To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about empire des rois , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jul 27, Jpp rated it it was ok. Sinon une rehabilitation, du moins une mise au point sur la politique coloniale de l ancien regime qui, en depit de graves fautes de strategie et de tristes echecs militaires, avait mieux compris qu on ne le croit parfois le poids economique et politique de l Empire.
Michaela rated it liked it May 21, Histories of French commerce, particularly of the French monopoly trading companies, focus on the political and economic workings that hampered the success of French commercial ventures in the Indian Ocean. Their plans to acquire cheap imports were hurt by French protectionism and mismanagement. Yet a third factor contributed to the failure of the French to profit from Indian Ocean trade: This reliance has been overlooked by most historians.
empire des rois: 1500-1789
Much of the scholarly work on the French East India companies fixates on the failures of the French traders and administrators in comparison to their far more successful Portuguese, Dutch, and English counterparts. Scholars tend to isolate the decisions of the companies' directors in the metropole from events on the ground. Therefore, historians describe the economic basis for the foundation of the early French companies by focusing, for example, on the goals of Colbert or royal financial imperatives without reflecting on how actual events and circumstances in the Indian Ocean might affect these plans.
As a result, historians usually blame constant funding struggles for hampering French access to prime markets in the Indian Ocean. Likewise, when scholars have presented a general history of the French East India Company, they have tended to focus on the execution of French plans, not their feasibility.
Similarly, scholars have attributed colonial failures in Madagascar more to hostile local communities or a lack of appropriately trained personnel than to the influence of diseases, such as dysentery, malaria, or flux du sang , and natural disasters, such as sauterelle infestations. Recent literature on the impact of the environment on the formation of states, empires, and civilizations points to a new understanding of the interaction between European colonial endeavors and their local environments.
Rather than considering events within the southwest Indian Ocean as isolated from the decisions of the metropole, this essay brings the two into conversation. It uses environmental history to understand the failures of the French East India Company and connects local events in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands with the overall history of French commercial and colonial expansion. After more than a century of French merchants periodically visiting the coast of the island on their way to Indonesia and India, private traders had tried to establish a colony with a few hundred men in southern Madagascar near Fort Dauphin.
The colony was a disaster: Out of the almost five hundred colonists, only one hundred remained alive in In , the French Compagnie royale des Indes Orientales assumed control of the colony and the trade of the Indian Ocean. Formed under Colbert, the company had an explicitly mercantilist purpose and was only nominally private, as the title of the company makes clear.
The cornerstone of this company's plans for trade was to establish a royal trading base in Madagascar, just as the Dutch had in Batavia and the Portuguese in Goa.
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Geographically, the location of the colony was ideal for quick stopovers of ships traveling from Europe to Asia. In addition, the land appeared fruitful. The governor of the Madagascar colony described the land as "fertile" and naturally growing a number of crops. The official stated that any food shortages were caused by the failures of the Malagasy to cultivate the land correctly. He complained that the Malagasy people did not take advantage of the land due to their laziness and that hardworking French farmers could quickly make the land productive.
theranchhands.com -- Compagnie des Indes orientales records
Several times a year, locusts ate all the plants to the roots, but with French control, this scourge could be wiped out. Within a decade in , this venture failed disastrously.
French attempts to colonize Madagascar almost ruined the company financially and diverted much of its commercial energies from any other Indian Ocean ventures during the seventeenth century. In the metropole, company officials and French ministers did not consider the role of the environment and the local people in their failures. Disease meant the mortality rate of European colonists was shockingly high, especially as the colonists could not procure enough food to remain healthy. The land they chose for the settlement, situated perfectly as a stopover for their ships sailing towards Java, turned out to be arid, and the native people were pastoralists who rarely accumulated excess goods to sell to Europeans or exported slaves in large numbers.
Despite these problems, French contemporaries attributed the collapse of the settlement to the incompetence of the colonial officials.
Even as the French turned to investing in the Mascarene Islands as refueling bases for their maritime ventures, which would provide food, water, wood, and labor to the dozens of ships passing through the ocean, they still had to rely on Madagascar to support both the colonial populations on the islands as well as Indian Ocean trade. French commercial strategists and financiers misjudged the fertility of lands in the southwestern Indian Ocean, and the Mascarene colonies never became self-sufficient.
The islands' ambitious leaders were not satisfied with growing wheat and raising cattle for passing ships. They attempted to transform both of the islands into coffee plantations, supplemented by other cash-crops such as indigo, sugarcane, and cotton. The governors envisioned the islands becoming even more profitable than Saint-Domingue, France's sugar plantation island in the Caribbean.
Unfortunately, these development schemes proved unfeasible without the imports of food and labor from Madagascar. In addition to occupying land typically cultivated for food items, the most profitable crops, chiefly coffee and sugar, were also the most labor intensive and the most demanding on the soil.
As a result, the French colonists required frequent influxes of slaves from Madagascar to help with clearing the land and establishing agriculture on the volcanic islands.
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The danger of bringing large numbers of slaves with a common culture and language to a relatively uninhabited island rapidly became clear. Runaway slaves, marons , robbed French colonial farms and encouraged rebellion among the other slaves, much as had occurred in Saint-Domingue. The French colonists blamed slaves from Madagascar for disorder in the islands' interiors.
Despite the fears about Malagasy slaves, eighteenth-century ships would return from their annual trading voyages to Madagascar with a small number of slaves as well as necessary food items. The company's plans to turn the land of the Mascarene Islands into profitable plantations turned out to be completely unworkable, even without the constant problem of runaway slaves.
The islands' crops failed repeatedly following a series of natural disasters, primarily drought and cyclones, in , , , and Are you an author?
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