The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Now, if all this sounds suspiciously reminiscent of an Enlightenment coffee-house it isn’t a total coincidence. Tobacco, for example, was adopted around this period by settlers then taken back and popularized in Europe itself, and it was indeed promoted in Europe as a drug to be taken in small doses to focus the mind. Obviously, there is no direct cultural translation here. There never is. But as we have seen, indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to scepticism of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment, even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the process.59 No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in seventeenth-century North America. But it’s possible, perhaps, to imagine some future non-Eurocentric history where such a suggestion would not be treated as almost by definition outrageous and absurd.