This book examines the French Enlightenment's engagement with the cultural and racial diversity of humankind, considering both the major thinkers usually associated with the Enlightenment and the travelers, officials, missionaries, explorers, and antiquarians whose writings and reports provided the raw materials for their philosophical syntheses. It argues that there was no single 'Enlightenment project' with regard to the non-Western world; on the contrary, eighteenth-century French authors took part in contentious debates on the causes and significance of racial difference, the relative merits of civilization and primitivism, the universality of religious belief, the legitimacy of slavery and colonialism, and the meaning of (and possibility for) human progress.