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  • Raynal's 'Histoire des deux Indes': Colonialism, Networks and Global Exchange ed. by Cecil Courtney, Jenny Mander
  • Kate Marsh
Raynal's 'Histoire des deux Indes': Colonialism, Networks and Global Exchange. Edited by Cecil Courtney and Jenny Mander. (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2015:10.) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015. xii + 349 pp., ill.

In a provocative essay written in 1989, Peter Hulme argued that one of the most important consequences of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) was showing that 'the principal motifs and tropes of […] European cultural tradition, far from being self-generated, were the product of constant, intricate, but mostly unacknowledged traffic with the non-European world' ('Subversive Archipelagos: Colonial Discourse and the Break-up of Continental Theory/Dipositio/n, 14 (1989), 1–23 (p. 3)). It is this idea of the previously unacknowledged impact of the non-European world on Europe that has galvanized the 'global turn' in historical studies generally and, more recently, in the historiography of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Given that Raynal's eighteenth-century bestseller was, as the editors claim in their comprehensive Introduction, 'arguably the first example of global history' (pp. 7–8), this volume of twenty essays constitutes a timely intervention into debates about global history, which, where studies of the eighteenth century are concerned, have been characterized by a certain scepticism. Divided into three sections, the volume brings together text-based analyses of the [End Page 136] themes explored in the Histoire (for example, Stéphane Pujol's study of global exchange and human economic and anthropological interests, and Christian Donaths chapter on what the Histoire posits as legitimate' tactics for establishing colonies (p. 47)); essays making use of new archival material concerning the written, visual, and oral sources that informed RaynaFs work (notably chapters by Gilles Bancarel and by Kenta Ohji); and chapters interrogating Raynal's intellectual debts — for example, to contemporary economic theorists (Antonella Alimento on the influence of Vincent de Gournay's political thinking on the Histoire) and to Spanish historiography (Susanne Greilich's insightful chapter on the traces of Spanish historiography and the leyanda negra in Book 6 of the Histoire). The fil conducteur of the volume is the concept of the social network, both in terms of how Raynal's transnational network of correspondents informed the production and propagation of colonial knowledge, and in terms of how "these very same patterns of sociability are themselves the focus of sustained historical, philosophical and political reflection' (p. 6) in the work itself. How Raynal's carefully nurtured network of European and American correspondents and informers shaped the collective work to which he put his name has been the focus of much research since the mid-1990s, with influential work by Anthony Strugnell and by Gianluigi Goggi (in a special edition of SVEC 2003:07) illuminating both how the network contributed to the Histoire and how its reception in Europe and North America influenced, in turn, debates about colonialism. In this respect some of the essays, particularly in the third section, add to an already extensive body of scholarship. The real strength of the volume lies in two of its essays: those by Sylvana Tomaselli and Daniel Gordon. Considering the type of history produced by Raynal and the role that social interaction plays in the text, both authors elucidate the global economic, political, cultural, and textual exchanges that underpinned eighteenth-century intellectual sociability

Kate Marsh
University of Liverpool
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