Fortunes a faire

Catherine Manning is concerned to relate the French traders to their social, regional and financial roots, and to trace their connections with other commercial groups in India, both European and Asian. The French evidence that she assembles, including much archival material, also makes a significant contribution to the debate about economic decline and renewal in 18th-century India.

Her analysis shows that economic and political developments in South India were crucial to the French move from trade to war in the 1740s. Finally the book examines why the French failed in an enterprise which was to succeed so signally for the British only a few decades later.