ABSTRACT
A French Company servant or free merchant used his French partner as a source of capital and a support at home. There were other needs which a French colleague could not supply and for these the French Asian trader turned to two groups in India itself: European merchants already established there and local Indian merchants, who provided between them the two pillars of the bridge of cross-cultural trade. The port cities of the Indian Ocean were well equipped with indigenous professionals to satisfy the needs of long-distance foreign traders; no commercial exchange could have taken place without these local groups and recent research has tended to stress the extent to which the European rise to commercial and later political dominance in India was aided by the intermediaries from within Asian societies. The French were no different from other Europeans in having companies of local merchants, brokers and agents of various kinds acting for them. However, French commerce was less integrated with local merchants’ trade than that of the English. The first French Company had been solely concerned with its European cargoes and had turned its back on country trading; 1 its servants were forbidden to engage in private country trade. These factors meant that the French did not enmesh themselves in the fabric of Indian commercial life in the prosperous years of the late seventeenth century, as the110English did. As a result, when the second Company began its operations and its servants were given the liberty of country trade, their contacts with Indian traders were comparatively limited. Indians were on the far side of the cultural divide and in an Asian context fellow-Europeans, however antagonistic at home, were less strange. Thus, the European partner came to have a particular importance for both the French Company and individual French traders, because of the initial weakness of their links with Indian merchants.
