| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Arvind Sinha. The Politics of Trade: Anglo-French Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1763–1793. New Delhi: Manohar. 2002. Pp. 249.

A common assumption in the historiography of European imperialism in Asia is that the years after 1763 saw the eclipse of French commercial power and influence in India. According to this reading of the history of the subcontinent, defeat in the Seven Years' War brought an abrupt halt to the hitherto robust French assault on the initial growth of British supremacy among the monopolistic European East India companies. Thereafter, although the specter of French military and political resurgence always loomed large in the minds of British company officials and decision makers in London (not least when Napoleon threatened invasion of India via Egypt), there was never any realistic prospect of France undermining Britain's dominant commercial position to any great degree. This book challenges such a view by focusing on a postwar French trading revival that lasted from 1763 to 1793, and Arvind Sinha is fully justified in claiming that his work represents the first detailed examination of French trade in the Coromandel, the southeastern coastal region of India where France was obliged to concentrate its activity during the late eighteenth century. The outcome is a careful study firmly rooted in Indian and French archives, which is only very slightly marred by the misspelling of the names of some leading historians. Overall, the data and detail culled from unused or underused sources serves strongly to underscore the important general point that Anglo-French rivalry was rather more complex, and had a greater number of dimensions to it, than has been previously acknowledged by historians. . . .

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