Louis XIV's East India Company () was a joint-stock company founded in the Kingdom of France in August 1664 to engage in trade in India and other Asian lands, complementing the French West India Company () created three months before. It was one of several successive enterprises with similar names, a sequence started with Henry IV's first French East Indies Company in 1604 and continued with Cardinal Richelieu's Compagnie d'Orient in 1642. Planned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to compete with the English East India Company and Dutch East India Company, it was chartered by King Louis XIV for the purpose of trading in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Louis XIV's company became insolvent and was reorganized in 1685, and was again bankrupt in 1706. In 1719, what remained of it was acquired by John Law's Company, which in 1723 became the French Indies Company active during much of the 18th century.

Background

The seventeenth century saw several French efforts to trade with the East Indies, starting with the first French East Indies Company (1604-1614). They were influenced by the successful business ventures of the Dutch East India Company. Between the 1630s and early 1660s, French efforts were smaller in scale, but they enjoyed some success. French merchant ships traversed the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and the northwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent. These accomplishments, however, paled in comparison with those of England and the Dutch Republic. France's Atlantic ports competed with each other. The commercial and financial expertise concentrated around the coastal regions of Brittany and Normandy.

History

At its foundation on , Its initial capital of the East India Company was 15 million livres, divided into shares of 1000 livres apiece. Louis XIV funded the first 3 million livres of investment, against which losses in the first 10 years were to be charged. Additional state support was provided in the form of subsidies indexed to trading volume, 20-percent subsidization of the investment expenditure to create overseas ports, and free military protection.

The company was granted a 50-year monopoly on French navigation and trade in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, a region stretching from the Cape of Good Hope eastward all the way to the Strait of Magellan. where it permanently relocated its operations previously in Le Havre in 1670.

Louis granted the company a concession in perpetuity for the island of Madagascar, as well as any other territories it might conquer. The underlying intent was to establish a French entrepôt in Madagascar to rival the Dutch colony of Batavia, but that plan was never realistic and the company gave up on it in 1668. Another motivation that interfered with the company's commercial activity was to promote the expansion of the Catholic faith, materialized in an early agreement made in 1665 by the company with the recently established Paris Foreign Missions Society by which the latter's missionaries were granted free travel on the company's ships. and Marcara Avanchintz, an Armenian trader from Isfahan, Persia.

See also

  • English East India Company, est. 1600
  • Dutch East India Company, est. 1602
  • Danish East India Company, est. 1616
  • Portuguese East India Company, est. 1628
  • France-Asia relations
  • French colonial empire
  • French India
  • List of chartered companies

References

Further reading

  • Greenwald, Erin M. (2016). Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
  • Museum of the French East India Company at Lorient (archived 25 April 2014)
  • The French East India Company (1785–1875) – history of the last French East India Company on the site dedicated to its business lawyer Jean-Jacques Regis of Cambaceres.
  • French East Indies Company nowadays
  • Frenchbooksonindia.com – an open access multilingual discovery tool with book data from 1531 to 2020, full-text ebooks from 1531 to 1937 and in-text search from ]