[2] The Histoire des deux Indes filled a public need for knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment, answering questions that preoccupied the minds of those in the late 18th century, around the time of the French Revolution.

[3] The Histoire des deux Indes lacks consistency in its style: Raynal limited himself to collecting articles provided by friends and pieces borrowed from existing published texts, without taking the trouble to rework them.

Je pensais bien que Raynal ferait des sottises; il a ajouté cette phrase, le reste est de moi.)

When Raynal left Paris, Chamford said Il est fatigué de vivre avec son auteur ("He is tired of living with his author").

Toussaint Louverture read the book and was especially inspired by a passage that predicted slave revolution in the West Indies.

Il ne résulte rien de son livre, sinon que l’auteur est un homme de beaucoup d’esprit, très instruit, mais qui n’a aucune idée arrêtée, et qui se laisse emporter par l’enthousiasme d’un jeune rhéteur.

Nothing comes out of his book, other than that the author is a man of much spirit, well educated, but who has not one firm idea, and who is carried away by the enthusiasm of a young rhetorician.

Declared a public enemy, Raynal was forced to leave France for Prussia, where he stayed the large part of his exile.

Today, scholar Jenny Mander notes that there are mixed feelings and overall confusion as to whether Histoire des deux Indes is an anti-colonialist text since there are so many contradictions within the piece itself.