Raynal's History of the Two Indies and Anti-Colonial Critique

One of the most widely read books of the late Enlightenment was the Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies, published under the name of the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal in 1770. A multi-volume history of European colonization in Asia, Africa and the Americas, it was written collaboratively, with Denis Diderot contributing many of its most passionate passages, especially in the 1780 edition.

The book condemned the cruelty of conquest, the slave trade and colonial exploitation, and one famous passage predicted that a great leader would arise to lead enslaved people to freedom and vengeance. The French authorities banned it, the Church placed it on the Index, and in 1781 the Parlement of Paris ordered it burned, forcing Raynal into exile. Yet the work also defended commerce and contained contradictions, sometimes proposing gradual reform rather than immediate abolition.

It was read across the Atlantic world, including, according to later accounts, by Toussaint Louverture.