Histoire philosophique et politique desétablissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes:édition critique, I: Livres I–V (review)

Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes is one of the most important works of the French Enlightenment. It represented an effort similar to that of the Encyclopédie but with an even more markedly philosophical and militant slant, incorporating a wide range of topics and contributors, most prominent among them Diderot, whose influence became more striking in the later editions. A fount of information as well as a manual of later eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosophy, the multi-volume work relays the entire history of modern European exploration, conquest, and colonization in both Asia and the Americas, covering topics as diverse as politics, economics, geography, botany, and ethics. This enormous history, first published in 1770, massively increased in size over the course of the three versions published during Raynal’s lifetime and saw the addition of several tables and maps, now beautifully reproduced in facsimile as an added volume to this new edition. An instant bestseller with over fifty re-editions in the first twenty years after its initial publication, dozens of translations into various languages, and a truly global circulation, the Histoire des deux Indes played a crucial role in anti-slavery campaigning and the ideology of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, outside a fairly narrow circle of specialists, it is not frequently taught or commented upon, most probably because of the lack of any reliable scholarly edition. Such an edition is now being produced. A prestigious international team of editors and advisers headed by Anthony Strugnell is in the process of publishing the first complete edition in over 180 years. This undertaking represents a huge challenge, not only because of the sheer volume of writing (the projected edition will number five outsized volumes of several hundred pages each), the vast range of topics, and the difficult effort of tracing unnamed sources and contributors, but also owing to the difficulty of combining three very different versions of the texts in the shape of the 1770, 1774, and 1780 editions. The latter was chosen as the base text, with reference made to the earlier versions as well as to the posthumous 1820 edition. Variants are given at the back, together with a list of Diderot’s contributions. Each book of the volume is annotated and introduced by a different editor, providing helpful insights for both specialists and general public. The variants are one of the few aspects of the edition open to criticism, with several variants indicated in the running text of the first volume not being correctly contained in the appendix (see, for instance, III,17 on pp. 286 and 670, and, for a more serious confusion, V,35 on pp. 579–81 and 746–47). However, given the enormity of the enterprise, the beauty of the present edition, and its fairly competitive price, this should not weigh heavily. Instead, the team ought to be congratulated on their efforts, which, hopefully, will bring the Histoire des deux Indes back to centre stage; there it can provide much fascinating material for students and scholars of numerous disciplines, among which literature, history, and philosophy are the most obvious beneficiaries.