Company Politics: Commerce, Scandal, and French Visions of Empire in the Revolutionary Era, by Elizabeth Cross

The many iterations of the French East India Company over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that it never really lived up to its one-time name as the Compagnie perpetuelle des Indes. Yet, despite a chequered history of liquidations, scandals and bankruptcies, the Company, or, indeed, Companies, exerted a significant influence on the making of France and its empire. At its height, as the so-called Law Company (1719–69), it controlled much of the French empire, from Louisiana, to Senegal, to India. It founded colonies, administered laws, built ships, fought wars, and traded extensively both in goods and in enslaved people. While the different versions of the Company enjoyed varying jurisdictions, administrations and lifespans, all were marked by a permeable and sometimes paradoxical boundary with the French state. As such, historians have increasingly recognised the potential for studying these companies as a productive site for thinking through the imperial and global dimensions of the Old Regime.

In this impressive book, Elizabeth Cross has written the definitive history of what is sometimes known as the New or Calonne Company (after its founder Charles-Alexandre de Calonne), which operated between 1785 and 1793. The creation of a monopoly company in the closing years of the Old Regime invites reflections on a monarchy running out of ideas. Taken together with the venerable tradition of unfavourably comparing French corporate ventures with their British or Dutch rivals, one might imagine that the New Company of the Indies (Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes) must have been a sclerotic and unprofitable institution. As Cross demonstrates, however, the Company itself was nothing of the sort. Drawing on an incredibly rich range of archival and printed material, she captures a dynamic and capitalist institution at work. The Company’s story unfolds across a set of skilfully constructed chapters that proceed chronologically. We find it achieving a surprising degree of commercial success, despite facing a very unpromising political context in both France and India. Rather than any organisational or financial shortcomings, it was this wider political environment that eventually did for the Company, as it became irredeemably tangled up in the Revolutionary politics of the Terror. The history of the New Company, therefore, enables Cross to tell a broader story, revealing ‘the wages of imperial reform in an age of crisis, evolving ideas of political economy, and the transformation of the corporation in revolutionary times’ (p. 3).

Building especially on work by Kenneth Margerison and John Shovlin, Cross argues convincingly that immediate political and diplomatic agendas continually trumped ideological consistency in economic policy in so far as the Company was concerned. This might not come as much of a surprise for scholars of the British East India Company, but for eighteenth-century France a physiocratic doctrine of free trade (itself a disputed category) is still sometimes looked upon as a straightforward guide to government policy. The much messier and ad hoc process by which economic theories were deployed, contorted or ignored in the pursuit of imperial politics is brilliantly dissected by Cross in her discussion of the creation of the Company over the first three chapters. It emerged out of a vicious tug-of-war between the finance and naval ministries. The latter envisaged the Company as a clandestine vehicle for revanche against perfidious Albion, which had dealt a humiliating defeat to France in India during the Seven Years War (1756–63). The Finance Ministry, meanwhile, wanted quite the opposite. The Company was to be a diplomatic means of buttressing commercial interdependency, and therefore helping ensure a fiscally desirable peace with France’s great enemy. Both were recurring imperial visions—the first driven by nationalistic and militaristic sentiments, the second a harbinger of Franco-British ‘condominium’ as proposed by David Todd for the nineteenth century. The result was a fabulously vindictive ministerial squabble in which each side would rather see the Company destroyed than come under the jurisdiction of the other.

Once formed, however, the Company was not content to be reduced to a political football. Although envisaged as a ‘purely commercial’ entity, with no control over colonial administrations, it quickly carved out a political agenda of its own. For instance, it pursued secret diplomatic negotiations with the ambassador of Tipu Sultan, the powerful ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore (1782–99). It balanced collaboration and competition with the British, who by this point had become the dominant power in Bengal. Participating in the shady remittance trade, the French Company at first sourced its textiles from British Company servants eager to transfer their ill-gotten fortunes back to Europe. Yet it soon found that Bengali weavers could be tempted away from the British with the promise of higher wages, sometimes precipitating violent reprisals from the latter, but apparently with little effect on French procurement. Even the coming of the Revolution did not initially pose a problem for the Company, which continued to operate despite the abolition of its monopoly in 1790.

In fact, the Company underwent a revolutionary transformation of its own. In a dramatic coup in 1791, the shareholders forced out a ‘dictatorial’ director, issued a new set of statutes admired by Cross for their aims of transparency and democratisation, and rebranded their ships with revolutionary names. As Cross notes, however, the Company may have ‘transform[ed] itself into a revolutionary actor in its own right, but revolutionary actors had the tendency of also becoming revolutionary victims’ (p. 156). She suspends full judgement on the murky events that accompanied the Company’s fall in 1793, but gives a plausible account of how certain Jacobin deputies speculated or extorted bribes from the Company, which had attempted to avoid revolutionary taxes. Pointing to the nineteenth-century afterlives of the New Company, Cross poses it as a further reminder of imperial continuities after the Revolution, an argument also made by Pernille Røge.

As the thrust of this review might suggest, Cross is more at home in the boardrooms and corridors of power in France than in the colonies and comptoirs (trading posts) of the Indian Ocean World. One such comptoir is incorrectly located in Jugdia, a village of the same name in West Bengal, on the map provided (p. 96). The historical Jugdia was in modern Bangladesh, in the Ganges Delta, although it has now succumbed to erosion. Relatedly, though the book remains true to its title in exploring ‘visions of Indian empire’, we are sometimes left wanting more about the material and political realities in India that influenced how and why these visions came to be advocated or abandoned. In this respect, the presentation of the 'Hindu Maratha Confederacy and the Muslim Kingdom of Mysore' might have been nuanced beyond this religious binary (p. 46). Finally, while Cross sometimes uses the British Company as a foil, perhaps a more pertinent comparison would have been with the Danish East India Company. The Danish Company shared a very similar trajectory to the French over the same period, continuing to trade and remit British money, while also losing its colonial possessions and monopoly in India. These remarks are nonetheless proof of an extremely stimulating book, one that is not just an indispensable guide to the New Company, but is essential reading for anyone interested in empire, trade or corporations in the Age of Revolutions.