On reading the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot: exploring tensions between European expansion and Enlightenment values

. Th is contribution will engage with a key question concerning the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot, viz. What can the ideas and the writings of these two philosophes still teach us today? In our discussion we will focus fi rst on Raynal’s Histoire and its 18 th -century Europeans, their commerce and colonies outside Europe, with special attention to what at the time was almost a paradigm case: the global maritime merchant empire of the Dutch. Secondly, we will consider what Diderot’s many contributions have added to the Histoire ’s power and impact, especially his critique of European colonial, commercial and civilisational endeavour around the world. At the time, as Diderot and Raynal gave voice to the discontents arising from the ongoing global expansion of Europe, their Histoire – as Jonathan Israel has shown in his magnum opus – became a major vehicle for the dissemination of their Radical Enlightenment. Th e question that will concern us here is the one posed by Anthony Pagden: What relevance do those radical ideas still have in our postcolonial and glo-balised world of today, where the former colonial empires and their peoples are today writing back themselves, clamouring to be heard?


INTRODUCTION
Why does the Enlightenment still matter?, asks Anthony Pagden 1 . To fi nd an answer to this question, we will examine one book in particular, which stands out within the Enlightenment's critical discussion of European colonial and commercial expansion. It is the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1780), produced under the direction of Abbé Raynal and with the help of Diderot (and many others), which straight away -so Robert Darnton tells us -became one of the forbidden bestsellers of the French Enlightenment. As the Nantes bookseller Barre explains in his letter of 15 September 1781:

Reinier Salverda
The public has received this work with enthusiasm. The author has genius, true knowledge, and an honest heart. He paints things in vivid colors, and in reading him, you feel your heart has been set on fire. He has torn away a great deal of the fatal blindfold that covers the eyes of the human race and prevents it from seeing the truth 2 .
It was a massive work, a world compendium of all overseas colonies established by European nations since 1492: first their commerce and trade, then their history, nature, produce, people and cultures, together with many critical discussions, from a philosophical and political point of view, of this European expansion, its virtues and its discontents 3 . With Raynal's name on the title page and his engraved portrait on its frontispiece, this bestseller, presenting as it did many different voices within Enlightenment debate, became the colonial complement to Diderot's Encyclopédie (1751-1772). A vast book, covering all European colonies and trading posts anywhere: the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, the French, the Danish, the Swedes, the Flemish, the Russians. Translated into many languages, the Histoire became a major vehicle for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas 4 , and was «one of the period's most important texts» 5 . Brown (2010). The final volume IV is due out in 2022. For this new edition we will use the abbreviation «Raynal, HDI»; the original 1780 edition will be referred to as «Histoire». Since the discovery of the Fonds Vandeul by Herbert Dieckmann and his publication of its Inventaire (Droz, Genève 1951) many scholars have been studying Diderot's contributions to Raynal's opus magnum; from 1991 onwards there has been an important series of international Raynal conferences; see: G. Goggi, s.v. «Histoire des deux Indes», in Dictionnaire de Diderot In her Panorama of the Enlightenment (2003) 6 , Dorinda Outram tells us how Raynal's Histoire offers lots of important information, especially on the dilemma of slavery; on the many negative things (slaughter, syphilis, expropriation of land and mineral wealth) which Europeans brought to America; on the colonial produce from the Caribbean, listed in Table [19] in book 14 -sugar, rum, coffee, cocoa, cotton, piment, ginger, indigo and tropical wood -generated by slave labour, imported into Great Britain and worth some 93 million pounds annually; and on the painful debates and ambivalent attitudes amongst Europeans concerning slavery and the slave trade -which were seen as unjustifiable, certainly, but also as necessary; and not to be abolished any time soon, for fear of commercial loss, disorder and violence in the colonies, unless the black slaves were first civilised and Christianised before they might be liberated, eventually.
Actually, as Joel Mokyr observed in 2009: «Within the Enlightenment paradigm, many ambiguities remained unresolved» 7 . Also, the Histoire has not nearly remained as well-known as the Encyclopédie. For a very long time it was almost totally forgotten. It is not mentioned in Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce, Civilization and Capitalism, 15 th -18 th Century (1982) 8 , which only features its opponents in economics, such as Adam Smith and French Physiocrats like Quesnay and Turgot. And in Le Livre noir du colonialisme (2003), Raynal's Histoire hardly features and is sharply dismissed for its incoherence and paradoxes on colonial matters by Marcel Merle, who prefers the rigour and directness of Rousseau in his Contrat social 9 .
