THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIREA French viceroy, De la Haye, appeared with a fleet of nine ships off the
coast of India so as to demonstrate the power of his king. This was the
time of the third Anglo-Dutch war and, therefore, De la Haye hoped for
British support against the Dutch in India. But the governor of Madras
turned him down, saying that the wars of his king were of no concern to
him as he had to obey only the orders of the directors of his company. The
bold Frenchman thereupon tried to tackle the Dutch single-handed, but he
suffered a miserable defeat, lost all his ships and was sent back to Europe
as a prisoner on a Dutch ship. After this misadventure nothing much was
heard about the French East India Company for some time.
It was only due to the quiet endeavour of one man, François Martin,
that the French East India Company gained a foothold in India at all.
Martin had arrived in India in 1668 and had died there in 1706, without
ever having left the country in all those years. The French settlement at
Pondichery owes its origin to this unique man. His observations and
experiences provided guidelines for those ambitious Frenchmen who tried
to build a French empire in India in the eighteenth century—the resourceful
Governor Dupleix, the daring Admiral La Bourdonnais, and the diplomatic
General de Bussy.
The commercial success of the French East India Company was much
more limited than the imperial vision of those great Frenchmen. Colbert’s
son and successor, the Marquis de Seignelay, had re-established the
company in 1685 along lines which were much more in keeping with
French practice. The board of directors consisted exclusively of
highranking government officers who received an assured dividend of 10
per cent on the capital which they had subscribed. The trade was managed
with bureaucratic precision. The company owned twelve ships, four of
which returned from India every year. In peacetime the company could
thus make some profit, although it was debarred from the lucrative textile
trade because of French mercantilist policy. However, the frequent
interruption of this trade due to European wars drove the company to the
verge of bankruptcy. It was only when the great financial wizard, John
Law, merged the French West Indies Company and the French East India
Company in 1719 that France caught up with the new pattern of
international trade, which linked Indian Ocean trade with transatlantic
trade. The new Compagnie des Indes prospered in this way and also
attracted merchant capital which had been lacking at earlier stages.
The European powers and the declining Mughal empireEurope was the scene of many wars in the first two decades of the
eighteenth century: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Nordic War, the
war against the Turks. In comparison, the next two decades were rather
peaceful. England enjoyed prosperity and stability under the great prime