An Uneasy Alliance: Traders, Missionaries, and Tamil Intermediaries in Eighteenth-Century French India.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the fraught intersection of commerce and conversion in the eighteenth-century French empire in India. I analyze the profound conflicts between the state-sponsored French projects of trade and religion in the colony of Pondichéry in South India, and by doing so reveal the many internal contradictions that posed a challenge to French aspirations for colonial hegemony. This thesis is equally concerned with the roles filled by Tamil professional intermediaries, employed by French traders and missionaries alike. By juxtaposing an analysis of internal French struggles with a study of colonial go-betweens, the thesis reveals the inherent incompleteness of colonial authority. It thus contributes to our understanding of early modern empires, by suggesting that fluidly distributed and tenuously held authority are the hallmarks of such ventures. Scholars have studied early modern commercial and religious projects, but rarely in tandem. My project examines the relationship between these two efforts, and reveals that while traders of the French Compagnie des Indes and Catholic missionaries were both sent to India to advance the interests of the French Crown, agents of these groups were deeply divided about the goals and practice of empire. I argue that while traders sought to sustain the profitable status quo and insert themselves into long-standing Indian Ocean trading networks based on kinship and confession, French missionaries, and particularly the Jesuits, espoused an ideology of disruption and radical change, in an effort to reconfigure the local spiritual and social hierarchies. As a result of these fissures among the French, Tamil commercial brokers and religious interpreters were able find a central and influential place in the conflicted crevices of the French project. While recent scholarly focus on colonial mediation has studied interactions between colonizers and colonized, this project demonstrates that a study of the lives and labors of local intermediaries also sheds lights on the internal contestations which shaped the French imperial endeavor. By examining the global project of empire through a resolutely local lens, I show that the colonizing experience is not one that simply divides colonizer and colonized, but rather creates fractures within imperial institutions and among colonizing agents.