Abbe Raynal s A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies is one of the great eighteenth-century histories. It attempts no less than an assessment of European settlement and colonization. The ideas contained within the work, and its savage indictment of slavery and European colonization, lead to its being banned by the French parliament. Despite the ban, the work proved enormously popular and it is of great significance as a key piece of democratic writing in the period leading up to the French Revolution.