In recent years, however, this has changed significantly, and today Raynal's work is getting a lot more scholarly attention internationally, most emphatically in Jonathan Israel's multi-volume work on the Radical Enlightenment (4 vols, 2001-2019) 10 -a vast and com-87 On reading the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot plex project of historical and philosophical reconstruction, running from the 1660s to the early part of the 19 th century, and ending in the split between radicals socialists. Israel's groundbreaking reconstruction of the Radical Enlightenment throws new light on the key role which Raynal's Histoire has played within it -a role which goes far beyond colonial commerce and economics, into critical discussions of politics, morality, and grand themes such as slavery and enlightened despotism 11 .
Against this background we will here be reading the Histoire to find out what it can tell us about colonial contact and interaction between Europeans and Non-Europeans. While the Histoire's discussions cover a quite multi-faceted international Enlightenment, we will here focus in particular, first, on the global merchant empire of the Dutch. Then secondly, we will take a closer look at the Histoire's authors, exploring how the different contributions by Raynal and Diderot shaped their critique of European colonial, commercial and cultural/civilisational endeavour all around the world, by addressing issues of counterpoint within the Enlightenment, as these emerged from voices both inside and outside Europe. Here the question is: What can Raynal and Diderot still teach us today? And as we proceed, we may wonder: Will our common humanity and the dream of a better world turn out, once again, to be just an Utopia, or is the struggle for radical enlightenment values today as crucial for mankind as it was in the 18 th century? In the nineteen books that follow, the Histoire goes on to present a wide-ranging critical-comparative examination of that European expansion -starting from the European discovery of the lands beyond the sea, discussing an immense range of contacts with the peoples living there -their customs, traditions, beliefs and history, their morality, laws and wars, their government, women, slaves, agriculture, colonial produce and taxation, through to their achievements in arts and philosophy, as well as their commerce, money and sources of wealth. The crucial book 19 offers a wide-ranging, systematiccomparative and analytical discussion of the vital features of all those empires. By the end of his vast survey, the author -now clearly a sadder and wiser man -takes his leave with a rather more humble wish for a better future for mankind, in a world where our only hope appears to be for 'philosophy' and the 'civilised nations' to give the 'savages' out there something better than the vice and oppression they have had until then from us Europeans: were written by Diderot? Yes, and the point is not only that they were, but that today we have practically all the evidence that this is so 15 . The Histoire, certainly the third edition of 1780, was a project of them both -two philosophes, both leading public intellectuals, first class writers, well-connected in society through the Salons they attended, and protected by enlightened government officials of the Ancien Régime, such as Malesherbes and Sartine. Both born in 1713, they had known each other in Paris at least since the early 1750s as freethinking members of the Enlightenment, engaged in critical discussion while looking for opportunities to work, to write and earn money. Decades before the Revolution, they were already well-established bourgeois, in the days when a merchant with philosophical pretensions would be an easy target for aristocratic ridicule on stage, as in Sedaine's play, Le Philosophe sans le sçavoir (1765) 16 . Their project was to gather information on commerce and many other things, to present and discuss before the emerging opinion publique. What was going on in the real world -that was the subject they studied, from China and Japan through the Orient on to North-Africa; and from South-Africa and the Cape on to Brazil, the Caribbean and North-America. Their approach was to start from empirical and historical fact finding, using questionnaires, correspondence and printed sources so as to get reliable first-hand data from informants with direct overseas experience; and moving on that basis to systematic-comparative description, together with critical philosophical and political reflection and moral discussion of those European colonies from the viewpoint of humanity and justice.

The Dutch empire in Raynal's Histoire
Coming now to the Dutch colonial and merchant empire in the Histoire, we will pursue this -like Raynal -as a special case of the European expansion. On this empire, first established in 1602, with its monopoly on colonial trade in Asia and elsewhere 17 , Raynal has many interesting things to say regarding its trading monopolies and global networks.
Right at the beginning, he refers to the seagoing Phoenician traders of ancient times -«les premiers négociants dont l'histoire ait conservé le souvenir» 18 , living on a small stretch of land along the Mediterranean seacoast of the Lebanon. Discussion continues in chapter VI of book 19, on the seagoing Europeans of the modern age, beginning with the Portuguese and the Spanish, who conquered and plundered the Two Indies. Thereafter, it was the newly independent Dutch Republic which saw the real opportunity for global commerce, and grasped it -starting, like the Phoenicians, from their unpromising small strip of land along the seaby taking to the oceans, for liberty and for trade. They did so with great success, establishing trading posts and forts all round the world: in Batavia on Java; on Ambon, Banda and Ternate in the Moluccas; Malacca in Malaysia; Deshima in Japan; Masulipatnam and Coromandel in India; Djeddah and Mocca in Arabia; Cape Town and Elmina in Africa; then Curaçao, Paramaribo and Nieuw Amsterdam in the Americas 19 . As a result, Holland soon became «un magasin immense» -not so much the Chinese of Europe (as the Dutch were often called), but actually the Phoenicians of the Modern Age.
