1777 Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Establissements & du Commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes

Description

An Important Work, Early Edition, Folding Maps, Illustrated, Publishers' Original Binding

The most important of Raynal's works. This the fifth edition, the first two volumes of seven. Revised and expanded. With half titles, two advertising leaves to this edition to vol. I. Illustrated with frontispiece, large folding map, and one full page plate to vol. I; frontispiece and folding map to vol II. Collated, complete.

A detailed study of the European settlement in the Americas with notes on trade and commerce between Europe and the Far East, Africa, and the Americas. In the original French.

Work by Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, French author and man of letters during the Age of Enlightenment. Originally published anonymously in 1770 in Amsterdam. It achieved considerable popularity and went through over thirty different editions between 1770 and 1787. At the time, the 'Histoire des deux Indes' was considered an encyclopaedia of the colonial age and the Bible of anticolonialism in the Age of Enlightenment.

This edition is an uncommon Maestricht edition, which includes frontispiece portrait of the author with name printed below. The 1780 Geneva edition, which also included the author's name, was censored in France in 1781; it was banned and burned by the public hangman for its bold and violent tirades, and Raynal was declared a public enemy and forced to leave France for Prussia. Under his signature at the bottom of his portrait he added the inscription: 'Au défenseur de l’humanité, de la vérité, de la liberté' ('In defence of humanity, truth, and freedom').

Raynal was the main author of this work, but the study was the product of a joined effort, with contributors including Denis Diderot, Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, Jacques-André Naigeon, Jean de Pechméja, Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, Joseph-Louis, and others.

From the library of John Napper with bookplate to front pastedown, London artist and teacher.