India and the Compagnie Des Indes in the Age of the French Revolution

Home , French India, Karaikal, Mascarene Islands, Yanam, Yanaon

India and the Compagnie des Indes in the Age of the French Revolution

ELIZABETH CROSS

abstract This article examines the global history of the Age of Revolution through the lens of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes (1785–94). Established in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the company was not only a commercial entity but also an integral part of a diplomatic strategy for reestablishing the postwar Franco-British relationship. ThegeopoliticalcontextoftheIndianOceanworldforcedFrenchpoliticalandcommer- cial actors to imagine forms of imperial and commercial power that frequently placed French interests under British protection, often in ways that provoked signiﬁcant opposition in the metropole. Amid ideologies of competition, Anglophobia, and militarism, the case of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes reveals how both state and private actors struggled to promote wide-ranging commercial collaboration between France and Britain in the 1780s and 1790s in ways that often anticipated later partnerships between the two empires.

keywords French Revolution, Compagnie des Indes, India, empire

he relationship between France and Britain in the late eighteenth century T has long been understood as one deﬁned by revolutionary nationalism in Europe and aggressive imperial competition for colonies and resources in the Atlantic world.1 This competition appears differently, however, when one examines the late eighteenth-century French Empire from the viewpoint of India, where France’s geopolitical and commercial ambitions had become decidedly subordinate to (and dependent on) those of Britain. A century of French efforts to establish trading posts (comptoirs) on the Indian subcontinent reached its apogee under the governorship of Joseph-Franc¸ois Dupleix (1741–54), whose strategic accommodation and co-option of Indian allies made France the

1. Meyer and Bromley, “La seconde guerre de Cent Ans”;Black,Natural and Necessary Enemies; Crouzet, La guerre économique franco-anglaise. For Anglophobia in eighteenth-century French nationalism, see Bell, Cult of the Nation. For recent challenges to these approaches, see Morieux, Une mer pour deux royaumes; Reinert, Translating Empire, 137; Shovlin, “War and Peace”; and Todd, Free Trade and Its Enemies, 14, 17.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 military terror of other Europeans in the region, especially the British.2 Yet the imperial calamity of the ensuing Seven Years’ War (1756–63) resulted in the near total collapse of France’s Indian empire and, soon thereafter, the bankruptcy and suspension of the monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes, or French East India Company, originally founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1664.3 The five comptoirs of French India that remained after 1763—Pondicherry, Chanderna- gor, Mahé, Yanaon, and Karikal (now Puducherry, Chandannagar, Mahé, Yanam, and Karaikal)—were a small corner of the empire indeed, a recognition that has long wrongly prompted many scholars, in Danna Agmon’s account, to dismiss the comptoirs as “failures and thus insignificant” to the broader arc of French imperial history.4 For this reason French India—and the commercial institutions that shaped it—stands apart from traditional understandings of the meaning of empire itself. Territorial visions of dominance and exploitation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, or in the nineteenth-century imperial projects that followed, do not map cleanly onto a colonial space where France’s political and imperial horizons were tightly circumscribed by both British ambitions and Indian states defending themselves against European incursion. To understand the dynamics oftheFrenchEmpireinIndiainthelateeighteenthcentury,wemustfocus instead on commerce and its institutions.5 Long after such bodies had ceased to rule over France’s North American or Caribbean empires, chartered trading companies—those most peculiar of early modern, transnational actors— continued to govern and trade in the French Indian Ocean. Recent generations of scholars of the British and Dutch East India companies have argued that these companies were not merely economic actors but sites of political conflict and intellectual ferment, as ministers, shareholders, and jurists fought over their geopolitical aims, their sovereign prerogatives, and their financial bottom lines. Often operating as sovereign states in their own right abroad, trading companies had relationships with their home states in the metropole that were often

2. For Dupleix, see Jouveau-Dubreuil, Dupleix; and Mole, “L’économie politique de Joseph Dupleix.” Voltaire himself quipped that all of the British general (and later ﬁrst governor of Bengal) Robert Clive’s victories—and Britain’s later supremacy in India—owed to his pilfering of Dupleix’s strategies and practices (Précis du siècle de Louis XV, 2:141). This claim parallels Voltaire’s arguments elsewhere about the development of English political thought; see Edelstein and Kassabova, “How England Fell off the Map,” 51. 3. The Compagnie des Indes existed in three, largely discrete incarnations: the Colbert Company (1664–1719), the Law Company (1719–69), and the Calonne Company, or Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes (1785–93). For accounts of the establishment and collapse of the Colbert and Law companies, see Dessert and Journet, “Le Lobby Colbert”; Ames, Colbert;Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes; Haudrère, La Compagnie franc¸aise des Indes; and Manning, Fortunes à Faire. 4. Agmon, Colonial Affair,5. 5. For recent examinations of India’s place in the making of French economic thought, see Gott- mann, Global Trade; and Smith, “Myths of South Asian Stasis.”

456 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 fraught with political contestation—these were, after all, institutions composed of private commercial and financial actors whose interests often conflicted with the stated political aims of their corporation’s charter.6 In different contexts, trading companies functioned as both state and nonstate actors, both public and private, both political and financial. As transnational actors, they similarly transcend any attempt at classification into metropole/colony, national/global binaries. The commercial, cultural, and even religious politics of the trading company played out in many geographic venues, including imperial rivalries and ruthless conquests abroad, contestations with private merchant elites in port cities, and political strife within central ministries and legislatures.7 The so-called Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes, established in 1785 and subsequently dissolved in 1793, offers us the perspective of one such “company- state” inthemidstoftheAgeofRevolution.In1787thecomtedeMirabeau decried the reappearance of a monopoly institution for Indian Ocean trade— long after the Seven Years’ War and decades of purportedly laissez-faire attacks against the privileged institutions of the Old Regime—as frankly “inconceivable,” andmanyscholarshavesubsequentlyagreedwithhim.8 The previous company’s monopoly had been suspended in 1769, and as it had long been known as a center of venal “court capitalism,” opponents of the new company in 1785 frequently (and not incorrectly) identified the granting of its monopoly as owing partly to a corrupt bargain between the controller-general, Charles- Alexandre de Calonne, and state creditors whose loans the monarchy relied on.9 From these financially dubious origins, the Nouvelle Compagnie dissolved in a 1793 revolutionary scandal that, in embroiling the Dantonistes—one of the principal revolutionary factions—in a financial fraud, has long been seen as a pivotal episode of the Terror.10

6. For Anglo-Dutch perspectives, see Stern, Company-State; Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt; Weststeijn, “VOC as Company-State”; Mishra, Business of State; and the essays on “corporate constitutionalism” in Petti- grew et al., “Dossier.” 7. For the study of transnational actors in general and the Compagnie des Indes specifically, see Dietze and Naumann, “Revisiting Transnational Actors,” 419–21; and Agmon, Colonial Affair, respectively. For other new scholarship examining French trading companies from these political and cultural dimensions, see Dewar, “‘Y Establir Nostre Auctorité’”; Gottmann, “French-Asian Connections”;Ghachem,“‘No Body to Be Kicked?”; and Roulet, La Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique. 8. Mirabeau, Dénonciation de l’agiotage, 43: “son inconceivable rétablissement.” This phrasing is echoed in Marion, Histoire financière, 1:385. More recent and nuanced formulations of this argument appear in Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France, 126; and Terjanian, Commerce and Its Discontents, 152. 9. For a genealogy of the idea of “court capitalism,” see Kwass, “Capitalism,” 627–28. For the lack of private merchant investment in the early compagnies des Indes, see Dermigny, “East India Company et Com- pagnie des Indes,” 459; and Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société, 389–90, 399–400. For the idea of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes as a quid pro quo, see Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France, 127. 10. The most significant of these studies is Mathiez, Un procès de corruption, written in response to Aulard, Les comptes de Danton. See also Houben, Finance et politique;Lestapis,La “Conspiration de Batz”; and Eude, “Une interprétation ‘non-mathiézienne.’”