The Phoenician analogy applied also to the dealings of the Dutch with the Japanese, who in Raynal's typology of nations emerged as their very opposite, viz. the Spartans of the Modern Age: isolated, fierce and despotic, closed off as they were from the world's commerce and from civilised intercourse with other nations -i.e. the opposite of the Dutch as a seagoing, trading and freedom-loving nation. Of the two, Raynal said: «Par le commerce, on est au moins citoyen peut-être, mais on devient plus homme; & le Japonais est devenu tigre sous la verge de ses tyrans» 20 . In Raynal's view, the Dutch empire stood out as a prime example -if not the paradigm case -of the Histoire's central theme and interest, which was «le commerce!» 21 . Other Europeans at the time took a far more critical view of the Dutch, whether in Japan or elsewhere. But Raynal saw right: the «esprit de commerce [...] étoit nécessaire aux Japonais», and from 1600 to 1900, through the Dutch trading post in Deshima, the Japanese acquired many European goods -weapons, clocks, paintings, scientific works, dictionaries and encyclopedias -from the Dutch as purveyors of western culture and civilisation 22  This long Dutch tradition in international trade was sustained by their ideal of the Mercator sapiens, the learned merchant, with his skillful combination of trade, science, learning, innovation and enterprise -set out as a program in 1632, at the opening of the Amsterdam Athenaeum by Professor Caspar Barlaeus; and practised too, for example by the Amsterdam burgomaster, polymath, international merchant and Dutch East India Company (VOC) director, Nicolaes Witsen early in the 18 th century. From Holland -probably via Le Parfait Négociant (1675) by Jacques Savary 23 -this notion made its way into Raynal's Histoire as «le génie du négociant» 24 -with very high praise for the manifold talents a merchant will need, and an extensive discussion of the principles, maxims, do's and don'ts of the modern science that is le commerce. Given that the Histoire's central theme is trade and commerce, we are here at the very heart of Raynal's great work; in his view, good commerce «devient en quelque sorte le moteur du monde», while at the same time Raynal also discusses the real-life abuse, injustice and devastation caused by illiberal monopolies and wars of commerce 25 , concluding that this sorry state of affairs will require a veritable revolution before we can hope to establish liberty and universal peace.
Further trade information on the Dutch colonies can be found not only in books 2 and 12 but throughout the Histoire of 1780. The many Dutch names of capes, straights, forts and trading posts in its Atlas by Rigobert Bonne 26 testify how «commercially and still 23  Covering long periods -from 1605 to 1777 -they detail the VOC capital, its shares, partners, trading rates and dividends, which averaged 21.5% per year on the capital (over 172 years); with a cumulative total dividend paid out over that period of 3,650 percent on the original capital -altogether, clearly a stupendously profitable investment. In stark contrast, the Histoire does not have a Table on the many slaves bought, sold and shipped by the VOC, though Raynal's text documents that Cape Town had between 40 to 50,000 slaves against some 15,000 Europeans; Surinam had 60,000 slaves against 2,880 Europeans; the Dutch Caribbean islands had more than 11,500 slaves under 6,000 Europeans; and Batavia had 150,000 slaves plus very many uncounted domestic servants, against some 10,000 whites 28 .
When the Histoire was translated into Dutch, people bought and read it, but public opinion in the Republic kept its distance and reserve 29 . Most people were interested only in useful trade information, and this need was catered for in the popular one-volume Dutch edition, Tafreel  a quote on its cover from Raynal's praise for 'le négociant' 31 . The Histoire's commercial views of free trade and profits were rather more welcome in Holland than Raynal's incisive critique of the duplicity of the Dutch, who at home had fought themselves free from the Spanish, while they brought nothing but injustice, greed and violence to the lands they subjugated overseas 32 .
Here, the comparative approach taken in the Histoire enables us to identify two interestingly different national trajectories during the Enlightenment: In France, after 1789, the Revolution gave the Jews civil rights; in 1794 followed by freedom for the Black slaves. In the Netherlands, in contrast, after the Batavian Revolution of 1795, civil rights followed for the Jews in 1796, and in 1797 two Amsterdam Jews became the first elected Jewish Parliamentary representatives anywhere in the world, one of whom was a coffee trader who had made his fortune in Surinam. But when in 1798 the Batavian Republic adopted its first, democratic Constitution, it was decided after long deliberation to leave out the tangled matter of slavery -in line with the US Constitution, but not the French 33 . to some unspecified moment in the future, and did not develop a clear, coherent and reasonable transition programme leading towards abolition 34 . On this issue he was clearly much more cautious and moderate than Diderot or Rousseau, and also than Voltaire, who in his Candide (1759) was scathing in his critique of the Dutch in Surinam and their treatment of slaves. Still, Raynal's sharp moral criticisms and his passionate outcry over European crimes against humanity -e.g. the English famine in Bengal in 1769, and the great massacre by Pizarro in Peru 35 -rightly earned him the title of «Défenseur de l'Humanité, de la Verité, de la Liberté», engraved on the monument on the frontispiece of his Histoire (1780) 36 .

