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Company Towns and Tropical Baptisms: From Lorient to Louisiana on a French Atlantic Circuit

Greenwald, Erin Michelle
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306442070

Abstract Details

2011, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History.
In 1729 the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) operated more than two dozen coastal and riverine comptoirs, or trade outposts, along waterways stretching from the upper Mississippi Valley to the West African coast to the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. The Company, administered by an assembly of Paris-centered directors, shareholders, and syndics, stood on the verge of initiating self-directed changes that would simultaneously diminish its functional and geographic scope and place it on firm financial footing for the first time since its mid-seventeenth-century inception. For unlike the Dutch and English monopoly companies, the French Company of the Indies prior to 1731 did not restrict its mission to trade alone; nor did the Company limit its operational sphere to the East Indies. Instead the Company spread its ships, bureaucrats, soldiers, laborers, and cargoes across the Atlantic and Indian oceans. In Louisiana during the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Company made a last unsuccessful bid in its quest to extract wealth from company-directed agricultural endeavors. As the Company’s focus shifted away from agriculture with the retrocession of the colony to the king in 1731, so too did the life courses of individuals whose fortunes were bound up in the Company’s trade, colonization, and agricultural mission in the Americas. Through the lens of an unpublished contemporary account penned by Marc Antoine Caillot, a clerk with the Company of the Indies during its last years in Louisiana, “Company Towns and Tropical Baptisms” situates the colony within the French Atlantic circuit that stretched from Paris and the Brittany Coast to Africa’s Senegambian region to the West Indies to Louisiana and back, and examines the Company’s role as colonizer, developer, slave holder, commercial entity, and deal maker between 1717 and 1731.
Alan Gallay (Advisor)
Kenneth Andrien (Committee Member)
John Brooke (Committee Member)
263 p.
History
slave trade; French Atlantic; Atlantic history; French Company of the Indies; Compagnie des Indes; Louisiana; Lorient; New Orleans; clerks; Caribbean; trading companies; Senegambia; East Indies; West Indies; slavery; Mississippi Valley; Caillot; Nantes

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Greenwald, E. M. (2011). Company Towns and Tropical Baptisms: From Lorient to Louisiana on a French Atlantic Circuit [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306442070

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Greenwald, Erin. Company Towns and Tropical Baptisms: From Lorient to Louisiana on a French Atlantic Circuit. 2011. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306442070.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Greenwald, Erin. "Company Towns and Tropical Baptisms: From Lorient to Louisiana on a French Atlantic Circuit." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306442070

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1306442070
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© 2011, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.