ABSTRACT
Europeans who contemplated Asian societies in the second half of the eighteenth century, whether as travelers, merchants, empire-builders, or theorists, all found themselves under the infl uence of Montesquieu, who asserted in his Spirit of the Laws (1748) that all of the major states of Asia were governed despotically-that “despotism is, so to speak, naturalized” in Asia (SL 63). Most commentators on Asia in the following half-century (and beyond), whether they were directly concerned with Asia or referred to the subject only tangentially, accepted the thesis of oriental despotism; the argument became one of the commonplaces of Western political thought in the later Enlightenment, an era in which Europeans were just beginning to acquire extensive data on the world beyond Europe and were attempting to come to terms intellectually with it. Among those who concentrated their attention on Asia, one of the few dissenters from this orthodoxy was A. H. Anquetil-Duperron, the arguments of whose treatise, Législation Orientale of 1778, are the subject of this chapter.
