The imagined empire: Balloon enlightenments in revolutionary Europe by Mi Gyung Kim (review)

• Main Author: DE OLIVEIRA, Patrick Luiz Sullivan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: ballooning; Enlightenment; French Revolution; public sphere; history of technology; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3456
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The Imagined Empire is a welcome addition to histories of early ballooning that have flourished in the past decade. Drawing from a rich theoretical toolbox, Kim ambitiously "aims at an archaeology of mass silence, a genealogy of the mass public, and a material geography of European Enlightenment to uncover how the flying machine—both imagined and real—stirred utopian visions and patriotic sentiments in revolutionary Europe" (p. 8). In doing so, she presents a survey of early European ascents, a dense analysis of the indeterminacy of scientific artifacts, and something that could cheekily be called the aerostatic origins of the French Revolution.