The intellectual ferment was transnational

From The Portable Enlightenment Reader by Isaac Kramnick.

The Enlightenment was an international movement that included French, English, Scottish, American, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Russian schools. Voltaire and Montesquieu visited England and wrote extensively about its institutions. Franklin and Jefferson visited England and France and were well connected with writers in both countries. The intellectual ferment was transnational. John Adams wrote his Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America in response to criticism from the philosophe Turgot, and Smith’s Wealth of Nations was translated into French by Condorcet. Mozart’s operas as Enlightenment icons epitomize the internationalism of the movement as well. The Austrian composer used Figaro, a literary invention of the Frenchman Beaumarchais, who, in addition to writing Le mariage de Figaro in 1778, had been involved in secret French munitions deals to help the revolutionary Americans. Beaumarchais’s play was immediately translated into English by Thomas Holcroft, Enlightenment novelist and close friend of Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin. Mozart’s librettist for Figaro, Lorenzo da Ponte, was an Italian who lived in London in the 1790s and became, finally, a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University in New York City.

 What a time.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.