India and the Compagnie Des Indes in the Age of the French Revolution
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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 opposi- tion 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 strug- gled 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 exam- ines 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 national- ism, 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. French Historical Studies Vol. 44, No. 3 (August 2021) doi 10.1215/00161071-9004979 Copyright 2021 by Society for French Historical Studies 455 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 sub- sequently 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 “inconceiv- able,” 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 prin- cipal 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 dimen- sions, 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 ech- oed 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