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 457

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 This article takes a different approach in presenting the Nouvelle Compa- gnie des Indes as a lens for examining evolving views of the Franco-British relationship in the Age of Revolution. I outline the company’s geopolitical origins and explore the evolution of its relationship with its British rival. Transnational institutions like the Nouvelle Compagnie integrated domestic institutional con- siderations of privilege and reform into larger geopolitical, imperial, and commercial contexts. Accordingly, the company reveals how the unraveling and dismantling of the Old Regime at home and abroad were concurrent processes, driven in this case by the extreme challenge of managing France’s relationship to Britain in Europe and overseas. Amid ideologies of competition, Anglophobia, and militarism, the case of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes also shows that both state and private actors struggled to promote wide-ranging commercial collaboration between France and Britain in the 1780s and even during the 1790s, demonstrating the novel ways that ﬁnancial actors viewed the French Revolu- tion as a moment of economic optimism and experimentation. Although these experiments collapsed amid the turmoil of the Revolution, they were harbingers of later partnerships between these imperial and commercial competitors.

France, India, and Britain in the 1780s

France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War did little to restrain bellicose visions of French power in the Indian Ocean world. As Kate Marsh has observed, the idea of “French India” became in part an imaginary site onto which French political thinkers continually projected fantasies of restored empire.11 In one of his many contributions to the eighteenth-century best seller Histoire des deux Indes (nominally authored by the abbé Raynal), the philosophe Denis Diderot imag- ined a resurgent France using its imperial power in defense of Indian colonial subjects, oppressed by the barbarity of British rule: “The French, seen as the lib- erators of Hindustan, will emerge from [their present] state of humiliation . . . [and] become the idol of the princes & peoples of Asia, if the revolution they will have brought becomes for [the French] a lesson in moderation. Their commerce will be extended & ﬂourishing, as long as they know to be just.”12 Some scholars see in this redemptive language of imperial rebirth and liberation the roots of the later, republican mission civilisatrice.13 At the time, these grandi- ose visions were more commonly expressed on a practical level in the form of a ministerial repertoire of diplomatic and imperial strategies aimed at shoring up

11. Marsh, Fictions of 1947, 20, 61, 66, 215. 12. Raynal et al., Histoire philosophique,vol.1,bk.4,chap.33,544.Alltranslationsaremineunless otherwise noted. 13. Strugnell, “View from Afar,” 22.

458 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 French influence in the Indian Ocean. Many of these emerged during the tenure of Louis XV’s principal minister, Etienne-François, duc de Choiseul, who sought to reestablish French power after the humiliation of the Seven Years’ War. The best-studied of these schemes were plans for the economic revitaliza- tion of the Mascarene Islands of Ile-de-France and Ile Bourbon: known at the time as the “key to the Indies,” the two islands were regarded as an essential naval base for future invasions of Asia.14 On the Indian subcontinent itself, colonial officials navigated tentative alliances with Indian states, principally the Maratha Confederacy and the sultanate of Mysore, recognizing these two states as strong sources of resistance to British rule and thereby essential allies of French geopolitical ambition.15 As evident in the contribution by Pernille Røge to this forum, local dynamics and the motivations of non-European rulers often had significant impacts on the shaping of metropolitan ideas, strategies, and policies. France’s engagement in the American Revolution between 1777 and 1783 offered a concrete opportunity to imagine both the implementation of these strategies and the possibility of reestablishing French power in India. The French minister of the navy during the latter stages of the war, Charles-Eugène-Gabriel de La Croix, marquis de Castries (1780–87), not only was a Choiseul protégé but also had served as a syndic in the Compagnie des Indes in the 1760s. Convinced of the geostrategic importance of the Indian Ocean for France, Castries aggres- sively pushed for the expansion of French military engagement against the Brit- ish in India throughout the American war effort.16 He personally supervised the 1781 launch of the Indian Ocean fleet, placed under the command of Pierre- André de Suffren, later known as the Bailli de Suffren. The fleet won several critical engagements with the British navy in the Indian Ocean and landed in India in June 1783, joining ground forces marshaled by the formidable Hyder Ali of Mysore (and subsequently his son and heir, Tipu Sultan). Yet hopes of extend- ing France’s decisive Atlantic victories to the Indian Ocean arena were abruptly dashed with the arrival of news of peace in Europe. The American Revolution ended before the combined forces of Mysore and France could win a significant land victory against the British East India Company’s troops.17

14. Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (henceforth ANOM), C2 110, “Mémoire sur le Commerce de la France en Asie,” ca. 1783 (fol. 204). For ecological and agricultural projects in the Mascarenes during this period, see Grove, Green Imperialism, chap. 5; and Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island, 65–75. 15. The politics of French alliance making in India in this period have been examined in Margerison, “French Visions of Empire”; and Margerison, “Rogue Diplomacy.” 16. Tarrade, “Le Maréchal de Castries.” 17. For Suffren’s expedition and Castries’s involvement, see Haudrère, “La Révolution de l’Inde,” 159–68. For the expedition’s untimely end, see Tarrade, Le commerce colonial, 2:495–96.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 459

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 After the war’s conclusion, this sense of an incomplete victory was com- pounded, in the eyes of many French officials and observers, by the apparent political and military weaknesses of their British rival. The American Revolution had destabilized the British ruling class at home, revealed systemic resistance to British rule in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and left Britain sad- dled with an immense national debt. French observers like the comte d’Adhé- mar, the ambassador to Britain, viewed the parliamentary contestations that unfolded around these issues as signs of the increasing precariousness of British imperial power.18 Adhémar was especially fascinated by the ongoing political turmoil engulfing the British East India Company. The company’s massive, private war debts furnished its Whig political opponents, such as Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, with ample opportunities to attack its endemic corruption and argue for financial and political reform, raising constitutional questions about its legal, sovereign status within the British Empire. In denouncing renegade company officials like the former governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, critics like Burke argued that it was morally, politically, and financially misguided to invest a mere “merchant” with the prerogatives that were properly a state’s. Accordingly, opposing reform bills proposed by Fox (1783) and later William Pitt the Younger (1784) advocated for tighter government surveillance over the company’s patronage networks and capital, earning the enduring ire of its directors, shareholders, and their parliamentary supporters.19 For Adhémar, this disunity among British political and financial elites about the status of their colonial project in India afforded critical opportunities for France to strike. These sentiments were echoed in the popular press by writers like Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, whose 1784 Tableau de la situation actuelle des anglois dans les Indes orientales evoked a comparison between France’s assistance of the American colonists and their Indian counterparts, who still awaited liberation from British tyranny. Similar to the dynamic observed in Mathieu Ferradou’s contribution to this forum, French imperial visions were frequently forged in opposition to understandings of British imperial realities. To achieve these geopolitical goals in the long run, French policy makers turned toward commercial institutions in the short run, advocating for the establishment of a “new” Compagnie des Indes to replace the one that had collapsed in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. Despite the advent of laissez- faire thought that challenged practices of privilege and monopoly, a Compagnie

18. See Archives des Affaires Etrangères (henceforth AAE), Correspondance politique Angleterre, 548– 49, 552, 556. 19. For the Fox/Pitt India Bill debates and the trial of Hastings, see the varying accounts in Suther- land, East India Company, chap. 13; Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, 207–28, 366–70; Dirks, Scandal of Empire; and Travers, Ideology and Empire, 210–23.

