ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the eight eenth century, there was no place more dissim ilar to a classical garden-château in France than the Royal Exchange in London. At first glance, the two places are so dissim ilar that it makes no sense to compare them or contrast them. One is a building type making up an entire archipelago in the French coun tryside, the other a unique place in London, the capital of England. Yet if we juxta pose them, we see on a more ab stract level two distinct approaches to globalization and regionalism, two approaches to organ izing the Western world at that time. The garden-châteaux across the French territory, including Versailles, were designed top-down as versions of a uni ver sal model, as classical closed worlds within the world, suppressing regional par ticu larities. The English Exchange, as de scribed by Joseph Addison, a neophyte politician, playwright, and essayist,1 was an emergent, free, open ‘Assembly of Countrymen and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind’, a ‘Metropolis’, and ‘a kind of Emporium’ for the ‘whole Earth’, a ‘great Council’ where ‘all con sider able Nations have their Representatives’ and people ‘divided from one another by Seas and Oceans, or live on the different Extremities of a Continent’, keeping their par ticu lar regional identity, come together. As opposed to the orderliness, the formal exclusiveness, and ‘mathem atical hap pi ness’ of the French landscape, to quote Orsenna once more, inside the Exchange one could ‘see a Subject of the Great Mogul entering into a League with one of the Czar of Muscovy’, ‘distinguished by their different Walks and different Languages’. ‘Sometimes’, Addison con tinued, ‘I am jostled among a Body of Armenians; sometimes I am lost in a Crowd of Jews; and sometimes make one in a Groupe of Dutchmen’, to the degree that ‘[I think that] I am a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times; or rather fancy my self like the old Philosopher, who upon being asked what Countryman he was, replied, That he was a Citizen of the World.’ Welcoming global diversity, Addison adds:
Nature seems to have taken a par ticu lar Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind, that the
Natives of the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependence upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest.
