This book, based on a wide range of eighteenth-century works, concerns European attitudes towards North Africa in the century preceding the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. It studies the radical transformation of perceptions of Barbary during the period, essentially by placing them in the context of the different eighteenth-century systems of classification of the world. Dealing with an area that has hitherto attracted little attention, this book throws new light on how enlightened Europe saw the rest of the world, and on the rise of racism.