Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The conclusion explores the liquidation of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes and its legacies for nineteenth-century French imperialism. The Company’s liquidation lasted for decades, as the French Revolutionary wars deferred the settlement of financial claims between the Company and its creditors. Its shareholders continued to demand the restitution of both their property and their former privileges, indicating that their revolutionary optimism had given way to a resurgence of rentier behavior that informed their new institutional undertakings. At the same time, while French visions of Indian empire receded in the face of British consolidation, new French imperial projects emerged. Although colonial officials insisted on the primacy of territorial conquest over trade, when their visions faced financial limitations, the French state turned to public-private partnerships as a method of outsourcing the costs of empire-building onto small, private companies. As a result, the book concludes by arguing that the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes represented a harbinger of later projects of nineteenth-century French informal empire.