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At the present time, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (Paris, 7 December 1731-17 January 1805) is not a household name in the historical imagination of the West. If he is remembered at all, it is as the pioneer of the European study of the manuscripts of the Zoroastrian creed and one of the founding fathers of French Orientalism.1 Readers of Edward Said's Orientalism will have encountered Anquetil as an early avatar of the Orientalist project which Said discursively took apart in that justly famous and timely book. Said labeled him "an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism," but apparently felt no need to inquire further into the nature of Anquetil's egalitarianism.2 This is a pity, for an unbiased examination of Anquetil's writings calls into question Said's lumping together of all varieties of Orientalism as intellectual vehicles of the imperial imagination. In Anquetil's own opinion, his work was an integral part of his critique of colonial robbery and European arrogance. The study of the history and the ancient languages of Asia, he declared, was of greater import than the satisfaction of mere curiosity, "because it contributes to our knowledge of lands that are more considerable than Europe, and it presents us with a grand survey, proper to perfect the knowledge of mankind, & above all to assure the inalienable rights of humanity."3
What Said so cavalierly dismisses as an "eccentric" egalitarianism, was in fact a life-long defense of the equality and dignity of non-European peoples, from India to the Americas and the Arctic zone. The story of Anquetil's intellectual trajectory calls into question all interpretations that depict the Enlightenment's thought about the extra-European world, exclusively or predominantly, in terms of Eurocentric arrogance and "Othering." Historians such as Urs Bitterli, Anthony Pagden, Melvin Richter, Sankar Muthu, and Jennifer Pitts have called our attention to the wide dissemination of critical judgments of European expansion and its cultural consequences in the thought of the eighteenth century.4 Yet, much remains to be done in this field before we will have a picture of the Enlightenment that fully recognizes its transcultural egalitarian dimensions. In this context, Anquetil's thought merits a closer examination than it has received thus far.5 This essay will show that his egalitarianism, while influenced by Jansenism and natural rights philosophy, acquired its global...