Clothing the Enlightened Body: European Dress in India during the Age of Reason

During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment notions of human difference 

were being shaped by Europe’s commercial and military encounters with the 

wider world. These encounters forced Europeans to define the boundaries of 

their own identity, based on a wide range of traits observable in other peoples. 

Eighteenth-century notions of race, or human difference as it was termed at 

the time, were not based on fixed hereditary attributes such as blood and 

genetics, but on a complex interplay between physical, moral, and cultural 

criteria.