Commerce, not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Company, 1719–1769

Abstract

Shovlin explores the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century French Compagnie des Indes, which was a site of innovative political economic thinking beginning with its founder, John Law, who outlined a strategy for peaceful French aggrandizement through the adoption of modernized techniques of public credit. This line of thinking was later developed by Jean-François Melon and Isaac Panchaud, both closely associated with the company. Other company officials emphasized that international stability and avoidance of territorial expansion in India best served the corporation’s interests. These perspectives reflect a deep ambivalence about empire, and were rooted in a broader discourse emphasizing that an age of commerce was displacing an age of conquest and territoriality.