ABSTRACT
Asia, as one of the Continents, was a favourite subject for the artists, sculptors and engravers of the eighteenth century. She, for a woman was the usual personification, was depicted as bare-breasted, but otherwise richly dressed and surrounded by the beasts and vegetation symbolic of the region: dromedaries and elephants, palms and vines. Among her other accoutrements a cassolette or censer and a cornucopia brimming with fruit or jewels often appeared. For these artists and their patrons, the idea of Asia, in contradistinction to America and Africa, was not seen only in terms of the magnificence and savagery of nature; it evoked instead the products of human cultivation, art and ingenuity. The animals chosen, however exotic, were domesticated ones and even if nature produced the raw materials of the continent, pepper, tea, spices and coffee, man cultivated and marketed them. The cornucopia’s tumbling riches were a reminder that, in the age before industrialization, Asia was the source of manufactured goods, porcelain, chintz, complexly woven and printed silks, which Europe could not make for itself. The scented smoke rising from the censer implied the religions and philosophies of the East, little comprehended, by which the vast populations of the continent lived. By 1719 when the new French East India Company was founded, the concept of Asia had lost much of the fabulous that had enveloped it in earlier centuries and its political and commercial geography, if not entirely understood, was 2well enough known to French traders and travellers, in outline, at least. 1 Their fellow Europeans, who had preceded them by two centuries, had been producing accounts of their journeys and transactions in a number of European languages, so that, by 1720, a voyage to the East, though still full of risk to life and fortune, was by no means the adventure into the unknown that it had been when Vasco da Gama persuaded an Indian pilot to guide his ship to its landfall on Malabar in 1498. At first the Portuguese had tried to limit access to knowledge of the East, but this was a position unsustainable after the mid-sixteenth century, and apart from the maps and travel books published in Lisbon, London and Amsterdam, the French were able to refer to literature produced in their own language by their own compatriots. 2 These writings, while rendering firmer and more concrete the West’s knowledge of Asia, did nothing to diminish the idea of its wealth and productivity. The Asia that these works described was above all Mughal India, an empire of enormous wealth and power. Profound changes in the relationship between emperor and empire, centre and periphery, had been developing since at least the reign of Aurangzeb which ended in 1707, but they were not apparent to Europeans in any coherent way before about 1739 when Delhi fell to Nadir Shah of Persia. At first the French, like other Europeans, arrived in India as if to a storehouse of exotic products to be bought with the silver of South America. By the early eighteenth century growing familiarity with the subcontinent led them to see it as more than just a market place. Missionaries were among the most intellectually enquiring of European visitors, studying the social customs, religious practices and languages of the people amongst whom they lived, and writing some of the earliest detailed accounts of Indian technology, particularly of the printing and dyeing of the celebrated textiles of Machilipatnam on the Coromandel coast. Naval and military personnel also annotated their experiences; books about India and documents in Indian languages were collected by Frenchmen in Asia and sent home to libraries in France. Scholars were financed for prolonged visits to Asia. 3 Even merchants 3came to be small-scale experts on the natural or social history of their adopted regions. Porcher des Oulches, for example, a long-serving employee of the Compagnie des Indes, wrote on the beliefs and practices of the Hindus of southern India. 1 The growing interest in the exotic in eighteenth-century Europe and eastern influences on taste in art and architecture showed a wider awareness among Europeans of what they saw. 2 For Company servants and free merchants, however, of far more importance than the published accounts of travels were the exchanges of information made informally within the social and family group. The letters of Dupleix, the most celebrated servant of the French Company in this period, include many conveying advice to relatives of place- and fortune-seekers in India. On a more detailed scale, some Frenchmen who spent their lives in Asia collected and preserved information on exchange rates, currencies, sources of goods, drawn from different areas of the Indian Ocean region and these volumes were copied and passed on carefully at death or departure. 3
