolis and colonial outsiders trying to make a name for themselves. Although not every early American savant was as cosmopolitan as Benjamin Franklin, the letters, journals, publications and reading notes that I examine reveal a different and deeply multilingual intellectual world. Precisely when Britain’s and France’s fight for North America was at its height, colonial scholars relied extensively on French publications to stay in touch with the Republic of Letters. In an epoch in which English had not yet become a global koiné, French served next to Latin as the universal language of learning. Mastering French enabled early American scholars to engage not only with France but with the larger scholarly world, which in the age of the Enlightenment became progressively identified with the Francophone république des lettres.
As I show in the book, French authors such as Bayle, Le Clerc, Lafitau, Caylus, Buffon, and Raynal, to name just a few, were widely read in the colonies as extensively as Locke, Newton and Sloane. By engaging with them, colonial savants participated in some of the key intellectual debates of the period, regarding antiquarianism, natural history, abolitionism, and Deism. Moving beyond British Protestantism they established a dialogue with currents of the Radical Reformation such as Socinianism, or even with the bête noire of Anglo-American Protestantism, namely the Society of Jesus. Indeed, the Church of England’s projects to evangelize Indigenous peoples intended to replicate the Jesuit reducciones of Paraguay in North America, to ensure that Native Americans did not only convert to Christianity but also adopted European culture to fully assimilate to white colonists.
MG: Your upcoming book, The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin, examines how early American scholars profited from the slave trade and the dispossession of Indigenous people. Did their close ties to the British Empire influence the ways in which they downplayed their role in oppressing local populations?
DP: The close relationship between early American scholars and the British empire is crucial to my story. Indeed, the conviction that knowledge should inform government and colonial rule was hardly new in the eighteenth-century. In fact, it shaped the British empire since its inception. Throughout his work, Francis Bacon repeatedly emphasized the connection between scientific progress and European expansion. When it was founded in 1660, the Royal Society rested on this very idea. The second charter stated that its goal was “to extend not only the boundaries of empire, but also the vary arts and sciences.” As scholars such as Richard Drayton, John Gascoigne, Mark Harrison, and Sarah Irving have shown, since England was religiously divided, it could not employ the same arguments that the Iberian nations had used but needed other ways to justify its empire. The belief in its scientific preeminence and in its capacity to improve the lives of both colonizers and colonized became one of the ideological foundations of British imperialism. Throughout the empire, practicing science became a distinctive way to prove one’s commitment to such colonial ideology.
While American scholars fully embraced this view, their understanding of the interplay between knowledge and colonialism did not simply echo British imperialism. Far from being limited to the bilateral exchange between London and the colonies, the story I trace involves a plurality of actors and empires, starting with France and its “colonial machine.” Anglo-French antagonism shaped the Republic of Letters in North America. While imitating their French colleagues, American scholars lacked the support of a state department concerned with science and worked through a more informal series of networks and patronage systems—a structure that permitted colonies to preserve a degree of autonomy and independence from the metropole while still working within an imperial framework.
Along with Bourbon France, British America’s investment in science and learning was fueled by the confrontation with powerful non-Western antagonists. Despite all the assertions made by the European empires, during the eighteenth century, North America remained overwhelmingly under the control of Indigenous powers. Western colonialism was neither stable nor inevitably destined to succeed. Precisely because they lacked the power to dictate terms to Indigenous people, colonists invested in “cultural capital” to supplement their precarious authority and navigate the volatile political landscape they faced. Scientific knowledge served to imagine a colonial mastery that in the eighteenth-century continued to be a far-fetched ambition rather than a realistic and achievable goal. Early American scholars could easily implement taxonomies and classification systems over books, artifacts, and natural specimens but had little power over the infinity of Indigenous peoples that inhabited the continent. Ordering knowledge in libraries, museums, archives, and scientific societies, allowed them to keep imperial ambitions alive, and to elude an unstable balance of power that was rarely in favor of European colonists.
MG: Can any of the sources you use be considered foundational to the formation of a distinct American Enlightenment, not so much countered as much as in relation to the European tradition?
DP: One of my goals with this project was to recover the connections between intellectual and political history. Even when they presented themselves as impartial and cosmopolitan scholars, the intellectuals I discussed in my book were all colonial agents and participated directly in the diplomatic exchanges with Indigenous powers. For this reason, I dedicated a chapter of my book to Indian treatises, that were often negotiated, transcribed and published by early American scholars. Benjamin Franklin is a famous case. Starting in 1737, one year after his appointment as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin published fourteen treaties in thirteen imprints, all in folio. Indian treaties capture the hybrid diplomatic practices that resulted from the mutual necessity to compromise and accommodate. While Europeans brought to America their own diplomatic protocols, they also had to learn how to adjust to the rituals that Indians had developed long before their arrival and that had allowed them to resolve conflicts, negotiate agreements and turn strangers into allies. As Colin Calloway has pointed out, Euro-American colonists “had to…come to terms with the reality that to succeed in Indian country they must behave as Indians thought friends and allies should, and to conciliate more often than command”.
While my story begins in a “middle ground” that forced both parties to adapt and accommodate, the long chronological span that I examine—which begins with the arrival of Logan in Philadelphia in 1699 and ends with Thomas Jefferson’s presidency—allows me to show how in Northeastern North America power relations progressively shifted. Although this was a long and winding process, I consider the 1779 Sullivan expedition against the Iroquois as a decisive turning point. Until that moment, the Iroquois League kept colonists in check and wielded its influence on a vast area that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Valley. Aware of that, Logan and other American scholars devoted much energy to Indian treaties and cross-cultural diplomacy, convinced that Britain could never establish its rule over North America without the support of the Iroquois. The Sullivan expedition radically changed such power dynamic. Planned by George Washington, the expedition—which Indigenous activists and scholars now refer to as a “genocide”—bent the Iroquois and forever changed their relationship with the American government. As I show in the last chapter of my book, the Republic of Letters not only followed but facilitated this shift. Indeed, it was precisely at that moment that the first anthropology museums were established in America. Collecting spoils of war and transforming them into display objects, early American scholars relegated Indigenous peoples to a distant past that would inevitably be overcome by Euro-American civilization.
Matias X. Gonzalez is a disciplinary tutor at the University of Turin and an independent postdoctoral researcher. He holds a PhD in Global History of Empires by the University of Turin. The dissertation, entitled “A ‘Fraternal Chain’. The working nation between Mexico and France (1829-1867),” analyzes the international movement of worker collectives between France, Spain, and Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, and how these collectives and social movements altered the imaginary of the Nation-State into a “working nation.” An article that analyzes the Mexican case recently appeared in Contributions to the History of Concepts. In 2023, he was granted a post-doc fellowship at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin, with which he resumed his academic interest in the political thought of C.H. de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) with a research project on the conceptual history of “work” in his political and scientific thought. He recently coedited La Nación Trabajadora. Futuro-pasado de un imaginario popular (Nido de Vacas, 2025) and translated Giuseppe Duso’s latest book: Federalismo. Para reinventar la democracia (Facultad Libre, in press).
Featured image: Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The Genius of America Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks.Oil on canvas; 60 x 74 inches. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.