Glory and demise of Raynal
This glowing epithet came from his friend Eliza Draper -making her literally the first woman who has something to say in the Histoire. The Eloge à Eliza Draper -in fact written by Diderot -presents a moving portrait in words of Eliza 37 , who was born in India and had earlier been the Eliza of Lawrence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1767). Raynal, equally smitten with her, and having read her letters from India, hoped she would bless his pen with her grace and her virtue. In reply to her dying wish, that History, Fame and Genius will incite him always to be the «Defender of Humanity, of Truth and of Liberty», he swears by heaven that he will never write even one line in which she may not recognise her friend. Underlining this monumental tribute, both her epithet and his oath are printed in capitals in the Histoire 38 .
In stark contrast, Diderot's fragments were dismissed as «déclamations» by Pierre-Victor Malouet, who -as an 34  Oratorien from the Collège de Juilly, the French-taught school of Colbert and Montesquieu -may well have had different stylistic preferences than Raynal and Diderot, both Jesuit-educated. It may also be, that Malouet used «déclamations» as in Sedaine's play, as an aristocratic ridicule against pretentious philosophes. Be that as it may, we do know how Malouet played a crucial role, both as a colonial expert and a co-director of the Histoire within the Ministère de la Marine (which included the colonies), exerting considerable influence over its political strategy 39 . As co-author of book 13 of the Histoire, Malouet got into a dispute over the matter of slavery -which he considered, like Adam Smith, as 'necessary' -against Diderot, who in book 11 argued that there was no argument that could ever justify a terrible and inhumane business like slavery 40 . We know, furthermore, that Raynal, who in 1781 was banished from France, upon his return in 1784 was ordered to live in Toulon and Marseille, with his close friend Malouet. It was under Raynal's name that Malouet in 1785 published his own pro-slavery book about Saint-Domingue, while in 1788 he launched a frontal attack on Condorcet, the progressive philosophe and Ami des Noirs, over his Réflexions sur l'esclavage des nègres -a clash, which escalated into a clear separation of minds over slavery between moderates and radicals within the Enlightenment 41 . Malouet was a constant and forceful presence in these various exchanges. In 1792, as we now know in detail from Lüsebrink 42 , he was involved in events, when he took an active part, first, in helping to produce the Address to the National Assembly in Paris, in which Raynal revoked, under pressure from Malouet, the revolutionary ideas in his Histoire. Then next, it was Malouet who ensured that this text was read out in the National Assembly on 31 May 1791, in the middle of the Revolution -an event which caused a major political upheaval, 39  ripped apart the revolutionary camp, severely dented Raynal's great reputation, while Diderot's political ideas in the Histoire suffered a serious setback. Malouet, meanwhile, throughout the Napoleonic era and into the Restoration "when he became Minister of the Navy and the Colonies", remained a hardline defender of colonialism and slavery and did everything to defeat the radical ideas in Raynal's Histoire 43 .

In Search of Liberty
Following in the footsteps of Montesquieu, the philosophes advocated new ideas, such as the freedom of thought and expression, the freedom of the press and the free exchange of ideas -and, as they proceeded, also the freedom of trade and commerce, and the freedom from slavery and exploitation. It was Diderot who, as a radical humanitarian, thought these new notions through to their logical political consequence, in particular in his many contributions to the third edition of Raynal's Histoire (1780). From Diderot's core notion of human freedom and dignity there is a direct line to his critique of monopolistic economics, colonial exploitation and slavery, of monarchical government, tyranny and censorship, and of the Church's stranglehold over the beliefs and ideas which people were allowed to have. It is for these reasons, and in particular -as reported in the Dutch Republic in the Middelburgsche Courant of 12 June 1781 -for its «godless, blasphemous and seditious» character, that the third edition of Raynal's Histoire was officially forbidden by the Parliament of Paris in June 1781 and sentenced to be burnt by the public hangman 45 .
Those were heady days under the Ancien Régime in France, as Claude Manceron tells us in Les Hommes de la Liberté 46  brought out anonymously by Raynal, and from the second edition of 1774 Diderot became fully engaged with this project until its third edition of 1780. So let us see how Diderot went about this. In the fragments which he contributed -fully «20 percent» of the entire book 47 , i.e. well over 500 pages -, Diderot found an outlet for his political ideas, which he developed into a critical commentary on the European colonials who take centre stage here. Behind these fragments there is his core view of humans as social beings, from which follows a simple social rule of secular moral virtue: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. From this perspective, the Histoire holds up a critical mirror to the rest of the world. Well-read and well-travelled, Diderot cast his net wide, holding forth on a great many topics, ranging from his critique of Russian despots (including Catharine II) and his support for American independence and their right to revolt; through his outcry at the mass killing of Beavers in Canada and the devastating impact on nature Europeans were then already having everywhere; to his dire prophecy that in 300 years -that is, by 2080 -there will be no Indians left 48 .
