The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Most of the Enlightened luminaries – from Diderot in Paris to Samuel Johnson in London – were horrified by slavery. Voltaire had a mixed record, deploring the institution, regarding Africans as cousins – ‘no one could treat their relative more horribly’ – and in his novel Candide asking, ‘At what price do we eat sugar?’ Yet he regarded Africans as having a different origin to Europeans.[*3] Diderot and Guillaume Thomas Raynal denounced slavery in their Histoire philosophique des deux Indes and approved slave rebellion. Yet the German philosophe Kant opposed any ‘fusing of races’ and in his essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’ supported slavery, believing it reflected a hierarchy of races with the whites at the top, Asians and Africans in the middle (‘the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized…he falls of his own accord into savagery’) and Native Americans ‘far below the Negro’. Kant’s racist ideology was unusual in these circles, yet Euro-American slavery required a theoretical justification for its unchristian dominance, the violence necessary to maintain it and the luxurious lifestyle and vast profits it delivered to its masters. Racialized ideas about Africans were not invented by European slave masters in the eighteenth century: medieval people were obsessed with heredity and breeding; Arab slave traders and intellectuals like Ibn Khaldun propagated racialized ideas about Africans not that different from those of European slave owner...