Sovereign spaces
: the Compagnie des Indes and the imperial state, 1699-1761

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis examines the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes, 1664-1769) as a vehicle for state-making in India and France. The French Company was always much closer to its metropolitan state than its English or Dutch rivals. Existing scholarship has cast this state influence as a debilitating weakness for the Company’s finances and trade, yet this thesis shows how the entanglement of state, commercial and religious interests proved a dynamic factor in the Company’s political interventions in the Indian subcontinent. By writing sovereignty into our understanding of the Company, this thesis thus provides a new explanation for French territorial expansion in India, a history that has been largely ignored in recent years. It employs the tools of social and cultural history in novel contexts to examine the creation of Company sovereignty in a wide range of sources, including private and official correspondence, legal records, missionary accounts, journals, ships’ logs, newspapers, travel writing, maps, and material culture. In doing so, it demonstrates how the Company was permeated by a diverse array of interests that shaped its state-making processes in specific ways, from royal ministers in Versailles to Luso-Indian widows in Bengal. It argues that this porosity helped shape the emergence of a corporate political economy driven by the accumulation of land revenues, which led to the articulation of a new kind of imperial power and sovereignty. Using the neglected history of a French trading company, this thesis tells a story that is at once global and local. In doing so, it provides a fresh perspective for understanding both the Old Regime and early colonial India.
Date of Award1 Feb 2020
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • King's College London
SupervisorDavid Todd (Supervisor) & Richard Drayton (Supervisor)

Cite this

'