In the process of writing these contributions, while developing his critique of European colonial, commercial and civilisational endeavour, we see Diderot becoming increasingly radical himself. Thanks to the immense philological detective work done by Diderot philologists, we can now read these fragments in the context of the Histoire within which they were first published and to which they belong. This will be the perspective from which we proceed 49 , when we now take a closer look at five key fragments by Diderot.
Our key here is the electrifying contrapuntal writing we encounter throughout Diderot's work, in his musical studies no less than his philosophical and literary work 50 . Instructive starting points have already become available, on writing in the margins of Diderot's oeuvre by Franck Cabane (2009), and on the dynamics of contrarieties and counterpoint in Diderot's writings by Walter Rex (1998) de Diderot, Champion, in the Histoire would merit a postcolonial 'contrapuntal analysis' à la Edward Said 52 . In this respect, note the pervasive dialogic character of Diderot's contributions, which range from Catechism-like presentations through fictional excursions to lively conversation pieces that hold up a critical mirror to his readers. Their orality is enhanced by a wide variety of forms of address, and by the many contradictory voices we get to hear in the Histoire -from concerned philosophers and expert advisers to the King, in passionate speeches, éloges, laments, warnings and prophecies, counter voices from women, from slaves, from sages all over the world, no less than from the narrator when he is speaking directly to us, his readers -all raising key questions of conscience for humankind to ponder and discuss. This is how Diderot was drawing up the balance sheet, le pour et le contre, on our European expansion and colonial commerce, and what this has brought us and taught us. It was -as Strugnell has pointed out 53 -to enlighten us and make us reflect on this immense global domain that Diderot, with all the literary, philosophical, rhetorical, critical and subversive samizdat writing skills at his command, came to develop his very own and totally new political discourse in the Histoire 54 .

The Chinese, what are they really like?
Our first Diderot Fragment here is his discussion of the Chinese in book 2 chapter XXI, entitled «État de la Chine, selon ses détracteurs» 55 . Diderot comes straight to the point, in direct opposition to the preceding panegyric in chapter XX by Raynal. Attacking the Sinophilia of Voltaire in his Essai sur les moeurs (1756) 56 , Diderot's critique of China and the Chinese was severe: their mandarins may be wise and enlightened, but only On reading the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot in name; one cannot get justice there; and they maintain their tyranny with clubs 57 . China to him actually was a wretched and almost barbaric country, overwhelmed by social ills and despotism. This angry, anti-despotic view contrasts strongly with Raynal's much more positive assessment. Diderot then continues with a point-bypoint rebuttal of many widely held idées reçues about the high culture, politeness and ancient wisdom of the Chinese, cutting down the admiring views of Voltaire and many Jesuits, who from about 1680 had played a major role in bringing knowledge about China to Europe 58 .
The contradiction within the Histoire between those two chapters reveals a growing political awareness on Diderot's part 59 . However, though sharply critical of the Chinese, he did not throw away what they did offer him: their secular moral sense, of Confucianist origin, so close to his own social and humanist views 60 . No, his disagreement was first of all with Raynal and Voltaire, and this he did bring out into the open. His comprehensive debunking of Chinese despotism put down a crucial challenge to Enlightened Europe -viz. how China might actually be enlightened from the West 61 . For the time being, however, he suspended judgement, laying before the opinion publique a proposal (at the end of chapter XXI) to send out a jury of disinterested and judicious Europeans, well-versed in Chinese language and literature, for a long stay in Peking, at court and in the provinces, to engage in free, critical conversations with Chinese of all possible backgrounds, in order to find out more about the real conditions obtaining in China. As an economic thinker and capitalist Smith was predominantly interested in the profitability of Dutch colonial trade, and not much in the Hottentots, whom he saw as «a race almost as barbarous, and quite as incapable of defending themselves, as the natives of America» 64 .

Hottentots, Hollanders and Humanity
As against this, Diderot's fragment on the Hottentots opens in a very different key, with a discussion of the bodies and customs of the Hottentots -the female genital skirt supposedly covering her vagina; the men having only one testicle 65 . Then, turning to his European readership, he asks: «Mais sont-ils heureux, me demanderez-vous?» 66 . The reply he gives himself is a strong warning to the Hottentots against the dangers and devastation which await them from the Dutch: The very different views of the Hottentots held by Diderot and Smith underline how far these two enlightened European colonial experts, who knew and read each other's works 68 , were apart: on the one hand, Smith, an outspoken champion of capitalist free trade and admirer of the moderate Montesquieu -and on the other, Diderot's deep moral compassion with the Hottentots, his prophetic tone and passionate words against the Hollanders, which mark him as the committed, radical humanitarian he was.