460 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 des Indes continued to be understood as an “integral part of French grandeur and power.”20 It could also function as a potential tool of rearmament for the state and the navy as they “quietly prepar[ed]” for the next war.21 Not only could the company shuttle munitions eastward in its ships, but expanded trade with India could finance future military expenditures. Since 1769 all taxes levied on the Indies trade had been designated entirely to the profit of the navy, meaning that an expansion of trade between France and the Indian subcontinent would directly support the financial burdens of remilitarization.22 As one naval official noted, under such a public-private arrangement, commerce would serve as a useful “mask” for underlying military objectives.23 Other French officials presented potent alternatives to this bellicose vision of France’s role in India—and of the Compagnie des Indes itself. The most significant of them was Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s foreign minister between 1774 and 1787. Having played a key role in organizing the American revolutionary war effort, he sought to take advantage of the new peace to transform the Franco-British geopolitical world order. He wished to dismantle the “old prejudice[s]” that trapped the French and the British in a relentless cycle of war and debt—one whose dimensions for France were becom- ing increasingly apparent after the war.24 In the early 1780s Vergennes took an active hand in financial and commercial politics, in part due to influence of one of his key advisers, the physiocrat Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours, who promoted an ostensible geopolitics of doux commerce within the French ministry. With Dupont’s aid, Vergennes developed commercial policies that saw commerce not as a tool of war but as a diplomatic strategy for fostering bet- ter relations between France and rival European powers.25 When the ministry drew up a list of administrative goals for renegotiating the Franco-British relationship after the American Revolution, the two most important ones were the drafting of a new, far-reaching commercial treaty with Britain and the

20. Margerison, “Shareholders’ Revolt,” 50. For contemporary examples of this language, see ANOM, C2 110, untitled mémoire by D’Esmondant, July 17, 1781 (fol. 182); ANOM, F2C 12, “Mémoire sur le Commerce des Indes,” anon., 1784 copy; ANOM, C2 108, “Memoire sur le Commerce de l’Inde,” anon., Nov. 1772 (fol. 195); New York Public Library (KVR 5065), Lettre d’un Indien à un auteur partisan du commerce de l’Inde, par l’entremise d’une compagnie exclusive (n.d.). 21. ANOM, C2 164, “Projet de lettre pour M. le Mis de Bussi,” Oct. 25, 1783. 22. ANOM, C2 110, “Précis sur l’état actuel des établissemens de la France aux Grandes Indes . . . ” (fol. 162v); C2 109, untitled (fol. 177v). 23. ANOM, C2 113, “Mémoire sur l’Inde,” by Conway, Feb. 1784 (fol. 17v). 24. AAE, Correspondance politique Angleterre, 540, Vergennes to Rayneval, Feb. 1, 1783 (fol. 319v). 25. Price, Preserving the Monarchy, chap. 3. For Dupont’s inﬂuence on Vergennes and the politics of doux commerce, see Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes,403,437;Cheney,“False Dawn,” 472; and Vardi, Physiocrats, 189–90.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 461

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 formation of a Compagnie des Indes.26 According to the Peace of Paris in 1783, this new bilateral commercial treaty—which would eventually be called the “Eden Treaty”—would reestablish Franco-British commercial relations “on the Basis of Reciprocity and mutual Convenience.”27 To further secure this tentative peace, Vergennes sought to foreclose potential avenues of conflict throughout the world, such as in India. Ensuring peace- ful relations with Britain would forestall the need for the enormous costs of refortifying and defending France’s Indian comptoirs and shoring up relations with putative Indian allies. Several years later, in response to the fiscal pressures of 1787–88, this mentality would ultimately lead to the so-called military evacua- tion of India, or the relocation of all French military garrisons from the comptoirs to the Mascarene Islands.28 If French trade could be protected through alternate means, such as through commercial agreements with the British and Indian sovereigns, there was no need to further support the intensive costs of transporting and provisioning French troops on the other side of the world. In the 1783 peace treaty, the British granted French merchants “a safe, free and independent Trade . . . whether they exercise it individually, or united in a Com- pany” in all parts of India, including British-controlled Bengal—a guarantee of commercial freedom and protection from interference, from which, unlike other European competitors in India (such as the Dutch or the Danish), French merchants alone could peacefully profit.29 Accordingly, Vergennes (and Calonne, as his ally in the Finance Ministry) claimed the project of creating a Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes to shape it toward these pacific views—something that the private financial actors behind the new company also sought for their own commercial purposes. The French and British companies had a long tradition of attempted collaborations and détentes—often pursued in direct opposition to state aims—such as their abortive nonaggression pact of 1754, which aimed at putting an end to the costly Car- natic Wars.30 Building on these early visions of Franco-British collaboration, a Huguenot expatriate banker in London, James Bourdieu, developed a scheme

26. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Joly de Fleury 1442, untitled (fol. 18); “Objets importants . . . ” (fol. 35v). Joly de Fleury consulted with Isaac Panchaud, banker and former shareholder of the Law Com- pany; see AAE, Mémoires et documents Asie,7,“Réfléxions générales sur les possessions et le commerce . . . ,” by Panchaud, Feb. 8, 1783 (fol. 417); Joly de Fleury to Vergennes, Feb. 12, 1783 (fols. 424–28). 27. The stipulation was contained in Article 18 of Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship,15.See Tarrade, Le commerce colonial,2:695;Whatmore,Against War and Empire, 186–89, 200–204; and Walton, “Fall from Eden,” 45–46. 28. For restraining naval expenditure, including in India, see Hardman, Louis XVI, 129. For the evac- uation of Pondicherry, see Rapport, “‘Complaints Lost in the Wind.’” 29. Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 13. 30. As argued in Shovlin, “Securing Asian Trade”; and Shovlin, “Commerce, Not Conquest.”

462 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 in the 1770s to establish what has been described as a putative “international cartel.”31 The plan stipulated that the French monarchy establish a new Compagnie des Indes that would contractually purchase significant portions of its cargoes directly from the British East India Company. A onetime collaborator of the former director-general of finance, Jacques Necker, Bourdieu relentlessly cultivated financial and ministerial allies to this project—including Castries, who saw it as a potential engine of tax revenues for the navy. With the establishment of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes in April 1785, Vergennes and Calonne saw the project instead as a means of cultivating Franco-British commercial relations, in addition to shoring up the Nouvelle Compagnie’s own bottom line. Accord- ingly, they authorized Bourdieu and one of the company’s directors, Augustin Périer, to negotiate such an arrangement in London with the British Court of Directors.32 The initial proposals for this agreement on the French side envisioned an expansive partnership between the two companies. To meet French demand for Indian cottons, Périer stipulated that the French would purchase a minimum of three shipments of textile cargoes directly from the British company. In exchange, the French would gain the right to sell an equivalent amount of tea from China directly to Britain.33 French merchants had long taken advantage of Britain’s high taxes on tea to sell large quantities of contraband to Britain and its colonists, and after American independence, French officials hoped to legalize these lucrative trade routes.34 Establishing a strong export trade with the new United States was one of the ways France could now “consolidate and expand” commerce with Asia.35 However, political and financial pressures on the British side forced a narrowing of the ambitions of the arrangement, such that the final contract was restricted to the purchase of Indian textiles in Bengal: as the “bridgehead” of British power, Bengal was a notoriously perilous market for other European traders.36 The final agreement committed the French to

