Region and period
Travelers in the East Indies in the 18th Century
In the eighteenth century the East Indies stopped being a string of trading posts and became a prize of empire. The Mughal Empire came apart after Aurangzeb's death in 1707; the nawabs of Bengal and the Carnatic ruled on their own account, and the Marathas held the center of the subcontinent. The European companies, which had come for pepper and cotton cloth, took sides in their quarrels, raised sepoy armies and ended up collecting the taxes.
The rivalry between France and Britain set the pace. From Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix dreamed of a protectorate over the Deccan; Mahé de La Bourdonnais, governor of the Mascarene Islands, took Madras in 1746. The British struck back: Robert Clive won at Plassey in 1757, Pondicherry fell in 1761, and the defeated Lally-Tollendal was beheaded in Paris. In 1765 the East India Company obtained the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, and Warren Hastings became its governor general in 1773. In the south, Hyder Ali and then his son Tipu Sultan, rulers of Mysore, held out until the fall of Seringapatam in 1799.
The sea route changed too. Île de France, today Mauritius, and Île Bourbon, today Réunion, became the indispensable port of call for French ships, with their plantations, their slaves brought from Madagascar and Mozambique, and their maroons hiding in the hills. In 1770 the intendant Pierre Poivre acclimatized clove and nutmeg trees smuggled out of the Moluccas, breaking the Dutch monopoly. Farther east, Batavia remained the capital of the Dutch East India Company, a rich city with a deadly reputation for newcomers, while private merchants, the country traders, criss-crossed the Indian Ocean as far as Canton.
The century also tried to understand. Anquetil-Duperron enlisted as a common soldier in 1754 to go to India in search of the sacred books of the Parsis; the astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil waited at Pondicherry for the transit of Venus in 1769 and missed it because of a single cloud. In Calcutta, William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in 1784 and saw the kinship of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin. At last the gaze was turned around: Mirza Abu Taleb Khan sailed from Calcutta in 1799 and described London, Paris and Constantinople for his own countrymen.
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Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Paolino da San Bartolomeo, A Voyage to the East Indies (1796)
Arriving on the Malabar Coast in the mid-1770s, when the echoes of Duprat's venture have not yet died away, this Austrian Carmelite stays there until 1789. A missionary, he learns Malayalam and Sanskrit, publishing the first printed grammar of the latter in Europe. His account, published in Rome in 1796 and translated into French in 1808, describes the Nairs, the Brahmins, the fishing castes, the court of Travancore and the advance of the armies of Mysore. Here, seen by a man who knew them over many years, are the peoples and kingdoms that Duprat passes at the double.
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