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Hello, the Age of Enlightenment is the period around the 18th century, perhaps the long

18th century from, say, 1688 to 1715, when an inter-1815, when an intellectual movement committed to the reason in signs and opposed to the

superstition in religion embraced the greatest minds of Europe and America Descarteses, Montees, Montees,

Didero, Walter, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,

but where are the British thinkers?

Some historians in the past have claimed that the Enlightenment

passed these islands by, but in his exuberant

Enlightenment, Britain and the creation of the modern world, Roy Porter says the Enlightenment

was British first and that the modern world started here.

Roy Porter is professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Welcome Trust Center of University College London,

and he's with me now.

Also here to discuss whether the Enlightenment was British is Linda Collie, author of Britain's

forging a nation 1707 to 1837 and Professor of History at the London School of Economics

and Jeremy Black, author of 18th Century of Europe and Professor of History at Exeter University.

Roy Porter, let's start rather basically.

What does the term the Age of Enlightenment actually refer to?

I think it's a Europe-wide development and it was rather nicely summed up by the German

philosopher Emmanuel Kant in the 1780s when he said that Enlightenment was mankind's escape from his self-imposed tutelage.

In other words, man had somehow wrapped himself up in a mental straitjacket, and at long last was growing up bursting free, coming of age and

developing a sense of intellectual freedom was ceasing to be dependent upon

...