31. Nussbaum, “Formation of the New East India Company,” 490. 32. Cleveland Public Library, East India Company Manuscript Collection (091.92 Ea77p85), Bour- dieu Chollet to Court of Directors, Aug. 13, 1784; “Extract of a Memorial presented to M. de Calonne, the Controller General of France . . . ”; Calonne to Bourdieu Chollet, Apr. 26, 1784. Vergennes’s awareness of the negotiations between Calonne and Bourdieu is discussed in Archives Nationales (henceforth AN), T 38 (Papiers Huber) 1–2, “Exposé des services . . . ” (pc 548). 33. The National Archives at Kew (henceforth TNA), PRO 30/8/360, “Observations sur les conditions proposes . . . ” (fol. 161), “Bases des arrangements de commerce . . . ” (fols. 163v, 165). 34. Eacott, Selling Empire, 227–28. 35. ANOM, C2 110, “Précis sur l’état actuel des établissemens de la France aux grandes Indes . . . ,” Georges Gougenot, 1780 (fol. 135). 36. Marshall, Bengal. The persistence of British attacks on French, Dutch, and Danish trade in Ben- gal was often cited as a principal cause of the 1760s bankruptcy of the old Compagnie des Indes, as is argued in ANOM, C2 108,BrunytoBoynes,Dec.11,1771(fol.32v);and“Reponse à une memoire sur l’Inde faite à

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 463

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 purchasing forty lakhs of rupees (or 4 million rupees; 1 lakh=100,000 rupees) per year in goods from the British company in Calcutta.37 The British further demanded inclusion of a noncompetition clause by which the French company would renounce all operations in Bengal for the duration of the agreement.38 The British East India Company recognized that this arrangement served its basic financial interests, but some of its directors and shareholders felt that it uncomfortably refracted their own internal political struggles. The members of the British Court of Directors who supported the treaty with the French company saw it as a way of earning needed revenues on their own side, to pay down the debts incurred by a state of near-constant war in India. It also represented a potential boon for the ongoing reform of the East India Company. In 1784 Wil- liam Pitt the Younger’s ministry enacted an India Act, restructuring the British company and placing it under the supervision of a ministerial Board of Control that had the power to influence the company’s governance and patronage. The act aimed in no small part at curbing illicit practices by rogue company agents, such as their use of French financial channels to “remit” illicit profits from India to Europe.39 As the planned agreement with the Compagnie des Indes would effectively legalize and formalize trade between agents of the two companies, it stood to cut off the source of these funds.40 For this reason, Pitt ada- mantly supported strengthening commercial bonds between the two companies.41 This firm ministerial endorsement led the British company’s own recalcitrant directors and officers—including Warren Hastings—to see the treaty as a further attempt by the cabinet to intervene in company business.42 Yet, rail as they might against this “humiliation” at the hands of the French, the

Fontainebleau,” Oct. 30, 1772 (fol. 154). The provisions on the tea trade were scrapped due to Pitt’s 1784 Commutation Act, described in Crouzet, La guerre économique franco-anglaise, 60–64. 37. Equal to 9,600,000 livres tournois or £400,000, as per the conversions in Furber, John Company at Work, 349. 38. English and French copies of the final treaty are in AAE, Mémoires et documents Asie,5,“Heads of Articles as the basis of a treaty and agreement between the English and French East India Companys [sic]” (fols. 190–201v); “Projet d’articles qui peuvent servir de baze au Traité et Convention à faire entre les Compies anglaise et française des Indes-Orientales . . . ” (fols. 202–15). 39. Sutherland, East India Company,409;Philips,East India Company,34;Bowen,Business of Empire,75–76.For“remittance,” see Furber, John Company at Work, 30. TNA, FO 27/17, Carmarthen to Hailes, Aug. 5, 1785 (fols. 116–116v), Hailes to Carmarthen, Aug. 18, 1785 (fols. 132–33v), indicate an awareness that Bourdieu’s firm was still largely in charge of this shadow network, as shown in Bourdieu’s negotiations throughout 1784: Cleveland Public Library, East India Company Manuscript Collection (091.92 Ea77p85), Bourdieu Chollet to Devaynes, June 4, 1784; minutes of Secret Court of Directors, Aug. 18, 1784. 40. TNA, PRO 30/8/361, “Mr. Baring’s Thoughts on the French Proposal,” undated (fols. 38–40v). 41. British Library (hereafter BL), India Office Records (hereafter IOR) I/1/17, “To the Court of Directors...,” Nov.4,1785(fol.84);“At a Secret Court of Directors the 15th August 1785/the 17th August 1785.” 42. Sutherland, East India Company, chap. 13; Furber, “East India Directors in 1784,” 480; BL, IOR I/ 1/17, “Extract of a Letter from Warren Hastings Esq. to Laurence Sulivan Esq. . . . ” (fols. 130–37).

464 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 British company could hardly afford to pass up such a lucrative contract. The Court of Directors approved the agreement with the Nouvelle Compagnie in late November 1785.43 When the French negotiators returned to Versailles with the treaty, it met with criticisms that often recalled those used by Hastings and his allies. Although they had once advocated for it, the French ministers now saw the treaty as an attempt by the British to reduce the French company to a docile cus- tomer. As Dupont de Nemours observed, the costs and risks associated with such a long-distance trade with unreliable partners would ensure that losses would be passed on to French consumers, compounding the negative economic effects of the company’s monopoly.44 Moreover, the proposed noncompetition clause for Bengal contravened the commercial rights the British had guaranteed to France in the 1783 peace treaty, thereby debasing the “glorious peace” that France had won.45 If their principal aim was to reestablish the Franco-British relationship on equitable terms, any agreement that retroactively renegotiated thepeaceinthenameofshort-termﬁnancialgainwas“not only useless, but embarrassing.”46 Despite the best efforts of James Bourdieu and the directors of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes, they were ordered by Louis XVI’s ministers to refuse the British company’s terms.47 The collapse of this agreement reveals the mismatched expectations of state and private actors as to the dimensions of the Franco-British relationship and the purpose of the French company itself. From the state perspective, Ver- gennes rejected the agreement not due to any underlying hostility to the British East India Company but because the agreement treated the two corporate entities inequitably, with the interests of the French placed secondary to those of the British. On the French side, both commercial and state actors demanded far more expansive visions of commercial partnership than the British would accept. This discrepancy reﬂected the realities of British power in the Indian Ocean: the French needed equal commercial partnership, but the British East India Company sought a client. As for the Nouvelle Compagnie itself, the king’s ministers saw it as a political tool in the service of their own militaristic or

43. BL, IOR I/1/17, “No. 96: At a Secret Court of Directors held on Wednesday the 30th November 1785” (fols. 102–3). 44. AAE, Mémoires et documents Asie, 5, Dupont to Vergennes, Dec. 29, 1784 (fol. 121). 45. AAE, Mémoires et documents Asie,5,“Observations des administrateurs [et] remarques [de M. de Rayneval],” 1785 (fol. 152); “Mémoire” by Rayneval, Jan. 1786 (fol. 173); AAE, Correspondance politique Angle- terre, 552, Adhémar to Vergennes, Feb. 26, 1785 (fols. 260v, 256–256v), Mar. 22, 1785 (fol. 383v). 46. AAE, Mémoires et documents Asie,5,“Observations des administrateurs [et] remarques [de M. de Rayneval],” 1785 (fols. 152–69v). 47. ANOM, 8AQ 328, Calonne to Paris administration, Mar. 18, 1786. See also TNA, PRO PC/1/123, dossier 82, “Rapport fait au Conseil d’état par M. de Calonne, le 21 septembre 1786.”

