Robert Ivermee's "Glorious Failure"

Robert Ivermee is a historian of British and wider European colonialism in South Asia. He is Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Paris, and the author of Hooghly: The Global History of a River.

Ivermee applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 introduces one of the most important Indian characters in Glorious Failure, the Tamil merchant and official Ananda Ranga Pillai. The page presents Pillai’s background and explains how, through his family connections and commercial dealings, he became one of the wealthiest residents of the French colony of Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast. It then outlines Pillai’s involvement with the French East India Company, first as a commercial agent and later as chief advisor to the governor at Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix. The page notes that Dupleix relied heavily on the polyglot Ananda, who spoke Tamil, French and Persian, to organise the Company’s trade with the local Tamil community and conduct diplomacy with Indian courts. It adds that Ananda kept a journal covering some twenty-five years of his life. For historians, this journal is an outstanding primary source on events at Pondicherry and in wider south India from 1736 to 1761.

Readers opening Glorious Failure to page 99 would understand that Ananda and Dupleix were important figures in the history of French India. They would get an insight into French eighteenth century commercial operations in the Indian Ocean. Some perceptive readers might note that the French presence in South Asia was not only commercial, as the presence of a French governor at Pondicherry and the mention of diplomacy with Indian courts suggests. However, readers turning directly to page 99 would get little sense of how, during the governorship of Dupleix, France became a major territorial power in southern and central India. The key argument of Glorious Failure – that France acted as an aggressive imperial power on the subcontinent, establishing an empire through force – is not clearly stated on this page. The Page 99 Test therefore does not work very well for the book.

Page 99 falls early in chapter five of Glorious Failure, which is devoted to the crucial years of French imperial expansion on the subcontinent (1739-1751). The pages that follow explain how, capitalising on its military superiority over local powers, France installed compliant rulers in different Indian courts before taking direct control of large swathes of territory in the Carnatic and the Deccan. Within a decade, however, France’s nascent empire in India had collapsed in the face of internal weakness, hostility from Indian powers, and conflict with Great Britain.

Learn more about Glorious Failure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue