An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic

In 1971, Michèle Duchet published Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Anthropology and History in the Century of the Enlightenment), which provided a sweeping analysis of the French production of knowledge about Africa and the Americas during the eighteenth century. Her work remains one of the most careful and convincing analyses of the complex and contradictory tangle of Enlightenment intellectual currents that both celebrated the universality of the human race and put forth hierarchical and differentialist theories about different groups that are often of startling arrogance and racism.1