Women, oppression, freedom and charity
Thirdly, an impressive feature of the Histoire is the long line of female portraits, detailing what women's lives were like at the time. Throughout the Histoire, we find Diderot and Raynal regularly taking stock of the position of women and the religion-driven customs they are subject to: in India it is widow burning; in Arabia infibulation, jealousy and honour killings; in Europe, Catholics have the institution of celibacy, which Diderot regarded as against nature, reason, humanity and religion; North American Indian Native Tribes, on the other hand, who do not have the Christian idea of an indissoluble relation between man and wife, often accept the practice of divorce 69 ; then again, in Japan, under the Sinto religion, female sexual instincts are welcomed by their deities and may wisely be cultivated in the houses of courtesans 70 .
As Michèle Duchet has shown, these and other fragments in the Histoire brought the early beginnings of a global comparative anthropology of women and their  71 . From the enormous variety of their life experiences, a key theme emerges: that of female oppression and regimentation by men -analysed by Gayatri Spivak as «double colonization» 72 . In Guinée, women are totally subject to their men, and lead a deplorable life of domestic slavery 73 . In South-America, Orenoco-women relate how they kill their baby daughters so as to spare them the hell of slave life that is the fate of women. One of them, when reprimanded for this by a Jesuit, told him how her life was hell and how she wished she had been killed at birth by her mother and thus spared this suffering, which is a thousand times worse than death 74 . Even in such atrocious situations, though, we still encounter female agency -as also in Mexico: when Cortés was given a slave girl, who became Marina Malinche, his lover, interpreter and counsellor, she led the Conquistadors to victory 75 .
As we see, in the Histoire Eliza Draper was not the only woman to speak (or write). Polly Baker 76 was another. Hauled before the court in New England, she speaks out against the puritanism of her judges and their oppression of women, over fertility and sexual productivity. The tale of Polly Baker came into the world as a fictional anecdote by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, was then relayed to London and Paris, picked up by Raynal and recounted by him in a Salon, then developed by Diderot and published in the Histoire. Interestingly, Diderot then reworked it again in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, where he combined it with the address by the Old Man on Tahiti 77 , in the same prophetic style as the Hottentot address above, defending the way of life of his people against European men: «Weep, unhappy Tahitians! Weep -not for the going but for the coming of those wicked and ambitious men!». Thus, both in New England and on Tahiti, it would seem, there was a clear clash between natural female sexuality on the one hand, and on the other the On reading the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot religion-inspired male oppression and abuse of it -both highlighting the same point: European men, when they come to the colonies, will just impose their own barbaric norms and behaviour on people living there.
There are many other such countervoices throughout the Histoire, speaking out against the oppression and chains which those Europeans were bringing, driven on by their cramped and unnatural ideas, their murderous habits, their lust for power and loot. It is the Histoire which has lent those countervoices a pen and words while documenting their lives 78 . As if Raynal and Diderot were out to construct an alliance amongst those at the receiving end of European oppression, fellow human beings who were desperately looking for freedom from those colonising European men. True Freedom, that is -for women, and for people of a different colour, of a different culture and different religion.
In contrast, the scant attention paid to women in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations -just three pages 79is telling. The moral universes of Smith and Diderot appear to be on different planets. Indicative of the distance is the snapshot in Paris which the Histoire presents of the Necker family in their Salon, where Raynal and Diderot produced their Éloge de Madame Necker 80 , praising her for the Hospice de la Charité which she founded in 1778 and where patients received exemplary care, i.e. one patient to a bed (instead of many more, as was usual, and for far less money than in the existing Parisian hospitals). The Histoire gives her -as a Swiss immigrant in France, a decent citoyenne, not a fancy aristocrat -high praise for this charitable initiative, made possible with Protestant money from her husband, the colonial banker and «intendant-général des finances en France» 81 , Jacques Necker. Around him, Diderot and others such as Galiani, Forbonnais and Montaudouin, subscribed to a pragmatic and eclectic liberalism -defined as «ni mercantiliste, ni physiocrate» by the economic journalist Jacques Accarias de Serionne in his Journal de Commerce 82 . Jointly with Necker's daughter, Germaine (later Madame de Staël), Raynal and Diderot in their Histoire produced a short triptych on the Huguenots 83 , highlighting their great contribution to French trade, industry and economy, and their subsequent expulsion and cruel persecution by the King and the Church of France. Thus, from Madame Necker's Salon via her regular guests Raynal and Diderot and her daughter, this Huguenot connection ran straight into the Histoire. Contact, conversation and writing brought them together in a meeting of minds around shared moral concerns, in the hope that doing good and charitable actions will set an example. Here too, Diderot made his pitch for the poor: the hospitals must be improved; the poor and the sick deserve decent, humane treatment; what really matters is to improve the world. Inclusive like Anacharsis Cloots and long before our Médecins sans frontières, Diderot was calling out: «Citoyens de l'univers, unissez-vous tous à moi» 84 .

Freedom and Slavery
Our fourth fragment is taken from book 11 of the Histoire, especially chapter XXIV, where Diderot presents one of the hardest hitting of all his contributions. With its catechism-structure, this fragment offers a critical examination of all arguments to justify slavery, leading to Diderot's radical conclusion: There is no argument that can justify slavery, because liberty is a human being's basic and inalienable natural, civil and political right 85 . During the Revolution, this was to become Diderot's most read fragment (though more so by politicians than by abolitionists) 86 . However, as we saw, in book 13 of the Histoire it was Malouet who took on Diderot, claiming that, yes, slavery might be unjustifiable and an abomination -but alas, it is a necessity. In this respect, he followed the Wealth of Nations (1776). True, Adam Smith did mention the well-known emancipation of slaves by the Quakers in Philadelphia, but in the same breath he also recognised the necessity of using slaves for sugar production, even if this will raise production costs 87 . For Smith this wasn't really a problem, though, since the profits on sugar were higher anyway than in any other cultivation process -and so one could afford «the expence (sic) of slave cultivation». As he saw it, this was just a problem of cost, and that could be resolved by money. Some see this as Smith's economic argument against slavery 88 , but that is doubtful, as necessity and cheap availability will soon prevail to justify the use of slaves. Money, after all, will buy you anything, and the frontispiece of volume III of the Histoire just shows us how. On the beach of Barbados we see «un Anglais de la Barbade, vend sa Maitresse» (sic). This is the infamous story of the Englishman Inkle just after he'd been saved from death by the native Yarico, who also became his lover. There, just before his return to England, he sells her as a slave for a bag full of money. Ever since, the story of Yarico and Inkle 89 -a story of heartless greed and cruel betrayal first reported as long ago as 1657 -has been around, commemorating a disgraceful act, kept alive until today in a long tradition of music, stories and poetry -most recently the Yarico musical in 2015 in London, even a monument to her in Barbados 90 .
As for the core issue in book 11, what Diderot presented is a tightly argued reasoning leading to the conclusion that there is no argument that can justify slavery. Slavery is a truly monstrous institution which violates the first human right there is, viz. the right for anyone to exist and to have pleasure in life. This is the basic humanitarian position of Diderot's Radical Enlightenment -a passionately held, secular moral standpoint, expressed in prophetic tone and style -at a time when the whole idea of freedom for slaves was still 'chimérique'. Diderot  Thus, with their Histoire, the two jointly laid the radical groundwork which enabled the next generation of Amis des Noirs, foremost among them Condorcet and Grégoire, to get the abolition of slavery through the National Assembly in February 1794 94 .

«Hommes, vous êtes tous frères!»
Our fifth and final point is to do with what happened after Diderot passed away in 1784. That same year, in Berlin, Immanuel Kant published his answer to the question: Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), with crucial adhortations such as «Humans, dare to know!» and «Overcome your own limitations and prejudice, your self-imposed blind spots and the blinders you are wearing». No less impressive is the fully-fledged theory he developed of knowledge and knowledge production, based on his well-known idealisations and categories, which have been very influential in defining the crucial notion of cognitive subject in the Western tradition 95 . However, with respect to slaves, non-whites and women, Kant took exception, since in his view these could not possibly be part of the ideal cognitive subject.
This position, developed, intellectually underpinned and validated by Kant, has been attacked by Gayatri Spivak in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). Coming from the field of Subaltern Studies in India 96 , she took issue in particular with Kant's notion of «der Rohe Mensch», the primitive person, who must be excluded from the Kantian cognitive subject as being inherently incapable of engaging in higher intellectual pursuits These were some of the crucial global issues addressed by Diderot in the Histoire of 1780 -the outcome of ten years of slaving away after he finished the Encyclopédie, during which, step by step, his political ideas became increasingly radical, starting from Galiani's Dialogues sur le Commerce des Blés (1770), via his own Pages contre un tyran (Frederick II, 1771); his Fragments politiques (1772) and his Observations sur le Nakaz (1774) for Catharine II; to his advice Aux Insurgents de l'Amérique (1778) 105 . And now, at the end of book 19, Diderot contributes a chapter, not as one might expect on Philosophie, Beaux-Arts & belles-lettres, or Morale, but, surprisingly, on Impôts 106 -a hardhitting political text, including his Dialogue with a Vizir, against despotic rulers and their extortionate taxation practices, and pleading for a just and fair taxation system for all in French society -written, perhaps, with Voltaire's story L'homme aux quarante ecus (1768) in mind, another «serious treatise on political economy cast in the form of a story», «one of the most complex of Voltaire's writings» and «closely akin to Diderot's masterpieces», as Besterman put it 107 .