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 465

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 diplomatic aims regarding Britain. Private financial actors, by contrast, saw the French company as a profit-driven trading enterprise—one with the right to navigate its own commercial relationships with foreign entities without the direct approval of the French state. From the payment of military expenses in Pondicherry to battles over the distribution of dividends to Parisian shareholders, this pattern of political meddling in what the company’s directors and employees regarded as private financial matters created a lasting sense of ani- mosity between company and crown.48

The Compagnie des Indes and the French Revolution This sense of their own private interests led the directors and shareholders of the Compagnie des Indes, like many other corporatist Old Regime institutions, to initially welcome 1789 as a moment in which they could reassert their own rights and prerogatives at the expense of the central state.49 The company’s directors solicited comments from their own agents and employees to prepare a cahier de doléances of their own, although the cahier was ultimately never drafted.50 But the nascent National Assembly set its sights on the company’s monopoly in early 1790, as longtime merchant resentment against its privileges boiled over. For merchant deputies in the National Assembly, such as those of Bordeaux and Nantes, the monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes was exem- plary of the “illegitimate” privileges being dismantled by the assembly: a privilege destructive of “the natural right of commerce” that could be revoked without indemnity.51 Yet, as Rebecca L. Spang has argued, “the Old Regime did not literally crumble. Instead, it had to be taken apart and unpicked stitch by stitch.”52 Like ﬁnancial and commercial privileges at home that presented discrete challenges of social order, the dismantling of institutions like the Compa- gnie des Indes entailed grappling with not only questions of economic utility but also geopolitical questions of diplomacy and empire. As it had been in the 1780s, the question of the company’s fate was entangled with political anxieties about the balance of power, potential for future military operations, and perceptions of national decline. In arguing over

48. Examples of such discontent with ofﬁcial interference appear in ANOM, 8AQ 15, Paris adminis- trationtoMoracin,Oct.31,1787;8AQ328,LamberttoParisadministration,Mar.25,1788;C2 114, Paris administration to Lambert, Mar. 26, 1788 (fols. 166–167v). 49. Kaplan, La ﬁn des corporations, xv, 363, 387, 415. 50. For their planned list of grievances, see ANOM, 8AQ 228, Paris administration to Boyer and Moracin, July 11, 1789. 51. For the idea of “illegitimate” privilege, see Spang, Stuff and Money, 84. For merchant-led attacks on the company’s privilege, see Archives parlementaires, 12:529 (Guinebaud de Saint-Mesme, Nantes), also 519 (Nairac, Bordeaux), 524 (Bégouen, Caux). 52. Spang, Stuff and Money,17.

466 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 the validity of the company’s monopoly, deputies frequently made claims not unlike those of Louis Monneron, the National Assembly’s deputy for the East Indies, who believed the assembly had the duty to fully reestablish the military garrisons of Pondicherry, shamefully “evacuated” by the monarchy for cost reasons. For Monneron and his interlocutors, France had a special destiny to “play alargerole” on the subcontinent, a role that could “carrythegloryofthe National Assembly to the far reaches of Asia.”53 Revolutionaries understood that their actions would recast French influence throughout the world. In the Indian Ocean arena, even if their aims were financially unfeasible, deputies insisted on the transnational dimension of their duty to undo the acknowledged damage and humiliations of the Old Regime. In the National Assembly’s April 1790 debate on the company’s monopoly, deputies both for and against its abolition saw the question as centered around the company’s role in checking British power in India. On the right, defenders of the company’s privilege, like Jean-Barthélemy Le Couteulx de Canteleu and Jean-Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil, reminded the assembly that the British East India Company—and the great counterrevolutionary bogeyman himself, Pitt— could only profit from the legal destruction of their French rival.54 Pierre-Victor Malouet and the abbé Bérardier accordingly insisted that the company served an essential diplomatic role in maintaining relations between France and essential Indian allies against the British, like Tipu Sultan of Mysore.55 On the other side, deputies opposed to the company’s monopoly denounced its inefficacy in checking British power in Asia. It had failed to use its commercial largesse to adequately assist the state with supporting the costs of military garrisons, and as François-Pascal Delattre of Abbeville argued, its attempts to build a cartel with the British East India Company showed that it had “dishonored the flag . . . [and] prostituted itself to the English.”56 Some of the strongest antipriv- ilege voices in the assembly made use of these nationalistic arguments. During the debate an altercation between the pro-company, archconservative abbé Maury and Dupont de Nemours, ended with the latter proudly announcing that his own preferred policy for the Indies trade would have brought a large number of French warships to the Indian Ocean, something that could have “put Bengal under French domination.”57 In projecting revolutionary nationalism outward

53. Monneron, Mémoire lu à l’AssembléeNationale,5;ArchivesDépartementales de la Gironde, C 4366, A nosseigneurs de l’Assemblée Nationale (pc 83); Archives Départementales de Loire-Atlantique, C 608, Chambre de Commerce de Nantes to Mosneron/Beylié, Nov. 13, 1790 (fol. 176v). 54. Archives parlementaires, 12:526–27 (Duval d’Eprémesnil), 530 (Le Couteulx de Canteleu). 55. Archives parlementaires, 12:519 (Bérardier), 529 (Malouet). 56. Archives parlementaires, 12:534–35 (Delattre). 57. Archives parlementaires, 12:516.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 467

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 into colonial and non-European spaces, the assembly’s debates demonstrate how imperial commitments and ideologies converged across revolutionary political binaries of Left and Right, often giving prominent voice to an unex- pected cast of deputies and officials (as Manuel Covo’s contribution to this forum also shows). Yet the National Assembly’s abolition of the company’s monopoly in spring 1790 paradoxically also enabled its corporators to establish their own vision of the Franco-British relationship in the revolutionary era.58 The loss of the monopoly transformed the Compagnie des Indes as an institution, as shareholders, bankers, and merchants began to ask whether that institution—whose underlying assets were left intact by the assembly—was capable of adapting to the new, revolutionary climate. Although protected and legitimized by the Old Regime, the company’s relationship with the monarchy had at times, in the view of these financial actors, been far from ideal, as ministers meddled in matters of internal company governance and forced seemingly inequitable financial arrangements on them. Accordingly, certain shareholders and directors recognized the potential to use the sweeping transformations of the Revolution to recast the company as a totally private institution, governed by its proprietors. The Revolution offered financial actors the ability to reject the company’s former status as hybrid, public-private partnership in favor of a vision of the company as a fully private financial actor, independent of political and diplomatic mandates. Their ideas leaned on a firm belief in what Kenneth Margerison has termed “shareholder-citizenship,” which came to have strong ideological resonance in the revolutionary climate.59 The directors and shareholders who supported the continuation of the company’s trade drew explicitly on the revolutionary idea that, just as sovereignty resided in the nation, sovereignty over the company and its assets resided in the shareholders: their charter and monopoly, granted by the king, only ever functioned as a stand-in for their own executive authority.60 As one shareholder, Barthélemy Huber, privately explained, the company had long endured a “despotic system” of ministerial governance, but a reformed version of the institution could “sever the root of these evils.”61 The Revolution gave the company, as it gave the nation, the chance to regenerate itself. Addressing the shareholder assembly, one of the directors, Abel-François Caroillon de Vandeul, said that “it was only after the

58. For the abolition of the monopoly, see Archives parlementaires, 12:535. 59. This practice began in the 1760s, amid the ﬁnancial chaos unleashed in the “second” Compagnie des Indes by the Seven Years’ War, see Margerison, “Shareholders’ Revolt,” 26. 60. The inﬂuence of revolutionary understandings of sovereignty is made explicit in ANOM, 8AQ 11, deliberations of Apr. 12, Aug. 27, and Oct. 25, 1790. 61. AN, T 38 (1–2), “Idées sur la re-composition de la Cie. des Indes.”

