Cardinal Richelieu, first minister to Louis XIII, was conscious of the potential profits to be made and in 1642 a company was established with a twenty-year monopoly on French trade with the Indies. To the detriment of nascent French ambitions in the Indian Ocean, however, Madagascar rather than India or Southeast Asia was the focus of the company’s attentions.
On Madagascar, a small French colony was established; a fort was built and, alongside an embryonic civil and military population, some of whom married local women, priests were sent out to convert the indigenous population. The unfamiliar climate and difficulties growing food meant that within a year one-third of the settlers had perished. The opposition of the Malagasy population to the French presence intensified as they began venturing into the interior of the country to find food, steal cattle and capture slaves—and by 1648, when a new governor, Étienne de Flacourt, was dispatched to restore order, it was clear that the colonisation and Christianisation of the island was failing. The brutal violence visited on the Malagasies by Flacourt’s troops served only to intensify the conflict, which degenerated quickly into a state of all-out war ruinous to the company’s finances and trade.
Consequently, only a small number of Frenchmen followed Pyrard to India in the decades after his death. The accounts they wrote of their travels added to the sense that Pyrard had created in French minds of the exceptional but as-yet-unrealised promise of India. Among the most conspicuous was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a Parisian jewel merchant who in 1638 set off across Syria and Persia for the subcontinent.
From the port of Surat, Tavernier visited the Mughal city of Agra, where the construction of the Taj Mahal had just begun, before heading southwards to the site that interested him the most: the diamond mines of Golconda in the kingdom of the Qutb Shahs—a rival Muslim power struggling to retain control of the Deccan plateau in the face of Mughal expansion. Adopting Persian dress and fluent in the Persian language written and spoken by Indian elites, Tavernier purchased diamonds, rubies and other precious stones that would earn him a fortune on his return to Europe.
Four more expeditions to India followed: as Tavernier’s thirst for riches grew, his travels became increasingly ambitious, taking in Masulipatam and San Thomé on the eastern coast of India, plus the cities of Allahabad, Benares and Patna in the north. The account of these journeys that he eventually published was almost a guidebook to India—a prototype Lonely Planet or Routard—with detailed information about the regions through which he had travelled, including the attractions to visit, the routes to follow, the lodgings available and the quality of the water and wine.
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Extensive advice was also offered about how to conduct trade, not least about the bribes that Mughal officials would demand and the often unfavourable exchange rates to be expected. Tavernier’s emphasis on diamonds and other precious stones contributed to the growing French sense of India as a kind of Eldorado—a place of unimaginable wealth and opportunities for enrichment—for those who knew how to overcome these hurdles.
A second Frenchman following Tavernier on the overland route to India in the 1640s was François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz, an aristocrat of English descent dispatched by the French monarchy as a spy. Travelling under the pseudonym Ibrahim Bey, he too arrived at Surat, where, he observed, ‘the English and Hollanders do all their commerce’. La Boullaye-Le Gouz set about recording the details of this trade, including the main items imported and exported and the role of local intermediaries in helping the Dutch and English to negotiate commercial deals.
On the whole, he noted, Europeans and other foreigners in the Mughal Empire were treated respectfully. Emperor Shah Jahan was clearly intelligent and appreciated the customs revenues derived from European trade. Restricting his travels to the western coast of India, La Boullaye-Le Gouz then sailed southwards to Goa, a city which, in his view, possessed ‘the grandeur of Florence’.
En route, he was taken aback to witness the devastation to settlements along the coastline wrought by fighting between the Portuguese and the Dutch and English. The Portugueseheld island of Bombay, he remarked, was an empty shell, its houses and churches razed to the ground by the English. In La Boullaye-Le Gouz’s estimation, some fifty to sixty Dutch vessels were present in the Indian Ocean; the English presence, though smaller, was growing. The Portuguese, he concluded, before returning to Europe via Arabia and Egypt, were no longer capable of expelling these rivals from India.
Until this point, French knowledge of the Mughal Emperor and his court had been acquired second-hand, mostly through the accounts of other European diplomats and missionaries who had secured audiences with the ruler. The emperor was a distant, semi-mythical figure, more legend than human. With the arrival of François Bernier on the subcontinent, this would change.
A native of the Loire, Bernier had acquired medical training and spent time in Palestine, Syria and Egypt before arriving in India in late 1658. The timing was important. With Shah Jahan gravely ill, a succession struggle involving his four sons had begun. As Bernier made his way from Surat to Agra, following the path previously trodden by Tavernier, he encountered the eldest of the sons, Dara Shikoh, and joined his entourage as a physician. From this vantage point, he witnessed Dara’s eventual defeat and the ascension of his younger brother Aurangzeb to the throne.
Bernier was welcomed into the new emperor’s court, where European medical knowledge was highly valued, and remained there for much of the next decade. As a royal doctor he accompanied Aurangzeb on his travels around the empire and gained unprecedented insider access to the Mughal regime.
Though his seizure of power had been cruel, involving the merciless killing of Dara and his other brothers, Bernier was in no doubt that Aurangzeb was a talented leader, ‘endowed with a versatile and rare genius […] a consummate statesman, and a great King.’ The resources of his empire, stretching from the Himalayas to the Deccan, were almost infinite. Its principal cities—Delhi, Agra and Lahore—were wonderous sights (though, naturally, not quite the equal of Paris, ‘the finest, the richest, and altogether the first city in the world’).
More than any European before him, Bernier had the opportunity to study the functioning of the Mughal polity. In letters sent back to France he explained how Mughal administration worked, outlining the system in place for the collection of revenues from the land—based on the fixed term award of land grants (jagirs) to those in Mughal service—and the degree of autonomy retained by local rulers.
His conclusion was that the Empire was not as rich, strong or stable as it outwardly appeared; though its resources were immense, its income was unpredictable and its expenditure high. The collection of revenues from defaulting landholders and the threat of internal rebellion meant that a huge and expensive imperial army had to be maintained. The administration of justice was arbitrary and failed to protect the poor.
For all that, Bernier noted, the commercial possibilities for a well-organised European trading company were immense.
This excerpt from ‘Glorious Failure’ by Robert Ivermee has been published with permission from Context.