The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe

摘要

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.