This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.
Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the eighteenth century.

Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the glass to Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the society of Rome.

But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the Abbe Raynal's History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772.

It is however, one of the remarkable books of the century.

Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery.