Elizabeth Cross's "Company Politics"

Elizabeth Cross is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Company Politics: Commerce, Scandal, and French Visions of Indian Empire in the Revolutionary Era, and reported the following:

Exploring corporate intrigue, financial scandals, and imperial competition in an age of revolutionary upheaval, Company Politics is a history of the last French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes) in the period between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution. By focusing on a non-state, corporate actor, the book delves into France’s informal, commercial empire in South Asia and argues that the strategies, ideas, and innovations of French economic actors represent key contributions to the histories of capitalism and the modern corporation itself.

Page 99 comes at a transitional moment right in the middle of Chapter 4, which focuses on the history of the Company’s operations in India in the 1780s. The chapter is composed of three case studies on the Company’s three principal trading sites: Pondicherry (Coromandel Coast), Chandernagor (Bengal), and Mahé (Malabar Coast). Page 99 marks the transition between the latter two. As a result, it does not give a great sense of many of the book’s overall themes, but it does highlight one of its key contributions, in that it asks readers to expand their own geographical understandings of the French colonial empire to include places over which France did not have formal territorial dominion. The British East India Company claimed control over Bengal in this era, which meant that the French Company’s trade there was effectively illegal. Similarly, on the Malabar Coast, the French Company was relentlessly challenged by Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who sought to manipulate the company’s access to goods and markets in the name of negotiating a formal military alliance with the French crown against the British.

Accordingly, page 99 reveals one key aspect of this book, in that the book is a story about a French empire that French imperial actors did not – and could not – easily control. It reminds us that despite its extravagant claims of supremacy, imperial power could often be not only exceedingly fragile, but subject to both colonial rivalries and local resistance.

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--Marshal Zeringue