Detailed map of Southeast Asia extending to include: the Malay Peninsula showing the island of “Sin Capora”; Mindanao in the Philippines; Sumatra and Java; the islands between Borneo and New Guinea; and the northern coastline of Australia. With an inset of the Moluccas lower left. The all-important wind directions, that establish the best navigational routes, are shown.

From the atlas volume to accompany the final edition of Guillaume Thomas Francois, l’Abbe Raynal’s ‘Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes’. The map was subsequently reprinted, omitting Bonne’s and the engraver, Andre’s, names.

Raynal’s text for his ‘Histoire philophique…’, adopted a “deistical and libertarian attitude associated with Montesquieu and Voltaire, … the exoticism, anecdotal style, and strident advocacy of social and economic reforms that characterized this survey of colonialism and commerce… made it one of the bulwarks of the French Enlightenment. But its open anticlericalism and advocacy of the right of insurrection alarmed the French monarchy and led to a decree of Parliament of 1781 ordering Raynal’s arrest and the confiscation of his property… the last section of his ‘Histoire philosophique’, also published separately as ‘Revolution de l’Amerique’ (1781), helped to bring about American independence; he also maintained that more than 25,000 copies were distributed throughout the colonies” (A. Owen Aldridge for ADNB).