| Abstract |
"Company Politics offers a new interpretation of political economy, imperialism, and the history of the corporation in the age of the French Revolution. The book focuses on the history of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes, the final iteration of the French East India Company, interweaving national and imperial scales through the frame of the transnational corporate body. Despite its reputation for financial corruption, the "New Company" emerged from the unique circumstances that France faced in India as a weakened imperial power, in the face of the rise of the sovereign British East India Company (EIC). As India remained integral to the broader French imperial economy, officials and intellectuals accordingly reimagined French power subsisting through an informal empire of trade, rather than a territorial empire of conquest, while simultaneously reimagining the trading company as a private, "purely commercial" actor, rather than a sovereign company-state. In tracing its trajectories through Europe and the Indian Ocean world, the book explores how these fraught boundaries between the Company's public and private attributes played out in disparate geopolitical and diplomatic contexts, revealing the practical limitations of metropolitan imperial ideologies. As both state and private financial actors clashed over the Company's prerogatives, they envisioned new alignments between state and market, challenged the legitimacy of the Old Regime's economic and imperial policies, and sought to revolutionize the underlying corporation itself. As a result, Company Politics argues that, as dynamic sites of corporate and imperial experimentation, French trading companies are integral to the broader histories of both capitalism and empire"-- Provided by publisher. |
