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This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of 'Blackness.' -- Marshall Poe New Books in History 2011 Curran's approach to intellectual history is an exciting one that transcends the oft-written biographies and other author-centered discussions. His focus on trends and his immersion in the writings of the time creates an accurate rather than anachronistic mindset, which is truly useful for historians. -- Sarah Goodwin Alpata: A Journal of History 2012 A definitive statement on the complex, painful, and richly revealing topic of how the major figures of the French Enlightenment reacted to the enslavement of black Africans, often to their discredit. The fields of race studies and of Enlightenment studies are more than ready to embrace the type of analysis in which Curran engages, and all the more so in that his book is beautifully written and illustrated. -- Mary McAlpin Symposium 2012 A highly intelligent book on an important topic. The breadth of Andrew Curran's knowledge about the Enlightenment is astonishing... The book makes the convincing point not only that Africa is a major focus in the Enlightenment's imagination, but also that natural history and anthropology are central to understanding not only its scientific agenda, but also its humanitarian politics. -- Carl Niekerk Centaurus 2012 This engrossing, comprehensive study traces 18th-century European thought on anatomical blackness of Africans... Curran's ability to dissect and explain complicated arguments of the period's major thinkers is impressive. Choice 2012 Curran's Francotropism and medical background enable him to develop insights that should prove important to the ongoing transnationalization and discipline-blurring of literary and cultural studies. -- Ian Finseth Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2012 This study reveals with striking clarity the complex interaction of the science of human difference in this period with other strands of Enlightenment thought as well as the practices of (French) slave trading and colonial slavery. -- Carolyn Vellenga Berman H-France 2012 A major contribution to the study of the uses of natural history, the presence and absence of universalism in the Enlightenment, and the origins of modern racial thought. -- Martin S. Staum H-France 2012 Curran has produced a powerful argument about how Europeans defined not only Africans but themselves in the early modern period; about how depictions of the 'other' furnished slavers and planters with the necessary intellectual justifications for slavery; about how natural science has the (frightening) ability to define both body and soul. -- Jeremy L. Caradonna H-France 2012 The Anatomy of Blackness is an intense and challenging reading experience, but one that certainly repays the effort. -- Stephen Kenny Reviews in History 2013