468 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 new order of things which reestablished every citizen in his natural and political rights, that you were offered to [reclaim] your own.”62 Revolutionary rheto- ric proved a potent “cognitive model” for developing claims of shareholder governance—to say nothing of an opportunistic device for demanding the set- tling of a host of petty financial grievances the shareholders had borne against the absolute state.63 Chief among these proposed reforms was the revisiting of the company’s abortive treaty with its British counterpart. Now that the French government itself seemed unable to stop them for reasons of state, the directors openly renewed their overtures to the British Court of Directors through their erstwhile partner, James Bourdieu.64 Bourdieu and his collaborators within the Compa- gnie des Indes saw the revolutionary moment as one of undeniable commercial opportunity in India. Writing to Huber, Bourdieu stated that “therewasnevera time so propitious to a French Company to trade to India, as the present.”65 The British East India Company now faced a geopolitical situation that seemingly rendered it amenable to a partnership with the French that might furnish needed sources of revenue at home: the first years of the Revolution also marked the beginning of the Third Anglo-Mysore war between the British company and Tipu Sultan. As a result, the early 1790s were a moment when the British were particularly in need of the funds that a French contract might supply and, moreover, particularly ill conditioned to resist French inroads into their trade on the subcontinent. As Bourdieu told Huber, “Parisistheplacetomakemoney,& England is the country to enjoy it.”66 From a strictly financial perspective in 1790,aCompagniedesIndesfreeofgovernmentoversightandexemptfrom sovereign expenses in India must have seemed a lucrative investment in contrast with its British counterpart, now tightly regulated by Pitt’s India Act and, far worse for its investors, its bottom line drained by costly wars.67 From the perspective of these private financial actors, the French Revolution not only fos- tered financial optimism but also created new opportunities for cross-Channel commercial collaborations. These high-minded aspirations to transnational commercial partnership ultimately did not come to fruition. Despite these insistent French overtures, the British Court of Directors was hesitant to agree to such an arrangement,

62. ANOM, 8AQ 11, deliberations of Apr. 12, 1790, fol. 23. 63. Freeman, Pearson, and Taylor, Shareholder Democracies, 102. 64. AN, T 38 (1–2), undated letter [summer 1790] from Bourdieu to Huber. 65. AN, T 38 (1–2), undated letter from Bourdieu to Huber (pcs. 432–33). 66. AN, T 38, letter from James Bourdieu to Huber, Dec. 31, 1790 (pcs 30–32). 67. Philips, East India Company, 3, 34.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 469

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 unsure as they were of the legal status of this Compagnie des Indes that claimed to be “independent of government.”68 This misunderstanding on the British side is a further testament to the uniqueness of the French Revolution as a moment of commercial and institutional experimentation: private, “unincorpo- rated companies” of this nature were rare and of dubious legality in eighteenth- century Britain.69 Yet the company’s ongoing connections to Britain helped embroil it in revolutionary turmoil and scandal. One of the principal architects of this abortive Franco-British rapprochement, Barthélemy Huber, took advantage of one of his many trips to London to negotiate with the British Court of Directors to emigrate permanently in late 1792.70 Many foreign investors num- bered among the company’s “shareholder-citizens,” including the notorious Walter Boyd and Jean-Baptiste Vandenyver, whose own mysterious financial dealings prompted repeated inquiries by the revolutionary government.71 The company’s revolutionary path came to a spectacular end with the so- called affairedelaCompagniedesIndesin 1793. In July a small cabal of Jacobin deputies in the National Convention, led by Joseph Delaunay d’Angers, denounced the Compagnie des Indes for its involvement in a tax evasion scheme since late 1792. The deputies responsible for securing the restitution of these funds instead accepted bribes from the company’s directors to illicitly edit their decree in the shareholders’ favor. The incident was, in many respects, routine influence trafficking of a kind that had long been formally institutionalized under the Old Regime and that, in the parliamentary politics of early modern Britain, was certainly the modus operandi of the British East India Company.72 This very point was not lost on those who subsequently prosecuted the recipi- ents of these bribes. At their trial, the accusateur public, Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, pointed out that some of the accused had never understood why French legislators should “refuse to make a fortune . . . in producing a good decree; in England they boast about it in open Parliament,” and he suggested that the Compagnie des Indes had even gone so far as to pay its corrupt agents

68. Eden, Journal and Correspondence, 2:451. 69. Freeman, Pearson, and Taylor, Shareholder Democracies, chap. 3. 70. For his emigration, see Huber’s dossier in AN, F7 5636. 71. For Boyd and his enduring role in xenophobic revolutionary discourse, see Mathiez, “Le banquier Boyd et ses amis.” Jean-Paul Marat and the agent of the Comité de Sûreté Générale, François Héron, tar- geted Vandenyver in Complot d’une Banqueroute générale de la France as part of a broad effort by foreign financiers to manipulate currency in France during the Old Regime. This denunciation—as well as Vandeny- ver’s role as financial agent for Madame du Barry—led to his arrest and execution. See his police file in AN, F7 477539; and Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship, 184–85, 247. 72. Cross, “L’anatomie d’un scandale.” For the British East India Company and the many attempts to reform its parliamentary influence, see Travers, Ideology and Empire, chap. 6; Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, chap. 7; and, more controversially, Dirks, Scandal of Empire.

470 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 in pounds sterling rather than in assignats.73 Such an institution and its financial minions were, in the final revolutionary analysis, more British than French. As a result of the tax evasion scandal and the affaire, the National Conven- tion ordered the shuttering of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes. The liquidation of its business, however, was an arduous financial ordeal that could not be resolved with any purportedly definitive decree by the Convention.74 The ensuing decades of naval war with Britain made it impossible for the company to col- lect on outstanding insurance policies underwritten in London, or for its foreign shareholders, like Walter Boyd, to claim assets that had been sequestered by the revolutionary government. Some of these claims were settled in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, but others remained unresolved at the time of the company’s ultimate disbandment in 1875.75 The company’s liquidation-without-end encouraged relentless claims making on the state by former shareholders, directors, and their descendants: for financial and imperial actors, the experience of the French Revolution frequently only ingrained an Old Regime rentier mentality.76 The Revolution dismantled the corporate financial institutions of the Old Regime, but practices, attitudes, and even key actors often stayed the same. From an imperial perspective, the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes emerged from competing visions of French power and left them in its wake. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the myth of “lost India” both helped shape competitive ideologies of imperial resurgence and became a site of memo- rialization for a bygone colonial era.77 Yet amid these competitive dynamics of empire—and in spite of the decades of war that followed its collapse—the efforts toward Franco-British rapprochement that had long characterized company policy turned out to portend later developments. With the abolition of the British East India Company’s monopoly in 1813, Britain opened India’s trade to all other European nations, abandoning the long-held “principles of colonial exclusion” that helped sink the abortive company treaty in 1785–86.78

