Enlightenment thought upgraded New World peoples but downgraded Old World peoples to barbarians

Evidence

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. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 68

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the usual assumption that all non-Western peoples were equally demeaned; parallels Edward Said’s oriental despotism thesis.