Sylvana Tomaselli (St John’s College, University of
Cambridge, UK)
Stadial history and Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes
Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713-1796)
Raynal’s contemporaries were quick to note the mess that hisHistoire Philosophique undeniably is. Amongst them, the anonymous author of the Analyse de l’Histoire Philosophique et Politique des établissemens et du commerces des Européens dans les deux Indes (1775) chose not to address either the historical or political parts of the work, noting that these consisted of little more than banal generalisations and relatively few blunders for him to correct. Indeed, what history and political analysis the work contained amounted to little more than padding around Raynal and his collaborators’s true interest, namely, philosophy by which the anonymous author understood an examination of nature, freedom and morality, but which in the Histoire Philosophique was principally placed in the service of irreligion. By contrast, the editor of the Maspero edition, Yves Benot, takes the true subject of the work and thus Raynal’s principal concern to be ‘le commerce, l’enrichissement par le commerce’.
Though it is undeniable that commerce is a central character in the Histoire Philosophique, it is by no means clear that it the central concern. Amongst other contenders for this position is the hierarchy of nations and their comparative advantages and respective contributions to human culture. Deployed within this running comparison is a more or less implicit history of human emotions or, more accurately perhaps, an exercise in the history of emotions as well as vice and virtue. Untwining some of this history is the subject of my paper.
