Buffon and Crèvecoeur demonstrated the influence of the new Enlightenment conjectural theorizing about the history of human civilization. Yet they were not historians. The eighteenth century saw an unprecedented interest in both traditional military and political historical topics and new cultural and social ones. This was accompanied by a new reflexive historical awareness. Enlightenment intellectuals developed a new conception of their own culture and how it differed from earlier eras. Norbert Elias, in his famous book The Civilizing Process, viewed the late eighteenth century as precisely the time when the civilizing process became manifest in western civilization, when human beings became consciously aware of their actually being “civilized.” It was only then that the concept of “civilization,” as a new bourgeois reflexive term, itself appeared. This entailed a distinctly historical awareness that humanity was undertaking a long historical mission of advancement toward ever growing progress. As we have already begun to see, this new awareness accorded an important place to the human command of nature, including animals, for the sake of such progress. Important aspects of modern attitudes toward nature and animals crystallized into their more recognizable contemporary forms during the late Enlightenment. Of course the Darwinian Revolution later added a further vital component to the evaluation of nature, and humanity's place in it. But its influence in this respect was built upon the foundations of the preceding century, enhancing rather than replacing them. While an evolutionary perspective could be utilized to advance sensitivity to animals, it could also serve to justify their subjugation, as indeed the subjection of human beings by each other. The democratic implications of Darwinism were theoretically obvious, but their practical realization was more difficult.

The emergence of the modern conceptualization of animals, and their place in human civilization, was a development of the second half of the eighteenth century. The fact that the same period also saw the rise of an unprecedented historical self-awareness was anything but fortuitous. It is therefore no surprise that late eighteenth-century historical literature, in an unprecedented manner, began addressing the importance of the human use of animals as an essential part of the tale of human progress.