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Chapter 1 provides a chronological overview of France’s near century and a half (1698–1842) in the Canton Trade. The Europe trade was carried out for its first two decades by private traders to whom the French East India Company leased its China monopoly on a limited basis; then, following reorganization in 1719, the Company began to exercise that monopoly itself, sending ships to Canton from 1720 to 1769. In 1769 the trade was opened to all French subjects and continued so until 1785, when the third Company was created; and when the trade was opened once and for all to all French nationals in 1790, this Company became private, in competition with other private companies before it was abolished in 1793. The intra-Asian (country) trade, in contrast, was initially in the hands of the Company, which remained involved in it to some degree before the trade went wholly private in the early 1740s. The French experience demonstrates the need for a reassessment of the traditional definitions of the terms “private” and “company,” and “Europe” and “intra-Asian,” proving that the distinctions between them are in fact far more nuanced, and indeed, often blurry, than traditionally acknowledged.

Introduces the French imperial project in India in general and Pondichéry specifically. This chapter also examines the reliance of both French trader-administrators of the Compagnie des Indes and Jesuit missionaries in the newly established colony of Pondichéry on local intermediaries, and argues that traders and missionaries held profoundly different visions of French empire in the east.

Anglo-French colonial rivalry marks the writings of the late 18th century, calling for a comparative examination of discourses and debates from each national frame. Yet many studies take one national context into their purview and lose sight of the very different way in which the same problems of the legitimacy of colonization and settlement were resolved in another. The introduction therefore sets a historical context for the literary and theoretical interpretations which follow in later chapters. The period examined is delimited to broadly the last three decades of the eighteenth century, although even this era is affected by the French and Indian War in North America and the Seven Years’ War in Europe (1754-1763) which placed the importance of colonial territories at the center of dispute. The give and take of an imperial calculus marks the writings from Diderot and Burke examined in the book, who critically examine the undertakings of the various European trading companies established around the globe. The introduction thus provides a historical sketch of the companies (the British and French East India Companies) and the emerging critique of the legitimacy of these enterprises of trade and conquest.

This chapter looks at two accounts of the French 1737 bombing of Mocha to make the concluding case that cultural and religious differences in the ports and emporia of Yemen were often understood in material terms and that the anxieties and discomforts generated by the cross-cultural encounter were expressed most readily through a language of things. It validates material culture as an important tool that served to assert, but also to evaluate, merchant identity and standing across the early modern western Indian Ocean.