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Robert Ivermee’s Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India, published by Hurst, takes a long view of France’s colonial presence in India for over three hundred years, starting with events that led to the French East India Company’s establishment, looking at imperial methods and their consequences, including famine, economic costs and devastation wreaked by war.
This excerpt is part of the book’s reckoning with slavery in the French colonies, which the author argues is largely ignored in studies of French India. “While the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade are widely (though still, no doubt, insufficiently) recognised in Europe today, European slave trafficking in the Indian Ocean has escaped sustained scholarly or popular attention,” he writes. “In a number of important ways, the development of French colonialism in India benefitted from the French trafficking and trading of slaves in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.”
Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s infamous Code Noir, published in 1685, then confirmed that the institution of slavery was a vital part of the French colonial endeavour, providing it with a firm legal foundation and linking it closely with race, wherever French colonies were established. In the Code, “noir” (black) was a catch-all term for non-white peoples the world over, including Africa and India. Just a year before it was published, François Bernier, now back in France after his decade at the Mughal court, had published a treatise considered by many to be the first modern classification of humans into distinct races. The theoretical and legal foundations for the use of racial difference to justify colonial exploitation and slavery were being laid.
That the Code Noir was published in 1685 was strategic, not arbitrary. By this point, the French colonies in North America and the Caribbean were faced with acute labour shortages, as very few French men and women crossed the Atlantic voluntarily to settle in the New World. (Life was so agreeable in France, noted one patriotic observer, that why would anybody want to leave?)