It is such a pleasure finally to thank in print the people and institutions without whom I would never have completed, let alone begun, this book.

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the John Carter Brown Library, the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University, and the East Carolina University Faculty Senate. The dissertation on which this book is based was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Johns Hopkins University History Department, the Brian J. Key Research Award, the Charles S. Singleton Dissertation Fellowship, and the Institut Français d’Amérique (then Washington).

Librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, especially the conservateurs at the Salle des manuscrits, were most forthcoming with assistance and advice early on. I would also like to thank the conservateurs at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and the archivists at the Ministère des affaires étrangères, the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix, the Archives de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille, the National Archives of Canada, the Rare Books Reading Room of the Library of Congress, and the University of Ottawa’s Rare Books collection. Special thanks go to the John Carter Brown Library. Its two directors, Norman Fiering and Ted Widmer, fostered this research, and its magnificent staff made it both possible and a pleasure. I am also most grateful to the staff at McGill University’s Redpath and McLennan Libraries for their help during the last stages of completing the manuscript. Finally, thanks go to the relentless Inter-Library Loan staff at ECU’s Joyner Library, who made it possible to work during the academic year in Greenville.

This book began as a doctoral dissertation, but it has a longer history.The questions I have asked, and continue to hope to answer, can be traced at least as far back as my undergraduate theses in political theory and in history, supervised by James Tully and Pierre Boulle at McGill University, respectively. Their delicate nurturing of my ideas and ideals continues to stimulate this research. I also want to thank Laurette Glasgow, fearless director of the International Economics Division at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, and Ariel Delouya, our deputy, for their example and their confidence in me and my wild idea to leave the department for academe.

The Department of History at Johns Hopkins provided not only funding for the dissertation, but also its famously challenging intellectual environment filled with sharp colleagues and extraordinary teachers with whom to discuss and debate. Anthony Pagden’s European Encounters first inspired this project. His supervision of my M.Phil. thesis at Cambridge and my doctoral dissertation at Hopkins then shaped this book, which does not adequately reflect the pearls of wisdom he has proffered for so many years. David A. Bell generously provided a rigorous initiation into the history of eighteenth-century France. His energy and input were essential to this book’s shape and completion. Orest Ranum has entertained my constant questions and drafts with his characteristic munificence and his always thoughtful and sound advice. Among so many generous gestures, he and his spouse, Patricia, went so far as to bring me to Raynal’s doorstep, in Saint-Geniez-d’Olt. John Pocock discreetly offered counsel and encouragement from this project’s inception, kindly sharing a draft of his writing on Raynal and making sense of my own early musings. A model feminist, teacher, and mentor, Judy Walkowitz often asked the toughest and most perceptive questions of my work. For special attention to my work in the final stages, I would like to thank Toby Ditz and Jack Greene. For their careful reading and helpful suggestions of the dissertation which inspired this book, I thank the members of my dissertation defence committee, Professors David A. Bell (again), Wilda Anderson, Mark Blyth, Toby Ditz, and Richard Kagan.

The organisers and participants of the 1998 Minda da Gunzburg conference on “Europe and Empire” listened carefully to my approach and offered encouragement in this project’s earliest stages. Special thanks to Jill Casid, Caroline Elkins, Pratap Mehta, Sankar Muthu, Jennifer Pitts, and Richard Tuck.

The Centre de Recherches Historiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, welcomed me into its doctoral programme, under the perceptive supervision and hospitality of Roger Chartier. Later, I was fortunate to be invited to share my work in Myriam Cottias and Jean Hébrard’s vibrant ÉHESS seminar on the “Histoire du fait colonial.” The University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies twice provided a generous and probing audience for chapters presented to them: I especially thank Jacqueline Best, Linda Cardinal, Serge Denis, Dimitri Karmis, Kevin McMillan, and Paul Saurette for their helpful insights. For fruitful discussions of my work, I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Triangle Intellectual History and French Cultural Studies seminar (especially Mimi Kim, Lloyd Kramer, Bill Reddy, Don Reid, Jay Smith, and Steven Vincent), as well as a long list of teachers and colleagues who have offered insights along the way: Sara Berry, Dominique Brancher, Jeremy Caradonna, Paul Cheney, Myriam Cottias, Charles-Philippe Courtois, Madeleine Dobie, François Furstenberg, Gianluigi Goggi, Istvan Hont, Vicki Hsueh, Lara Kriegel, Sheryl Kroen, Catherine Labio, Catherine Larrère, Jane Lesnick, David Marshall, Lucien Nouis, Maurice Olender, Annelie Ramsbrock, Sophus Reinert, Neil Safier, John Shovlin, Michael Sonenscher, Céline Spector, Philippe Steiner, Ann Thomson, Elizabeth Wingrove, and Amit Yahav.

