RAYNAL, Guillaume Thomas.

Best edition. Published at Geneva by Pellet in 1780 in two formats, the superior in quarto – as here – the other in ten volumes octavo, this is the definitive version of the text, including for the first time extensive contributions by Diderot and other philosophes.

The present 1780 Geneva edition 'is of special importance to the student of both Raynal and Denis Diderot, because of the number and interest of Diderot's contributions to what became (without acknowledgement) a very collaborative work . . . . Raynal, and those he enlisted to help him, produced a history of the post-medieval world as they saw it. Of the great technological breakthroughs which had ended the feudal and papal era, the compass and gunpowder had combined to generate a world-system held together by oceanic commerce in European hands. To Enlightened historians without exception – indeed by definition – the advent of a commerce-generating society in all parts of what they chose to term 'Europe' was the guarantee that neither ancient empire, medieval empire and papacy, nor early modern universal monarchy and religious warfare, would return to plague them, and they knew that oceanic commerce and European empire in other continents were part of their modern world. The Histoire des deux Indes is based on this vision, and therefore claims attention as one of the first attempts to write history as that of a world-system (Pocock, Barbarism and religion IV pp. 229–33).