Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World by Erin M. Greenwald (review)

In six short and well-argued chapters, Erin M. Greenwald, senior curator and historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, examines the global contours of the French Company of the Indies in Louisiana, West Africa, and the Bay of Bengal during the eighteenth century. She focuses on Marc-Antoine Caillot, one of the firm's agents, whose "life in many ways mirrored the history of the company that employed him" for thirty years (p. 153). In this institutional history of the French Company of the Indies, Greenwald follows Caillot's long career to offer a broad picture of Atlantic world commerce and colonialism.

The book opens in the late seventeenth century, when the French Company of the Indies won a monopoly to trade and settle overseas colonies, and traces how Indian Ocean models of commerce shaped French economic ventures in the Atlantic world. Through these globalized, hybrid colonial models, the company brought the Gulf South into a wide web of empire. The book concludes in the 1730s, when the company shifted its focus from the Atlantic world to the East Indies. The company suffered from crippling financial losses until relinquishing its interests in the Atlantic world by abandoning Louisiana commerce, making Louisiana a province directly ruled by the French Crown, and turning a profit in the Indian Ocean trade.

Several key themes emerge throughout the narrative, including Greenwald's keen focus on mercantilism as a form of organizing empire. Specifically, Greenwald studies France's attempt to force its colonial economy into a model to compete with "British and Dutch merchants who operated within coherent spheres of nationwide finance systems" (p. 16). But ironically, the system of regulation meant to enrich France hampered the company's viability. Greenwald traces various attempts to circumvent mercantilist policies and thus sheds light on an enduring feature of colonial history: the conflict between commerce and politics in overseas empires.

How Greenwald recreates the specific mechanics of travel is one of the book's chief strengths. She details oceanic crossings with an eye to how disease, climate, and other challenges shaped colonial imagination about the New World. These "tropical baptisms" made the grueling work of empire material, forcing agents like Caillot to endure brutal hardships (p. 69). These experiences also rendered the New World a fantastical space within the French imperial imagination. At once embodied and imagined, the work of commerce in the French Atlantic helped create a larger politics of empire during the eighteenth century.

A third key theme of this book is its attention to politics and political culture. While scholarship on the French Atlantic has looked at specific political transactions that shaped the expansion of the empire, Greenwald goes a step further, unpacking the value systems, ideals, ideologies, and cultures that shaped the politics of the French empire. By finely parsing the differences between bribery and patronage, mercantilism and monopoly, Greenwald deftly places the political economy of the French Company of the Indies in a wider political context.

Greenwald promises a global history of Caillot and the company that spans the East and West Indies, but the book's focus is largely Atlantic. Although ventures in the Indian Ocean shaped the company's rise and though Caillot also traveled to India, that material is confined to the opening and closing passages of the book. Greenwald's book, at its core, offers a careful, detailed, and thorough account of the company's activities in Louisiana and the Caribbean. Readers of this journal will certainly welcome this work, which builds on and updates Daniel H. Usner's classic study, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992). With an exhaustive look at the wider French Atlantic empire, Greenwald offers a fresh perspective on familiar events in Louisiana history...