In Trading Places, Madeleine Dobie explores the place of the
colonial world in the culture of the French Enlightenment. She
shows that until a turning point in the late 1760s questions of
colonization and slavery occupied a very marginal position in
literature, philosophy, and material and visual culture. In an
exploration of the causes and modalities of this silence, Dobie
traces the displacement of colonial questions onto two more
familiar and less ethically challenging aspects of Enlightenment
thought: exoticization of the Orient and fascination with
indigenous Amerindian cultures.
Expanding the critical analysis of the cultural imprint of
colonization to encompass commodities as well as texts, Dobie
considers how tropical raw materials were integrated into French
material culture. In an original exploration of the textile and
furniture industries Dobie considers consumer goods both as sites
of representation and as vestiges of the labor of the enslaved.
Turning to the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Dobie
considers how silence evolved into discourse. She argues that
sustained examination of the colonial order was made possible by
the rise of economic liberalism, which attacked the prevailing
mercantilist doctrine and formulated new perspectives on
agriculture, labor (including slavery), commerce, and global
markets. Questioning recent accounts of late Enlightenment
"anticolonialism," she shows that late eighteenth-century French
philosophers opposed slavery while advocating the expansion of a
"liberalized" colonial order. Innovative and interdisciplinary,
Trading Places combines literary and historical analysis with new
research into political economy and material culture."
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