Empire and Enlightenment after John Law: Merchant Capitalism and Political Economy in the French East India Company

Abstract

This article accounts for the expansion of French global commerce in the decades after the John Law system (1717–20) and explores the contradictory relationship between two consequences of that expansion: the consolidation of the Old Regime’s fragmented, unevenly developed, and elite-dominated global economy, on the one hand, and the emergence of an abstract and critical discourse of political economy, on the other. The argument is pursued through two figures who were intimately associated with the French East India Company: the financier François Castanier and the philosophe Jean-François Melon. The accumulation strategies of Castanier, a director of the company from the period of the Law system to his death in 1759, reveal the particular logics of merchant capital in Old Regime France. The development of Melon’s ideas, from memoranda written for the company in the 1720s to his influential Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), shows how those operations in turn generated a critical political economy of empire. Reading Melon alongside Castanier, the article recovers the productive but unstable relationship between empire and Enlightenment that emerged out of the French East India Company in the decades after the Law system. In facilitating the career of Castanier, the company offered a blueprint for growth in an economy of finite adaptability. But in provoking the critique of Melon, it revealed how French merchant capitalism generated expectations that the Old Regime was unable to meet.