Between Two Empires. Histoire des deux Indes And Modern Colonialism

Abstract

The article critically analyses the late eighteenth century process of crisis and transformation of the concept of empire. By considering Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and the Enlightenment’s critique of the different imperial models, Pandolfi reconstructs the transit from classic colonialism – built around the relations between settlers, savages and slaves – to another phase characterized by the indirect exploitation of the labour force. The text underlines the ambivalence of Enlightenment towards the question of the empire by demonstrating how Raynal’s work reflects the constitutive tension of the second half of the 1700s. Therefore, through Diderot’s analysis, the author demonstrates how the moral advancement of humanity is the product of a constant interaction between the colonial rhetoric of commerce and those revolutions, which, – in different moments and places – have crossed the colonial space.