The popularity of historical writing in the eighteenth century has long been an idée reçue in the academic study of pre-revolutionary France. Given the fashion for texts which posited themselves as ‘histories’, it should come as no surprise that India lent itself to such a mode of representation. Alongside a fascination with history was a growing interest in the wider world. Indeed, the proliferation of texts produced at the end of the eighteenth century on India and, more generally, Asia – texts which posit themselves as ‘histories’, and purport to favour fact over fantasy, analysis over fictionalization – are symptomatic of what Mita Choudhury, discussing contemporaneous English-language representations, has described as the ‘demand for more of the real Orient’. The general introduction to abbé de Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce et des établissements des Européens dans les deux Indes, first published in 1770 and estimated to have been one of the three most widely read books in France in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1789 (along with Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloïse and Voltaire's Candide), exemplifies this interest in the real, an interest which was shared by the reading public and authors alike:

Despite the increasing interest in India and the Orient, knowledge of India's physical situation remained vague. The eighteenth-century American traveller John Ledyard developed the term ‘Philosophic Geography’ to describe his ‘freely constructed geographic sentiment’, which bore little relation to physical topography and borders.