Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on the little-known French East India Company, Company Politics explores corporate politics, financial scandals, and rival empires, shedding light on both the rise of European rule in India and the origins and economic consequences of the French Revolution.
Trade ReviewFrom the Seven Years' War through the Revolution of 1789, the history of the French East India Company is a tangle of corruption, reformist illusions, and imperial ambitions. Company Politics offers a commanding interpretation of this episode that explains the curious durability of the much-reviled trading companies, and company states, well into the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Cross is a skilled researcher, a discerning interpreter of politics, and an urbane writer. * Paul Cheney, University of Chicago *
Company Politics offers an arresting account of how the Third French East India Company came to embody a new type of global trading corporation, one divested of sovereign attributes and relying instead on economic power to project royal influence abroad. This book adds a critical new perspective to the growing literature on the dynamic relationship between imperial governance and political economy in the final decades of the eighteenth century. * Rafe Blaufarb, author of The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property *
This superb study of the last French East India Company examines the final decades of the old regime French empire in India, making clear the geopolitical and economic possibilities it still appeared to present. Following the company into the 1790s, when it was at the center of the French Revolution's greatest corruption scandal, Cross examines how revolutionary republicanism destabilized the patrimonial norms that underpinned the absolutist order. Comprehensively researched, deeply conceptualized, and a pleasure to read. * John Shovlin, author of Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order *
Company Politics is written with remarkable fluency, combining meticulous empirical research with nuanced yet authoritative analysis. Cross makes sense of France's New East India Company as a remedy—a concoction of trade-offs and contradictions, commerce and state, war and peace—prescribed to heal the wound of France's painful loss to the British in India. She guides us with ease and assurance from metropolitan debates and disputes, from old regime to new, across a great gap to the lived realities of France's disparate trading posts in India. This is an invaluable study of continuity underpinning revolutionary change that deepens our understanding of French commercial and imperial strategy in Asia far beyond the period it addresses. * Natasha Pairaudeau, author of Mobile Citizens: French Indians in Indochina, 1858-1954 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Timeline of the Compagnies des Indes Introduction Chapter 1 The Company's Two Bodies Chapter 2 The Revolution of India Chapter 3 Diplomatic Intentions Chapter 4 Between the Colossus and the Tiger Chapter 5 Discredit Chapter 6 Revolutionary Regeneration Chapter 7 Notes on a Scandal Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
