The Importance of Being Learned: George Sale's Universal History

The formation of the ethics and practices of Western historical scholarship owes much to universal history – an ungainly, yet highly flexible genre. Those who wrote universal histories had to choose between competing chronologies; they needed to ascertain the exact geographic location for Biblical events, and to fix the meaning of key concepts and places in a bewildering variety of languages. Because universal history covered all peoples, all lands, and all centuries since the beginning of the world, many of the ancillary disciplines of modern Western history - archaeology, geography, philology, and chronology - developed out of attempts to create the most comprehensive ‘universal history’ for each age. The deployment of a biblical narrative linking all the peoples of the world to each other and to one Christian God was an immensely useful and enduring framework for understanding the distant past. While this sacred framework for universal history persisted well past the age of Enlightenment, its form and meaning varied considerably.

My paper will focus on George Sale’s contribution to the English Universal History (London, 1736-1744), a commercial and collaborative enterprise that swelled to sixty-six volumes by 1768. My reading of Sale’s work will discuss the way in which scholarly practices (and the ideal of erudition itself) dovetailed with specific narratives in universal history. Sale’s critical attitude toward evidence and his attention to the philological aspects of history was characteristic of an early Enlightenment vision of universal history.  But Sale’s ecumenical vision of universal history was lost when a new syndicate of booksellers proposed that the modern half of the same universal history would relate the rise and progress of Europe as the cultural, intellectual and political center of the world. This centering of universal history within Europe undermined the sacred cosmopolitanism that had guided Christian universal history for centuries.