Many thanks go to my colleagues and friends in the History Department at ECU. I sincerely thank Michael A. Palmer, my former chair in ECU’s department of history; Gerry Prokopowicz, my current chair; Dean Alan White and Associate Dean Cindy Putnam-Evans of the Harriot College of Arts and Sciences; and the East Carolina University Faculty Senate for supporting this research and the book’s production as well. Special mention goes to my dear colleagues and friends, John O’Brien and Mona Russell, who were particularly indispensable to the project’s completion.

I was fortunate to be asked to join the editorial team of the first critical edition of the Histoire des deux Indes. I am deeply indebted to my volume editor, the erudite and prolific Gianluigi Goggi, as I am to Anthony Strugnell, Cecil Courtney, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Ann Thomson, and Muriel Brot. Key questions in this book were given an opportunity to air in the truly rich conference organised in July 2010 by Jenny Mander at Newnham College at Cambridge University. There I benefitted from the insights of William St-Clair, Stéphane Pujol, and Kenta Ohji. Though I have tried my best to offer one modest interpretation of the work herein, I am all too aware that this book does not adequately reflect the wealth of knowledge they have produced, and generously shared, concerning the HDI.

I am fortunate for the friends and colleagues who have sustained this project during its long gestation. Julia Holderness has stood firmly by my side, a dear friend, reader, counselor, and enlightened critic. She is by far more dame and more raison than her subject, Christine de Pizan. Anna Krylova has offered a model for the life of a woman historian and critical thinker, with advice and encouragement.

In Paris, I experienced first-hand the ideal of the doux commerce of ideas. One could not ask for a finer group of historians with whom to share a writing group: For their friendship and solidarity, within and beyond the Bibliothèque nationale, I thank Charly Coleman, Andrew Jainchill, Ben Kafka, Rebecca Manley, Emmanuel Saadia, and Dana Simmons. My favourite littératrices, Natasha Lee, Anne Beate Maurseth, and Louisa Shea, nourished my fumbling in the dix-huitième with insight and companionship. Ariane Bergeron-Foote, Chartiste-archiviste-paléographe, a dear friend since we were tiny undergraduates, showed me the way to the wonderful world of Paris’ libraries and manuscripts. Élodie Richard helped me navigate the corridors of the 54 blvd Raspail, and so much more. To Ken Ashworth, Francesca Feder et compagnie, and to tutti gli amici dell’ Académie des Quatre Vents, I give thanks for showing me that a life outside the BnF can also be rich and wondrous.

What a joy it has been to wrap up this book (for it is not, nor perhaps could it ever be, complete) amid the marvelous collection and staff of the McLennan Library at McGill University in Montreal, where, in many ways, it began. As my deadline approached, I was fortunate to be surrounded by Pierre Boulle, Nick Dew, François Furstenberg (again), and Joanne Robertson, each of whom helped me enormously in these last stages.

I am very grateful to Eric Crahan, history and politics editor at Cambridge University Press, for taking on the publication of this book, as I am to his assistants, Jason Przybylski and Abby Zorbaugh, and to copy editors Ruth Homrigaus, Dan C. Geist, and Ami Naramor. Andrew J. Walker provided valuable research and fact-checking assistance, and Celia Braves created a beautiful index. I am also extremely grateful to the very generous manuscript reviewers for Cambridge, whose incisive suggestions I have tried my best to incorporate.

I am blessed with a large and wonderful extended family, all of whom, Fraser and Terjanian, have shown endless support. I thank Jonathan Bowling for flavouring the last phases of this book with zest. I am so grateful to James Terjanian, who kept cheering on his sister, despite his brave labours around the globe in the most difficult of conditions. And finally, without the unlimited and unwavering support, encouragement, generosity, humour, and love of my parents, Sheila and Antoine Terjanian, this book would simply not exist. I dedicate it to them, my favourite economists.