The French East India Company and the trade of the Indian Ocean

"The present selection of the writings of the late Indrani Ray has been planned around certain identifiable factors that determined India's changing tryst with the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the protagonist in these writings is the Indian merchant, the biographer is the French East India Company's official. Using a wide array of French sources, the author has reconstructed the changing world of the Indian merchant as he rubbed shoulders with the European trading companies in the palmy decades of the seventeenth century and retreated into his shell in the turbulent decades of the eighteenth. Taken together, these essays underscore both the prosperity and vitality of Indian trade in the seventeenth century as well as its inherent fragility in the face of political uncertainty and unrestrained competition in the succeeding years."--Jacket.