Full Description
French mercantile endeavors in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India were marked by novel intersections of aesthetics, science, and often violent commercialism. Connecting all of these worlds were the thriving textile industries of India's Coromandel Coast. This book focuses on the integration of the Coromandel textile industries with French colonies in India from the founding of the French East India Company in 1664 to its debilitating defeat by the British during the Seven Years' War. Narratives of British trade and colonialism have long dominated eighteenth-century histories of India, overshadowing the French East India Company's far-reaching sphere of influence and its significant integration into the political and cultural worlds of South India. As this study shows, the visual and material cultures of eighteenth-century France and India were deeply connected, and together shaped the century's broader debates about mercantilism, liberalism, and the global trade of goods, ideas, and humans.
Contents
Note on Transliteration and Translation, Note on Currency Conversion, List of Abbreviations, List of Figures, Acknowledgements, Introduction 1: The Threads that Bind: South Asian Textiles and Networks of Exchange between India, France, and the West Indies A Homespun Empire: Indian Textiles in Their Local Contexts Eastern Persuasions Trade Goods as Cross-Cultural Interlocutors Of Aristocrats and Slaves: The Double Life of Guinea Cloth The Antecedents of Industrialization 2. Coromandel Craft and European Natural History: Lessons Learned and Lost in Mutual Intelligibility across Cultures Botanical Beginnings Antoine de Jussieu and the Ambitions of French Bioprospecting Nature in Images/The Nature of Images: Tapping Local Medical Knowledge in Early Modern India Uncommon Ground: South Asian Aesthetics and L'Empereur's Jardin de Lorixa Jungles and Gardens 3: Shifting Terrains: Negotiating Kingship as a Tamil Dubash in Eighteenth-Century Pondichéry Travails and Portrayals of the Family Pillai Ananda, N?yak of Pondichéry 4: Faith and Fortunes: The Use and Abuse of Material Artifacts in the Evolving Coromandel Seeing and Believing: Iconoclasm, or the Limits of Mutual Intelligibility Obligatory Presents: The Evolution of Gifting Epilogue: Crosscurrents in the Wake of the Seven Years War Appendix 1: Glossary Appendix 2: French Governors of Pondichéry, Bibliography, Index