With the new public discourse he developed in his fragments, we see Diderot operating as «l'homme du questionnement» 108 . Throughout the Histoire this is the point: Diderot and Raynal addressed those questions head-on, thus making explicit the real world context within which trade and commerce are having to operate. While the two regularly came to different views, their debates did shape the frame of relevance which matters when studying the European expansion. What really made the Histoire was their dynamic cooperation and exchange -Raynal's great, synthetic, commercial and statistic sweep across all those empires, peppered by the critical and imaginative flashes of liberal political and democratic insight which the mercurial Diderot added to the mix. In the process, two different moral universes were coming to the fore 109 . On the one hand, the dominant Moderate Enlightenment with the elite liberalism and capitalism of Turgot, Smith and Malouet and many others, who all battled to free themselves from absolute monarchy and despotism, but did nothing to extend their fight to include freedom for women, blacks and slaves. And on the other, Diderot's Radical position: freedom is a basic human right for everybody in the world; and there is not a single argument that could possibly provide a justification for slavery. His moral imperative therefore is: we must fight despotism and slavery, if we are to move forward to a humanitarian and democratic society. Here, at the end of the Histoire, culminates the deeply moral questioning which runs right through it. It is for such a better future that Diderot invited everyone to come and engage in a dialogue about the real world issues at stake here. Even the cruellest European would be welcome to a discussion of the following question: À quel prix? Nowhere else but in the 18 th century could one read such searing political prose as in the radical fragments which Diderot contributed to the thinktank or debating club which he turned Raynal's opus magnum into -simply by asking questions that are still valid, and still with us today.
The European Expansion may have started for good reasons of commerce, trade and exploration. But today, when we ourselves go out to the Two Indies, we are having to face two critical questions: (i) Know Thy Self, and (ii) What About The Other? -Socratic questions, which confront us with the fact that everyone we encounter in the world is our fellow human being, free, like us, never a slave, never an inferior subaltern, and all belonging to the societas humana. This gives us a clear moral and social-humanitarian categorical imperative 111 . But it sits uneasily alongside the commercial imperative of modern capitalism, which has become a core part of modern imperialism since the Enlightenment 112 .
It is this tension which the authors of the Histoire have made explicit through the discussions in their book 110  -so the whole world would know and understand this too. They did so by giving a voice to those very many human beings who had (and often still have) no say in the matter -the poor, the needy, the hungry, the workers, the slaves, the women -all those who, even today, are often not heard and not included. For despite what Smith and Kant said, they do matter. It is this democratic and inclusive insight which is the revolutionary political contribution of the Histoire to Enlightenment debate.
So now, finally, to answer Anthony Pagden's opening question. Andrew Curran rightly says that Diderot's «dogged quest for truth makes him the most compelling 18 th -century advocate of the art of writing freely». Diderot wrote for us, his «interlocutors of the future», and «has now become the most relevant of Enlightenment philosophers» 113 . Equally, Jonathan Israel's massive volumes on the Radical Enlightenment have made accessible the eye-opening, life-enhancing, Prospero-like qualities of that endlessly fascinating mind of Diderot -a political thinker who was, in the words of Anthony Strugnell: «the only significant theorist of revolution before 1789» 114 , operating from deep moral commitments, who yet remained the experimental philosopher he always was, putting his ideas before us -by questioning both le pour and le contre, thus challenging us to make up our minds.
What is at stake here is his point: if we are to be free, we do need to be able to think and write freely.
Here we have another of Diderot's questions which still matter today: How to ensure the «extension de la sphère des Lumières?» 115 . Think how Diderot himself did this in the Encyclopédie: by spreading clarity, as in a good dictionary. It is as we saw above, where the Histoire put the Quaker challenge to its readers, viz. that in all honesty, we cannot be free and tyrants at the same time. Now think. So, first, take the Stoic philosophy, traditionally held by nobles, aristocrats and ruling elites, and say out loud: «I will not be a slave». Next, make sure that each and every person in the world will learn to say this, and practice it too, so we can all share this maxim as our universal basic human right 116 .
It is for this inclusive human rights perspective that Paolo Quintili has called Diderot «a revolutionary stoic» 117 . A man for our time, who keeps inspiring us to do likewise, while we are learning to handle things that change and must change further, on our way to a better world. In their Histoire, Raynal and Diderot demonstrated that trade and commerce, contact and exchange, whether between individuals, peoples or nations, are never neutral and value-free. Free trade and fair trade, and the quite different economic models and choices underpinning them, both form an integral -but very unequal -part of the world in which humankind is learning to live together -and will always require open, critical, political and philosophical debate, exchange and moral judgment.
Here we have Diderot's invitation to us: to come along, continue our dialogue, develop morally acceptable solutions, and together realise our full human potential. For the benefit of us all.