Ghostwriting and collective authorship in the Enlightenment: Diderot, d’Holbach’s coterie and the problem of authorship in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes

In recent decades, researchers have developed enormous interest in the role of Denis Diderot in Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's major historiographical work, the Histoire des deux Indes (HDI). Scholars have especially emphasised the importance of Diderot's role as a ghostwriter, claiming that he wrote large parts of the HDI. However, this article demonstrates that scholarship must reject almost all previous attributions of HDI fragments to Diderot. It reaches this conclusion through two distinct methods: source criticism and computational stylometric analysis. The picture that emerges is of a collective work involving many contributors. The HDI was likely the product of a collective – Paul Thiry d'Holbach's coterie – in which Diderot probably played a subordinate role. This paper argues that d'Holbach may have written a substantial share of the fragments typically attributed to Diderot.