French East India Company

English company agents become familiar with Indian customs and languages, including Persian, the unifying official language under the Mughals.

In many ways, the English agents of this period live like Indians, intermarry willingly, and a large number of them never return to their home country.

The knowledge of India thus acquired and the mutual ties forged with Indian trading groups give the English a competitive edge over other Europeans.

The French commercial interest—Compagnie des Indes Orientales (East India Company, founded in 1664)—comes late, but the French also establish themselves in India, emulating the precedents set by their competitors as they found their enclave at Pondicherry (Puduchcheri) on the Coramandel Coast.

Madagascar's historical role as a destination for travelers from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa is underscores by the ruins of fortifications built by Arab traders as far back as the ninth century.

Not until the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, do European ships flying Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French flags explore Madagascar's shoreline.

Beginning in 1643, several French settlements emerge; the best known of these, Tolanaro (formerly Faradofay) on the southeast coast, lasts for more than thirty years.

The settlement survives in part because the colonists have taken pains to establish cordial relations with the Antanosy, the ethnic group inhabiting the area.

Relations deteriorate later, however, and in 1674 a massacre of nearly all the inhabitants ends French colonization endeavors for more than a century; survivors flee by sea to the neighboring territory of Réunion.

The French East India Company (French: La Compagnie française des Indes orientales or Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales), a commercial enterprise, is founded in 1664 to compete with the British and Dutch East India companies.

Planned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, it is chartered by King Louis XIV for the purpose of trading in the Eastern Hemisphere.

It results from the fusion of three earlier companies, the 1660 Compagnie de Chine, the Compagnie d'Orient and Compagnie de Madagascar.

The first Director General for the Company is François Caron, who had spent thirty years working for the Dutch East India Company, including more than twenty years in Japan.

The first state-sponsored French voyage to the Indies had occurred in 1603, a voyage captained by Paulmier de Gonneville of Honfleur.

French king Henry IV had authorized the first Compagnie des Indes Orientales, granting the firm a fifteen-year monopoly of the Indies trade.

This precursor to Colbert's later Compagnie des Indes Orientales, however, was not a joint-stock corporation, and was funded by the Crown.

The initial capital of the revamped Compagnie des Indes Orientales is fifteen million livres, divided into shares of one thousand livres apiece.

Louis XIV funds the first three million livres of investment, against which losses in the first ten years are to be charged.

The initial stock offering quickly sells out, as courtiers of Louis XIV recognize that it is in their interests to support the King’s overseas initiative.

The Compagnie des Indes Orientales is granted a fifty-year monopoly on French trade in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, a region stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan.

The French monarch also grants the Company a concession in perpetuity for the island of Madagascar, as well as any other territories it can conquer.

The French had taken Saint Thomas  in 1672 but had soon been driven out by the Dutch.

Chandernagore (present-day Chandannagar) is established in 1673 with the permission of Nawab Shaista Khan, the Mughal governor of Bengal.

The French acquire Valikondapuram, on the Coromandel Coast, from the Sultan of Bijapur in 1674, and thus is laid the foundation of Pondichéry, which is to become a principal base of the French East India Company.

The battles between the Kimpanzu and Kinlaza continue to plunge the Kingdom of Kongo into a chaos not known in centuries.

The fighting between the two lineages leads to the sack of São Salvador in 1678.

Ironically, the capital built by the pact of Mpemba and Mbata is burned to the ground not by the Portuguese or rival African nations but by its very heirs.

The city and hinterlands around Mbanza Kongo are depopulated.

São Salvador becomes the grazing place of wild animals where rival claimants will crown themselves, then retreat before drawing the ire of opposition partisans.

Even after its resettlement, the city will never regain its prominence.

The population of São Salvador has dispersed into the mountaintop fortresses of the rival kings: the Mountain of Kibangu east of the capital and the fortress of the Águas Rosadas, a line founded in the 1680s from descendants of Kinlaza and Kimpanzu, the region of Mbula or Lemba where a line founded by the Kinlaza pretender, Pedro III rules; and Lovota a district in southern Soyo that shelters a Kimpanzu lineage whose head is Doña Suzanna de Nóbrega.

Finally, D Ana Afonso de Leão will found her own center on the Mbidizi River at Nkondo and guide her junior kinsmen to reclaim the country, even as she seeks to reconcile the hostile factions.

In the interim, however, tens of thousands fleeing the conflict or caught up in the battles are deported as slaves to English, French, Dutch and Portuguese merchants every year.

One stream leads north to Loango, whose merchants, known as Vili (Mubires in the period) carry them primarily to merchants from England and the Netherlands, and others are taken to Luanda where they are sold to Portuguese merchants bound for Brazil.

The Indian subcontinent had had indirect relations with Europe by both overland caravans and maritime routes, dating back to the fifth century BCE.

The lucrative spice trade with India had been mainly in the hands of Arab merchants.

By the fifteenth century, European traders had come to believe that the commissions they had to pay the Arabs were prohibitively high and therefore sent out fleets in search of new trade routes to India.

The arrival of the Europeans in the last quarter of the fifteenth century marked a great turning point in the history of the subcontinent.

The dynamics of the history of the subcontinent come to be shaped chiefly by the Europeans' political and trade relations with India as India is swept into the vortex of Western power politics.

The arrival of the Europeans generally coincides with the gradual decline of Mughal power, and the subcontinent becomes an arena of struggle not only between Europeans and the indigenous rulers but also among the Europeans.

Siraj ud Daulah, governor of Bengal, unwisely provokes a military confrontation with the British at Plassey in 1757.

He is defeated by Robert Clive, an adventurous young official of the British East India Company.

Clive's victory is consolidated in 1764 at the Battle of Buxar on the Ganges, where he defeats the Mughal emperor.

As a result, the British East India Company is granted the title of diwan (collector of the revenue) in the areas of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, making it the supreme, but not titular, governing power.

Henceforth the British will govern Bengal and from here extend their rule to all of India.

Vasco da Gama had led the first documented European expedition to India, sailing into Calicut on the southwest coast in 1498.

In 1510 the Portuguese had captured Goa, which has become the seat of their activity

Under Admiral Alfonso de Albuquerque, Portugal had successfully challenged Arab power in the Indian Ocean and dominated the sea routes for a century.

Jesuits had come to "convert, to converse, and to record" observations of India.

The Protestant countries of the Netherlands and England, upset by the Portuguese monopoly, form private trading companies at the turn of the seventeenth century to challenge the Portuguese.

Mughal officials permit  the new carriers of India's considerable export trade to establish trading posts (factories) in India.

The Dutch East India Company concentrates mainly on the spice trade from present-day Indonesia.

Britain's East India Company carries on trade with India.

The French East India Company also sets up factories.