73. AN, W 342 (3), “Acte d’accusation” (dossier 61). The purported payment in British pounds is described in AN, W 173, “Delaunay d’Angers” and “Notes tirées du rapport d’Amar.” 74. The company’s liquidation was the subject of two decrees by the Convention: the first, fraudu- lently amended, Collection générale des décrets rendus,42:154–55(17vendémiaire an II), and the second, 53:125–27 (17 fructidor an II). 75. Conan, La dernière Compagnie française, 143–85. For the British claims adjudicated after the Congress of Vienna, see AAE, Mémoires et documents Angleterre, 147, Dossier “Compagnie des Indes” (fols. 103–70), Dossier “Compagnie des Indes: Actionnaires” (fols. 171–93v); Mémoires et documents Asie 5(fols. 351–92). 76. Examples of these claims are found in ANOM, 8AQ 375, “Une classe de citoyens victims mal- heureuses . . . ”; 8AQ 376, “Reclamation de sept ou huit cent familles.” This echoes arguments about postrev- olutionary financial behavior in Lewis, “Legacies of French Slave-Ownership”; and Cheney, Cul de Sac, 215. 77. Agmon, “Failure on Display,” 882; Marsh, Fictions of 1947;MarshandFrith,France’s Lost Empires. 78. Eacott, Selling Empire, 348; Webster, Twilight of the East India Company.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 471

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Accordingly, in 1824 the liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say penned an extraor- dinary essay calling for the rejection of lingering French colonial ambitions in India, where “[Great Britain] has become the protector of property . . . justice is equitably rendered . . . the most perfect religious tolerance exists in British India . . . [where] peace reigns.”79 This passage is remarkable not for its delu- sional view of the social and cultural beneﬁcence of British rule in India but for its implication for French colonial policy: its advocacy of an acceptance of Brit- ish rule on the subcontinent, in exchange for the protection of French trade. His writings echoed precisely the vision of partnership entertained by both state and private, commercial actors in establishing the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes and in plotting its unsuccessful consortium with its British counterpart. That same vision reappeared forcefully later in the nineteenth century, as a kind of Franco-British “condominium” emerged, coalescing around shared commercial projects of empire rather than only schemes of military conquest and settler colonialism.80 The nineteenth-century age of empire was not only a story of competitive European nationalisms but also one of transnational collaboration in the perpetuation of imperial rule. Finding the antecedents of such a system in theageoftheFrenchRevolutionshowsthatthereisstillmuchtorevealabout that period’s role in the creation of modern world orders.

ELIZABETH CROSS is assistant professor of history at Georgetown University.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editors and the anonymous reviewers for French Historical Studies for their constructive feedback on the various drafts of this article. Special thanks go to Manuel Covo and Megan Maruschke, the organizers of this forum, for their generous invitation to participate and for their thorough and immensely helpful guidance and feedback at every stage of the process. The research for the larger project underlying this article was generously supported by Mellon fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Council on Library and Information Resources, as well as funding from Georgetown University, Harvard University, the Newberry Library, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

References

Agmon, Danna. A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India. Ithaca, NY, 2017. Agmon, Danna. “Failure on Display: The Meaning of Eighteenth-Century French India in Twentieth-Century Administration and Historiography.” Journal of Modern History 91, no. 4 (2019): 848–82.

79. Say, Essai historique, 2, 16. 80. Todd, “French Imperial Meridian,” 161–63, 173.

472 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Ames, Glenn Joseph. Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade. DeKalb, IL, 1996. Aulard, F. A. Les comptes de Danton. Paris, 1888. Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge, MA, 2001. Black, Jeremy. Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century. London, 1986. Bowen, H. V. The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833.Cam- bridge, 2006. Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre. Tableau de la situation actuelle des anglois dans les Indes orientales, et de l’Etat de l’Inde en général; d’après les rapports des deux Comités de la Chambre des Communes, les Histoires, les Voyages & autres Ouvrages publiés de Londres sur ce sujet en 1783, faisant suite au Journal du Licée. Paris, 1784. Cheney, Paul. Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue.Chicago, 2017. Cheney, Paul. “A False Dawn for Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism? Franco-American Trade during the American War of Independence.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2006): 463–88. Collection générale des décrets rendus par l’Assemblée nationale [puis la Convention nationale], avec la mention de leur date. 67 vols. Paris, 1789–95. collection-baudouin.univ-paris1.fr. Complot d’une Banqueroute générale de la France, de l’Espagne, et par contre-coup de la Hollande et de l’Angleterre, ou les horreurs de l’ancien et du nouveau régime, mises au jour par le Citoyen Heron. Paris, 1793. Conan, Jules. La dernière Compagnie française des Indes (1785–1875), avec la liste des principaux actionnaires de cette compagnie. Paris, 1942. Cross, Elizabeth. “L’anatomie d’un scandale: L’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes revisitée(1793– 1794).” In Vertu et politique: Les pratiques des législateurs (1789–2014), edited by Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Leuwers, and Alain Tourret, 251–64. Rennes, 2015. Crouzet, François. La guerre économique franco-anglaise au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 2008. The Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship, between His Britannick Majesty, and the Most Chris- tian King: Signed at Versailles, the 3d. of September, 1783. London, 1783. Dermigny, Louis. “East India Company et Compagnie des Indes.” In Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans l’océan Indien, edited by Michel Mollat, 453–69. Paris, 1970. Dessert, Daniel. Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle. Paris, 1984. Dessert, Daniel, and Jean-Louis Journet. “Le Lobby Colbert: Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 30, no. 6 (1975): 1303–36. Dewar, Helen Mary. “‘Y Establir Nostre Auctorité’: Assertions of Imperial Sovereignty through Proprietorships and Chartered Companies in New France, 1598–1663.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012. Dietze, Antje, and Katja Naumann. “Revisiting Transnational Actors from a Spatial Perspective.” European Review of History 25, nos. 3–4 (2018): 415–30. Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain.Cambridge, MA, 2006. Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830.Chapel Hill, NC, 2016. Edelstein, Dan, and Biliana Kassabova. “How England Fell off the Map of Voltaire’s Enlighten- ment.” Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 1 (2020): 29–53.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 473

