Contenu du sommaire : Les Indes Orientales au carrefour des Empires

The Indian Ocean has in recent years emerged as a vital area of study and analysis inviting attention from historians, anthropologists, social scientists and cultural studies scholars. The growing corpus of scholarship on the Indian Ocean has in turn raised issues of methodology and of potentialities for comparative research. The very nature of the discursive as well as the physical space of the Indian Ocean discourages a uni-disciplinary perspective and compels the researcher to consider both an expanded archive as well as a more inclusive paradigm of understanding. Colonialism was an obvious factor giving unity to the space of the Indian Ocean. Religion was another important field of cohesive interaction. The questions that arise as to the nature and dynamics of these historical and contemporary forms of cohesion are many. How for instance, did migrations and anti-colonial resistance experiences shape modern subjectivities in the Indian Ocean ? How can we meaningfully understand the notion of multi-culturalism in the Indian Ocean ? How were identities forged in the Indian Ocean, and what role did religious, commercial networks and media networks play in this process ? New studies intend to address some of these issues by drawing on emerging analysis of transnationalism, universalism and regimes of circulation in the Indian Ocean, by suggesting new theoretical frameworks for understanding and exploring new methodologies of study.

A vivid illustration in the first half of the eighteenth century of the circulation of knowledge by printed books, the Histoire générale des Voyages by the Abbé Prévost put into the hands of French readers, in French translation, the accounts of European travelers, notably English, in the different corners of the world. This article uses the French versions in Prevost of travel accounts to the East Indies that first appeared in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century in anthologies compiled by Churchill, Astely, and other English publishers. By exploring the recurrent themes of different topographies, local « mœurs » and religious beliefs observed by European travelers to the East Indies, and incorporated by Prévost, this article will study the relationship between the French and English versions, and the adaptations made for French readership apparent in the French translations originally published in English.

The second half of the eighteenth century represented a turning point in the interest of French elites for the Indian world. The last influence of the universalist thought of the Enlightenment came to be mingled with the first reflections of orientalists, before these even existed. And no less apparent was the spectacle of geopolitical conflict in the subcontinent, part of a century-long colonial rivalry between France and Britain. The political as well as the social knowledge of India at the time was held to be serious only if it derived from direct experience. A kind of « practical » methodology emerged, significantly different not only from that used by virtually all scholars of the Modern Age, whose knowledge of India was based almost entirely on the accounts and memoirs of contemporary travelers and missionaries, but also from that developed by orientalists beginning in the nineteenth century, when new documentary sources allowed for a more scientific approach to the study of Indian society.

Traditionally, historiography has attributed the difficulties faced by French trading posts in India after 1765 following the Seven Years War to the supposed corruption of colonial personnel and to the political negligence of the government of Louis XV. The purpose of this article is to analyze contemporary as well as structural causes that led French trading posts to complete paralysis between 1768 and the end of 1773, and that prompted the governor Law de Lauriston and his council to implement strategies for their survival, and in addition, to evaluate the scope and the different consequences whether social, economic, or political that occurred locally, regionally, and internationally of this deep crisis. This short study aims to depict a more complex and accurate image of the French failure in India at the end of the eighteenth century.

Joseph-Elzear Morenas (1778-1830) is known for this anti-slavery views expressed in his Précis historique de la traite des noirs et de l'esclavage colonial, published in 1828. ?But by this time, he already had a long career behind him in different colonial establishments like Saint-Louis in Senegal and Chandernagor in India. In this last post, he served as a liaison agent for the governor general of Mascareignes, Charles Decaen, between 1806 and ? ?1810. A keen-eyed observer of Indian society, he wrote a treatise on hinduism. And he was also involved in Deacaen's short-lived projects to forge alliances with those indigenous princes opposed to the English presence, an experience that led him to write a criticism of the colonialism practiced by the East India Company. This article will re-examine the correspondence between Morenas and Decaen, found in the Papiers Decaen in the municipal library of Caen. From these documents, it is possible to trace the exceptional itinerary of Morenas, an intelligence officer in the service of a colonial administrator in a slave society and an agent of an imperialistic project in competition with English colonialism. What are the links between the observation of indigenous societies and a theoretical stance about colonial? domination during this period of transition ?

From 1825 till 1848, slaves that were considered « detrimental to the peace and quiet » of the Ile Bourbon were « sent », either temporarily or permanently, to Sainte-Marie, another French colony northeast of Madagascar. Not only did those slaves happen to participate in the toilsome colonization of the mere 155-mile-square isle, they were also given over to an overly stern penal system. We would argue that the shilly-shallying of this repressive package results from a clash between the State power on the one hand and the slave owners on the other.

A member of the maritime expedition of Captain Nicolas Baudin to the southern lands (1800-1804), François Péron (1775-1810), from 1804 to 1809, wrote a series of reports, accounts, and descriptions of the diverse populations, ?« ? savage ? »? and European, that he observed during his voyage. These different productions have, for some time, aroused the interest of historians, particularly historians of anthropology. Considered part of the different instructions on voyages written by members of the Société des Observateurs de l'homme, François Péron observations would mark a rupture, symbolized by the use of the dynamometer and the advancement of the measurement of muscular force, in the vision of ?« ? savage  ?»? populations whose ?« ? natural  ?»? physical weakness excluded them from the possibilities of progress and perfectibility. His anthropological observations thus constitute the end of the vision of the ?« ? good savage  ?»? transmitted by the heritage of the Enlightenment. ?In this respect, Péron appeared as a representative, and participant, of a rupture in the conception of a common humanity, the ? ?« ? ?savage ? ?» ? ?populations being reduced to the status of an simple curiosity. ? The anthropology of Péron belongs to a general movement of the restoration of order that characterized the Empire, the particular manner of describing southern populations, participating in the abandonment of the political ideals of the French Revolution, and more precisely, of the republican project of the Directorial Republic.

Starting from 18th and 19th century texts based on « colonial projects » by members of the Dutch administration or high ranking officers in the colonial army, and anchored on the concept of « engineering society », the author endeavors, through numerous examples from the diverse Dutch colonies, to discern the means which were considered at the time to strengthen the connection between the mother country and its colonies from the political, economic, but also, moral, perspectives. These debates, as the author demonstrates, were also bound up in the discussions concerning the passage from a colonial economy of exchanges to new modes of economic exploitation based, for the most part, on free labor. These projects, shrouded in philosophic and moral discourse of the Enlightenment, are signifiers of this transitional period between 1770 and 1830 in the community of European colonial capitals.