Enlightenment thinkers reclassified Asians and Arabs from equals to barbarians needing liberation

Evidence

The crisis of slavery and the need for reform in the colonies of the New World was one context in which the notion of a mission to civilize began to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. A similar trend was evident in the Enlightenment treatment of the non-European peoples of the Old World. Although historians are still debating just how negative the view of India, China, and the Middle East had become by the time of the French Revolution, clearly the philosophes who wrote about such places now deemed these older cultures, too, in need of civilization. The analogy with changing views of the inhabitants of the New World is not exact. Where slaves and Amerindians were upgraded from peoples devoid of civilization to peoples capable of it, Asians and Arabs in many early Enlightenment treatises had been placed on an equal footing with the Europeans, only now were downgraded to barbarians. And the categories of analysis were slightly different; while the savagery of most New World inhabitants was attributed to environmental factors, the barbarism of Asians and Arabs was defined in terms of oriental despotism and ignoranceY To civilize them would thus mean not only mastering nature and encouraging commercial exchange but also liberating them from political tyranny and superstition. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful genealogical anchor for what ‘mission civilisatrice’ meant before republicanism reshaped it.