Views on the Natives’ Economic ‘Backwardness’ from 17th Century Natural Law to 18th Century Conjectural History

In the 17th and 18th centuries, following the colonization of the new world and the intensification of the Atlantic slave trade, the 'savage' (and his avatar the 'barbarian') emerged as a recurring figure in European scholarly literature. Among the many questions raised by the discovery and awareness of a new alterity, the apparent economic backwardness of conquered and enslaved populations was a major theme for reflection, as well as a problem to be solved for Western political and moral philosophy. From the theories of natural law of the 17th century, which almost invariably present the condition of Amerindians as an exemplification of the state of nature, to the developments of conjectural history in the second half of the 18th century, authors put forward a wide range of hypotheses. Natural inferiority, deleterious characters, climate, or a precarious economic environment were some of the factors put forward by a body of literature nourished by social contract theories, essays on the diversity of mores and characters, first treatises on political economy and so on. I will distinguish four main lines of interpretation put forward by the scholarly literature of the period, depending on whether the authors explain what they consider to be a backwardness of native populations by essentialist arguments, or by the predominance of 'physical' (climate and natural environment), 'moral' (i.e. political) or economic and material causes (division of labour, development of private property). To do this, I will draw on the writings of authors such as Locke, Smith, Ferguson, Lord Kames, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, Buffon, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant, as well as some of the major debates of the time, such as the opposition between monogenism and polygenism, the question of 'national characters', or that of an alleged hierarchy of 'human species'.