 Diderot was one of the most forceful critics of European colonization. In his contributions to Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, he challenges the view that indigenous people benefit from European civilization and argues that the European colonists are the uncivilized ones. He claims that culture (“national character”) helps to inculcate morality and reinforces norms of respect, but these norms tend to dissipate when the individual is far from his country of origin. According to Diderot, colonial empires frequently become the sites of extreme brutality because the colonists are far away from legal institutions and informal sanctions and this weakens the habits of restraint, exposing natural man’s full instinct for violence (Muthu 2003).