Enlightenment universalism and colonial knowledge: Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, 1770--1800

Eighteenth-century Europeans subsumed encounters to both the east and the west, the Americas and Asia, under a single category---the "two Indies"---that formed a pivotal field of interest for a wide range of moral and political writing in England and France. This conceptual similarity would not survive the nineteenth century's increasing emphasis on biological conceptions of racial difference. This study considers aspects of this colonial encounter in the work Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, whose arguments about the interdependence of colonial knowledge and cosmopolitan projects prefigure contemporary theories of globalization and cultural diversity in important but often neglected ways. My project shows that colonialism in the Enlightenment was both more complex and more contradictory than we presently understand it to have been, and that eighteenth-century answers to the question of how empire was justified and whether it was or was not consistent with the movement toward universal justice---cosmopolitan justice---continue to structure (or to haunt) twenty-first-century answers to similar questions.; Unwilling to accept fully the legitimacy of colonial dominance, Diderot formulates a political fantasy of a consensual colonialism, a "soft-colonization," which relies on exploring the possibilities of breeding and mating with a subject people. The failure of communication which Diderot dramatizes by means of a parodic and pseudo-ethnographic dialogue such as the Supplement alongside his empirical efforts undertaken in the Histoire des deux Indes are both examined. Regarding Burke, what underlying logic made possible his eventual support of the right of the American colonists to secede, his scathing attack upon the Jacobin revolutionaries in France, and yet his even more passionate denunciation of Hastings and the East India Company's actions in India? I organize these questions around a reading of the Reflections and consider how Burke's previous writings on India shape and inform his understanding of Jacobinism in Revolutionary France. This, along with Indianism (his neologism), become the two terms under which Burke addressed what he considered "the two great evils our time."...