Profiles in transition: Of adventurers and administrators in south India, 1750-1810 1

This essay attempts to understand the transition to colonial rule in South India between the mid-eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries through an examination of three contrasting European figures who were present there in those times. The method is a time-honoured one, even if it had fallen into discredit for a time on account of the fashionable distaste for ’biography’ as a pursuit of the historian, as well as the idea that the colonial (or would-be colonial) elites were not really worthy of the historian’s attention .3 If there is some novelty to recommend it, it must lie in the choice of the figures themselves, here a French entrepreneur and military commander, a Portuguese ecclesiastic and inveterate maker of unfinished projects, and a Scotsman who eventually participated as an East India Company