Company Politics is written with remarkable fluency, combining meticulous empirical research with nuanced yet authoritative analysis. Cross makes sense of France's New East India Company as a remedyDLa concoction of trade-offs and contradictions, commerce and state, war and peaceDLprescribed to heal the wound of France's painful loss to the British in India. She guides us with ease and assurance from metropolitan debates and disputes, from old regime to new, across a great gap to the lived realities of France's disparate trading posts in India. This is an invaluable study of continuity underpinning revolutionary change that deepens our understanding of French commercial and imperial strategy in Asia far beyond the period it addresses.
Elizabeth Cross is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University.
