The “Encyclopédie” (1751-72), by Diderot and the Encyclopédistes, presented the latest, greatest knowledge and thinking of the European Enlightenment, “to change the way people think”, freeing the book-buying public in France and elsewhere from their Catholic educations. Among the enlightening articles of the “Encyclopédie” was one about “Negroes”, written in 1765 by Encyclopediste Jean-Baptiste-Pierre le Romain.
Diderot and the Encyclopedistes meet at his house.
Le Romain was their expert on the Caribbean, having lived there from at least 1734 to 1762, first in Martinique and then in Grenada (till the British took over), working as an engineer. He contributed nearly 70 articles on the region’s plants, animals, peoples, products, and geography.
Unoriginal content: Despite Le Romain’s first-hand knowledge and the grand aims of the “Encyclopédie”, most of the article on Negroes is almost word-for-word the same as the 1728 Chambers’s “Cyclopaedia” from London. I am not going to repeat that part of the article since I already transcribed most of it in a post of its own. Le Romain updated the prices for slaves and, in effect, vouched for the accuracy of most of the rest of the Chambers article.
Original content: But Le Romain did seem to add some original content (here translated from the French by Pamela Cheek for the University of Michigan):
Racism, slavery and religion: Something that Chambers neglected to point out:
“People try to justify what is odious and contrary to natural law in this trade by saying that normally these slaves find the salvation of their souls in the loss of their liberty; that the instruction in Christianity given them, joined to their indispensability for the cultivation of sugar, tobacco, indigo, etc. mitigates that which seems inhuman in a trade in which men buy and sell others just like beasts for cultivating land.”
Diet: in West Africa:
“For even though negroes are very sober, sterility is sometimes so extraordinary in certain places in Africa, especially when some cloud of grasshoppers has passed, that it is a fairly frequent occurrence for it to be possible to harvest neither millet, nor rice, nor other vegetables on which they customarily subsist.”
during the Middle Passage on-board slave ships:
“In addition to the provisions for the ship’s crew, those who conduct this trade carry gruel, gray and white peas, beans, vinegar and spirits [liquor] to feed the negroes they hope to have from their trading.”
Proper treatment:
“Their hard nature demands that they be treated neither with too much indulgence nor too much severity. For if a moderated punishment makes them yielding and animates them to work, an excessive rigor puts them off and brings them to cast themselves among the maroon or wild negroes who live in inaccessible places on these islands, where they prefer living the most wretched life to slavery.”
Barbarians:
“But since Europeans have outbid one another, so to speak, these barbarians have known how to profit from their jealousy…”
This is a step down from Chambers, but Africans were already being called savages (by 1737) and soon, in Edward Long’s “History of Jamaica” (1774), a different species altogether, one close to orangutans.
– Abagond, 2021.
Source: Encyclopédie (1765).
See also:
- Black people according to:
- -445: Herodotus,
- 1700: White racial frame
- 1728: Chambers’s Cyclopaedia
- 1787: Thomas Jefferson
- 1906: Franz Boas
- 1911: Encyclopaedia Britannica
- 1959: Golden Book Encyclopedia
- 2010: US television
- 2021: The Economist
- Middle Passage
- the White lens
- The term “savage”
- Black people as monkeys
- lips
- polygenism
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Abagond 
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