15 - French traders and India at the end of the eighteenth century

Summary

As the late Louis Dermigny was keen to emphasize, Indian markets grew increasingly attractive to merchants operating out of French ports in the aftermath of the Seven Years War because of the opportunities offered by the suppression of the monopoly of the French East India Company in 1769. The Mozambique trade, the export of sugar and coffee from the Mascarene Islands, the expeditions within India, the country trade from the Île de France to the shores of India, to Malabar, to Coromandel and to Bengal – all these contributed to the growth of the prestige of the Indian trade in the metropolis, to the point of creating a predisposition in favour of India in business circles there. Shipowners in particular strove more or less successfully to bolster profits that were apparently no longer fed by the West Indian trade to the degree they had been in the first half of the century.

Marseilles and Bordeaux seem to have been the two ports most orientated towards Indian markets. Marseilles profited from old links established by the Levant trade with Asiatic commerce and from the increasingly substantial utilization of the capital of the Genevan businessmen and bankers; Bordeaux, still without much involvement in the slave trade on the eve of the American war, had substantial capital available from its direct business with the islands of America. The examples that form the basis of this essay are taken from Genevan and Bordeaux archives and apply to different periods.