By what channels did the French Enlightenment reach the eighteenth-century Irish reader, and what impact did it have? What were the images of Ireland current in the France of the philosophers like Voltaire? These are the questions which a team of scholars attempt to answer in this volume.

First published in 1777, Abbe Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal (1713-96) was a French Philosopher, historian and priest. On leaving his parish in Paris, he devoted himself to writing and the society of philosophes. He produced a number of historical works, including this famous history of the European colonies (part of which some modern scholars attribute to Diderot). This is Volume three of a collection of six volumes of his work Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies.