The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History by Siep Stuurman

Author:Siep Stuurman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, World, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Philosophy, Political
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

In the opening pages of the Histoire des deux Indes, commerce is indeed extolled as the harbinger of worldwide peace and prosperity, but Raynal knew quite well that European merchants seldom hesitated to use armed force when it served their interests. Referring to the Portuguese sailors in the Indian Ocean, Raynal depicts them as “European barbarians” and “swarms of hungry and cruel vultures” for whom all means were acceptable to satisfy their boundless greed.273 Elsewhere, he defines them as “a new kind of nomadic savages” cut loose from the moorings of civilization and morality.274 Like other critics, such as Edmund Burke, Raynal seems to fear a process of de-civilization that will sooner or later infest Europe itself.275

The difficulty of the science of commerce, Raynal explains, does not spring from its complexity but from the avidity of those who conduct it.276 The princes of this world are no better: by their “almost modern envy” they seek to turn the flows of goods and money to their advantage, engendering “a secret conspiracy to ruin all of them.” Wars of commerce, Raynal contends, is an unnatural term.277 Sadly, recent history seemed to suggest otherwise: “All the coasts and all the seas drenched in blood and covered by cadavers; the thunderstorm of war raging from one pole to the other, across Africa, Asia & America, on the Ocean that separates us from the New World, on the vast expanse of the Pacific: that is what we have seen in the last two wars.”278 Virtually all of Raynal’s detailed narratives of European commercial practices contradict the celebratory nostrums found in his generalizing statements. Fair trade is his ideal, but he condemns the slave trade, monopolies, and piracy.279 Together, those three forms of “odious” commerce probably accounted for the greater part of European overseas trade.

How should we read Raynal? Jonathan Israel considers the Histoire des deux Indes a “project of world revolution” with an intellectual and political impact on both sides of the Atlantic, a book that “summoned the world’s oppressed to rise against their rulers in the name of liberty.” Yet he also underlines that Raynal and Diderot depict the prospects of humanity “in a sombre light.” Surveying the globe, they behold a scene of “degradation, superstition, ignorance, and tyranny,” not only among autocrats and priests, or among the colonists and missionaries, but also among the common people who everywhere seemed to oscillate between the indolence of servility and the passions of resentment and rebellion that “usually lead nowhere.” Even so, Raynal, Diderot, and d’Holbach clung to the vision of one universal society including all the inhabitants of the world. Likewise, Israel posits, they were convinced “that true morality is one and must be identical ‘pour tous les habitants de notre globe.’”280 It would seem, then, that Diderot and Raynal embraced a planetary vision of common humanity and equality but despaired of the ability of princes and common people alike to act upon this lofty ideal, let alone to realize it.

In Israel’s argument, the Histoire des deux Indes appears as a treatise of political philosophy rather than a work of history.

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