Raynal’s ‘Histoire des deux Indes’: Colonial Writing, Cultural Exchange and Social Networks in the Age of the Enlightenment

The year 2010 will see the publication of Volume I of a the first complete modern critical edition of the abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes (Ferney-Voltaire: CIEDS). The conference will celebrate this landmark publication, by exploring Raynal's text and its multiple contexts, assembling scholars of colonial history, Enlightenment studies, the history of ideas, literary history and book history.

The nineteen books of the Histoire, which chart a philosophical and political history of European colonial trade and settlements, were hugely influential.  Translated into many other European languages, they helped popularise and shape anti-colonial and abolitionist discourse even while they served to inform colonial administrators and to reflect on intra-European rivalries.  Substantially revised and augmented over a period of ten years, Raynal’s project was a vast undertaking in which he drew on multiple resources, placing the Histoire at the centre of a complex and extensive network of writers, politicians, administrators, scientists and other thinkers on the one hand, and, on the other, at the confluence of countless texts concerning the history of European colonies and travel writing, written over several centuries in different times and spaces, and from often very different professional and ideological positions.

Focussing in particular on the role played by social networks, this conference seeks to explore Raynal's Histoire within the multiple circuits of communication that simultaneously shape the 'global eighteenth century', its modes of sociability and its literature. Alongside papers that shed new light on Raynal's networks of living informants, his exploitation of printed sources, and his collaborators, the conference programme will comprise papers that consider these interactions in relation to other patterns of Enlightenment sociability and literary/artistic collaboration, and in relation to the broader processes of intellectual and cultural transfer within France, between France and other European nations, and between Europe and its colonies. It will also include papers that address the diffusion of Raynal's text, its networks of readers, and the ways in which its material circulation lead to culturally-specific receptions. Space will also be given to papers that reflect on the dynamics of social networks and knowledge transfer from a more theoretical point of view.

NB. CRASSH is not able to help with the booking of accommodation.