— Luis Ramos
What if we were to view the Enlightenment less as an intrinsically Western idea and more as a new approach to knowledge prompted by a prolonged period of European exploration and colonial expansion? Drawing from the recent work of scholars who have sought to re-examine the eighteenth-century from a colonial, transatlantic or feminist perspective, I seek to demonstrate why the age of reason matters for a historically informed understanding of global studies. Yet rather than offer an overview of critical currents within the field, I will center my revalorization of the Enlightenment on a work that embodies many of its inherent tensions and contradictions. Offering a historical overview of Europe’s colonial encounter and commercial relations with Asia and the Americas from the sixteenth- to the eighteenth-century, Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes represents a number of challenges and opportunities for scholars interested in rethinking the Enlightenment beyond a conventional North Atlantic framework. On the one hand, by characterizing the violent incursions of European explorers in the New World as a violation of international law, Raynal reveals an anti-imperialist strain in Enlightenment thought. On the other, by propagating a theory about the New World’s physical and moral degeneracy, he creates an image of Amerindian societies as inhabiting an earlier state of natural and cultural development. Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes thus offers conflicting images of the New World, simultaneously signaling a high point and a dark undercurrent in Enlightenment thought. However, rather than emphasize one component of his work over the other, my aim here will be to demonstrate how the critical controversies that it generated in Europe and the Americas might contribute to a greater understanding of the cultures of Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.