ABSTRACT
The importance of country trade and of close contact with Asian trading communities to European Companies and private traders has been extensively explored in recent years. Such trade and such relationships were built up in varying ways in different areas of India and south-east Asia and it is generally agreed that the active co-operation of local intermediaries was essential to the success of the Portuguese in Melaka in the sixteenth century, to the Dutch in Batavia in the seventeenth and to the English in Bengal in the eighteenth. This correlation is by no means the unique perception of twentieth century historians; It was well understood by contemporaries. The French, theoreticians even in the practical world of trade, made a number of studies of the Asian trade of rival Europeans and the importance of attracting local merchants to their enclave of Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast and of developing an active Asian trade were constantly emphasized. 1 However, by the mid-eighteenth century after thirty years of Asian trading, Pondicherry’s country trade was not large and French activity had been diverted inland to political and military means of earning an income. This paper seeks to examine the ways in which French country and private traders sought contact with local networks of commerce and finance on Coromandel and the effect of such links on the nature of their trade and on their ultimate success in south India. The material comes from French sources, in particular from the records of the legal office of Pondicherry preserved in the Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence. 2 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315255996/18043072-ea51-40fc-9c49-0d3a54a6de23/content/fig14_1.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> “Indico Orientalis Nova Descriptio”, printed map with the inscription <italic>Amstelodami loannes lansonniun excudebet</italic>. It show the Nanyang region with placenames in Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish (Éora Public Library and District Archives) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315255996/18043072-ea51-40fc-9c49-0d3a54a6de23/content/fig14_2.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
