ABSTRACT
In the Age of Revolution, the idea that Europe should help a “savage” Africa attain civilization through colonization was on the rise. When explaining how such views came about, scholars have looked at the ways in which the production and reception of travel literature and natural histories of Africa shaped, and were shaped by, evolving ideas of race in eighteenth-century Europe. Though insightful, these studies ignore the impact of the encounter with Africa itself as well as the geopolitical context within which it took place. This article argues that the idea of a ‘savage’ Africa in need of civilization through colonization was linked to Europeans’ inability to easily advance their commercial enterprises in Africa at a time when European colonization in the Americas was eroding. Through a study of Jean-Baptiste-Léonard Durand’s activities in Senegal during his directorship of the French Compagnie de la gomme du Sénégal in the mid-1780s and of his published account of these experiences in the Voyage au Sénégal in 1802, the paper shows that Durand’s struggle to negotiate French commercial interests in Senegal on his own terms, and his deep frustration with gum and slave merchants along the Senegal River, contributed to his subsequent depiction of Africans as “savage” and in need of civilizing. The paper also suggests that the changing geopolitical context in Europe and the Americas during the Age of Revolution further shaped Durand’s call for the civilizing of Africa.
