In addition to a far-reaching survey and history of European commercial activities, the book had replaced the Encyclopédie as the venue for some of the era’s most liberal positions on both global and domestic politics. Despite the fact that the History’s disparate points of view often come into direct contradiction — the inevitable pitfall of multiple authors — the most powerful portions of the book unequivocally put forth a vision of history according to which tyrants, magistrates, and priests had not only instituted various forms of despotism in Europe, but had exported it to the world’s
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