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Eden, William. The Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland,editedbyRobertJohn Eden. 4 vols. London, 1861–62. Eude, Michel. “Une interprétation ‘non-mathiézienne’ de l’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 244 (1981): 239–61. Freeman, Mark, Robin Pearson, and James Taylor. Shareholder Democracies? Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850. Chicago, 2012. Furber, Holden. “The East India Directors in 1784.” Journal of Modern History 5, no. 4 (1933): 479–95. Furber, Holden. John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eigh- teenth Century. Cambridge, MA, 1948. Ghachem, Malick. “‘No Body to Be Kicked?’: Monopoly, Financial Crisis, and Popular Revolt in Eighteenth-Century Haiti and America.” Law and Literature 28, no. 3 (2016): 403–31. Gottmann, Felicia. “French-Asian Connections: The Compagnies des Indes, France’s Eastern Trade, and New Directions in Historical Scholarship.” Historical Journal 56, no. 2 (2013): 537–52. Gottmann, Felicia. Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France, 1680–1760. New York, 2016. Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. New York, 1995. Hardman, John. Louis XVI. New Haven, CT, 1993. Haudrère, Philippe. La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIème siècle (1719–1795). 2nd ed. 2 vols. Paris, 2005. Haudrère, Philippe. “La Révolution de l’Inde n’aura pas lieu: Les français dans l’océan Indien durant la guerre de l’Indépendance américaine, 1778–1783.” In La France et l’indépendance américaine, edited by Olivier Chaline, Philippe Bonnichon, and Charles-Philippe de Vergennes, 153–68. Paris, 2008. Horn, Jeff. Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820.Cam- bridge, 2015. Houben, Henri. Finance et politique sous la Terreur: La liquidation de la Compagnie des Indes (1793– 1794). Paris, 1932. Jouveau-Dubreuil, G. Dupleix, ou l’Inde conquise. Paris, 1942. Kaplan, Steven L. La fin des corporations. Paris, 2001. Kwass, Michael. “Capitalism, Political Economy, and Inequality in Eighteenth-Century France: Writing History after the Great Recession.” French History 33, no. 4 (2019): 606–32. Lestapis, Arnaud de. La “Conspiration de Batz” (1793–1794). Paris, 1969. Lewis, Mary D. “Legacies of French Slave-Ownership, or the Long Decolonization of Saint- Domingue.” History Workshop Journal, no. 83 (2017): 151–75. Manning, Catherine. Fortunes à Faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–1748. Aldershot, 1996. Margerison, Kenneth. “French Visions of Empire: Contesting British Power in India after the Seven Years War.” English Historical Review, no. 544 (2015): 583–612. Margerison, Kenneth. “Rogue Diplomacy: Sartine, Saint-Lubin, and the French Attempt to Recover ‘Lost India,’ 1776–1780.” French History 30, no. 4 (2016): 477–504. Margerison, Kenneth. “The Shareholders’ Revolt at the Compagnie des Indes: Commerce and Poli- tical Culture in Old Regime France.” French History 20, no. 1 (2006): 25–51. Marion, Marcel. Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715. 6 vols. Paris, 1914–31. Marsh, Kate. Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolonization, 1919–1962. New York, 2007. Marsh, Kate, and Nicola Frith, eds. France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and la Fracture Coloniale. Lanham, MD, 2011.

474 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Marshall, P. J. Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India, 1740–1828. Cambridge, 1987. Marshall,P.J.The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783. Oxford, 2005. Mathiez, Albert. “Le banquier Boyd et ses amis.” In Robespierre terroriste, 38–55. Paris, 1921. Mathiez, Albert. Un procès de corruption sous la Terreur: L’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes.Paris, 1920. Ménard-Jacob, Marie. La première Compagnie des Indes, 1664–1704: Apprentissages, échecsethéri- tage. Rennes, 2016. Meyer, Jean, and John Bromley. “La seconde guerre de Cent Ans, 1689–1815.” In De Guillaume le conquérant au Marché commun: Dix siècles d’histoire franco-britannique,editedbyFrançois Bédarida, François Crouzet, and Douglas Johnson, 153–90. Paris, 1979. Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de. Dénonciation de l’agiotage au Roi et à l’Assembléedes Notables. N.p., 1787. Mishra, Rupali. A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company. Cambridge, MA, 2018. Mole, Gregory. “L’économie politique de Joseph Dupleix: Commerce, autorité et deuxième guerre carnatique, 1751–1754.” Outre-mers, nos. 388–89 (2015): 79–96. Monneron, Louis. Mémoire lu à l’Assemblée Nationale en faveur des colonies françoises, aux Indes, par M. Louis Monneron, député de Pondichéry. Paris, 1790. Morieux, Renaud. Une mer pour deux royaumes: La Manche, frontière franco-anglaise (XVIIe– XVIIIe siècles). Rennes, 2008. Murphy, Orville T. Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787. Albany, NY, 1982. Nussbaum, Frederick L. “The Formation of the New East India Company of Calonne.” American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (1933): 475–97. Pettigrew, William A. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752. Chapel Hill, NC, 2013. Pettigrew, William A., David Armitage, Paul D. Halliday, Vicki Hsueh, Tom Leng, and Philip J. Stern. “Dossier: Corporate Constitutionalism.” Itinerario 39, no. 3 (2015): 487–525. Philips, C. H. The East India Company, 1784–1834. Manchester, 1961. Price, Munro. Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787. Cambridge, 1995. Rapport, Michael. “‘Complaints Lost in the Wind’—French India and the Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: A Global Dimension?” In The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: From Old Regime to the French Revolution, edited by Julian Swann and JoëlFélix, 223–43. Oxford, 2013. Rapport, Michael. Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners, 1789–1799. Oxford, 2000. Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, et al. Histoire philosophique et politique, des Etablissemens et du Com- merce des Européens dans les deux Indes. 4 vols. Geneva, 1780. Reinert, Sophus A. Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy. Cambridge, MA, 2011. Roulet, Eric. La Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique, 1635–1651: Une entreprise coloniale au XVIIe siècle. Rennes, 2017. Say, Jean-Baptiste. Essai historique sur l’origine, les progrès et les résultats probables de la souveraineté des Anglais aux Indes. Paris, 1824. Shovlin, John. “Commerce, Not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Com- pany, 1719–1769.” In New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy,editedbyRobert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, 171–202. Basingstoke, 2018.

cross • India and the Compagnie des Indes 475

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Shovlin, John. “Securing Asian Trade: Treaty Negotiations between the French and English East India Companies, 1753–1755.” In The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Cen- tury: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade, edited by Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapel- broek, 267–93. Basingstoke, 2017. Shovlin, John. “War and Peace: Trade, International Competition, and Political Economy.” In Mer- cantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire,editedby Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, 305–27. New York, 2014. Smith, Blake. “Myths of South Asian Stasis: Trade with India in Late Eighteenth-Century French Thought.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59, no. 4 (2016): 499–530. Spang, Rebecca L. Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA, 2015. Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. New York, 2011. Strugnell, Anthony. “AViewfromAfar:IndiainRaynal’sHistoire des Deux Indes.” In India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century, edited by Simon Davies, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, 15–27. Oxford, 2014. Sutherland, Lucy S. The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics. Oxford, 1952. Tarrade, Jean. Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: L’évolution du régime de l’Exclusif de 1763 à 1789. 2 vols. Paris, 1972. Tarrade, Jean. “Le Maréchal de Castries et la politique française dans l’océan Indien à la fin de l’Ancien Régime.” In Révolution française et océan Indien: Prémices, paroxysmes, héritages et déviances, edited by Claude Wanquet and Benoît Julien, 39–48. Paris, 1996. Terjanian, Anoush Fraser. Commerce and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought. New York, 2013. Todd, David. Free Trade and Its Enemies in France, 1814–1851. Cambridge, 2015. Todd, David. “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870.” Past and Present, no. 210 (2011): 155–86. Travers, Robert. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal. New York, 2007. Vardi, Liana. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. Cambridge, 2012. Vaughan, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius.Durham, NC, 2005. Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet]. Précis du siècle de Louis XV. 2 vols. Geneva, 1769. Walton, Charles. “TheFallfromEden:TheFree-TradeOrigins of the French Revolution.” In The French Revolution in Global Perspective, edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, 44–56. Ithaca, NY, 2013. Webster, Anthony. The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860. Rochester, NY, 2009. Weststeijn, Arthur. “The VOC as Company-State: Debating Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Expansion.” Itinerario 38, no. 1 (2014): 13–34. Whatmore, Richard. Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Cen- tury. New Haven, CT, 2012.

476 French Historical Studies 44:3

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article-pdf/44/3/455/935679/455cross.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021