Of all of the European powers involved in the commercial and geopolitical struggle for dominance in the lucrative Asian trade from ca. 1500–1800, the experience of the various French companies operating in the Indian Ocean basin during that time has received by far the least amount of scholarly attention. Portugal's once formidable Estado da India has long generated a rich and intellectually invigorating historiography, as have the seventeenth-century proto-capitalist companies of the English (EIC) and the Dutch (VOC). The French experience in Asia, however, while garnering scholarly interest during the halcyon days of the Third Republic, including the works of Paul Kaeppelin, Jules Sottas, Henry Weber, and Alfred Martineau, has with the notable exception of S. P. Sen, Philippe Haudrre, Catherine Manning, and my own Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996) remained largely dormant since that time. It was therefore with a good deal of excitement that I perused the pages of Professor Wellington's contribution to this much ignored, albeit highly significant, field of scholarly inquiry.

The book is divided into two parts: first, a brief history of the various French companies beginning with those of the early sixteenth century, including Henry IV's Sociètè pour le voyage des Indes Orientales, the first to receive letters-patent from the Crown on 1 June 1604, and culminating with the Compagnie des Indes (1719–1763), which thanks to the exploits of Joseph Franois Dupleix was the most successful of all the French companies. The second part of the book focuses on the economic details of the trade pursued by these companies touching on the various trade routes utilized by the French, as well as the patterns, structure, and value of their commerce over these decades.

Wellington's overview of the French companies, as he admits in his preface, is based exclusively on extant secondary works, though a few key studies are noticeable by their absence. His goal was not to comb the Archives Coloniales for new manuscript materials, which might allow him to revise main outlines of the French experience in the Asian trade. Rather, it was to provide an overview for general readers and undergraduates. As such in this “brief” 94-page section, we are treated to a concise and eminently readable overview of the checkered French experience in the trade over these centuries: the machinations relating to transferring monopoly privileges between the various royal monopoly corporate entities, the key early role of Cardinal Richelieu, the misguided attempts to colonize Madagascar, the great efforts of Jean Baptiste Colbert's Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales and his Persian Squadron of 1670 to undermine the entrenched power of the Dutch VOC, the years of uncertainty from ca. 1683–1721 including the collapse of John Law's system, and finally the glory days of Dupleix in the 1730s and early 1740s ended by the rise of English power under Robert Clive. All in all, it is a fascinating story competently told by Wellington. One critique of this section, however, is that more effort could have been expended to compare and contrast the French companies and methods with those of their European and Asiatic rivals in the trade. As it stands, the reader is left with the impression that the French were largely operating in a vacuum and neither learned from nor impacted the activities of these rivals; clearly this was not the case over these centuries.

Section two discusses the “record of the trade” materials for the French companies. Wellington's training as an economist emerges in these pages. Based on bills of sale, ship's manifests, and other materials from the archives (although it is unclear whether he consulted these materials in Nantes or is citing them from other sources) the author presents an interesting statistical breakdown of the structure of the French trade, employing regression analysis on occasion to demonstrate that the “history of the trade of the Compagnie Royale des Indes Orientales and the Compagnie Franaise des Indes have some close parallels” (p. 110). Another conclusion of this section is that “both trades were subject to wide fluctuations about a rough trend, except during war when the trade plummeted” (p. 110). Of course, neither of these assertions is surprising nor disagreeable. What is somewhat unexpected is that after admitting that the financial data on Colbert's Compagnie is notably scant, Wellington believed it was prudent to construct and run such equations (Y = k + at + bw) for imports and exports. In his structure of the trade chapter, Wellington thankfully eschews regression equations in favor of comprehensible prose and argues (in step with the existing historiography) that during the eighteenth century, the trading products shifted from earlier Indian staples such as spices and textiles to China goods (tea and porcelain) and coffee from Moka and the island of Bourbon. The final hundred pages of the book contain appendices, in particular 12 detailed tables of imports and exports for the two major companies, as well as a useful glossary of the surfeit of terms used to describe the textile products in this rich trade. While the information contained in these tables will no doubt hold interest for students of the trade, Wellington makes little effort to analyze the information they contain systematically, or directly relate it to the conclusions in his previous chapters.

Overall, therefore, this book contributes relatively little to the historiography of the trade. Its initial section, while engaging, offers nothing new to readers already familiar with the standard secondary works. Similarly, the second section, with the exception of Wellington's regression equations, offers scant information that has not already been published in earlier works on the trade and particularly Haudrre's opus. That said, for those who are not specialists in the field or those who are not able to read French, Wellington's work provides a useful introduction to the travails of the French quest for Asian trade from ca. 1500–1763, and for that alone he is to be commended.