Mercantile Aesthetics: Art, Science, and Diplomacy in French India (1664-1761).

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the integration of the French East India Company with the painted and printed textile industry along India's Coromandel Coast from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century. It aims to illuminate how, in mercantile economies, multifarious forms of exchange restructure our narratives about cross-cultural exchanges during the pre- and early-colonial era. I argue that the Coromandel textile industry mediated the development of European natural history, forms of collecting and gift exchange between France and Asia and within India itself, and luxury consumerism and constructions of exoticism within France. These three factors recast European conceptions of modernity in the eighteenth century as being deeply imbedded in, and informed by, indigenous South Asian knowledge of natural history and aesthetic and social practices.;Chapter one provides a critical overview of the complex trade and marketing networks created by merchants and brokers within India and abroad, both before and during the arrival of East India Companies. Processes of exchange within trade networks of the Indian Ocean imbued these textiles with diverse interpretive layers through which Europeans came to understand and define `Asian' exoticism. This chapter also examines how Indian textiles assumed contradictory meanings within varying social contexts by examining their use as currency in the slave trade concomitant with their circulation in French luxury markets.;Chapter two argues that the Coromandel textile industry served as a point of convergence for both aesthetic practice and scientific knowledge about the botanical world. Specifically, I look to the Jardin de Lorixa (c.1695-1725), a compendium of 725 botanical images painted by Indian textile painters for a French company physician. I emphasize how this work mediated European and Indian knowledge and representation of nature.;The final chapter investigates the transition from mercantile to imperial forms of interchange from three perspectives: gifting, iconoclasm, and the self-fashioning of France's chief Tamil broker. The extant writings and portrait of Ananda Ranga Pillai overturn traditional notions of colonialism in which Europeans arrive, restructure, and dominate. Conversely, instances of violent iconoclasm and destruction of Hindu temples by the French highlight how images served as a focal point around which contested canons of beauty, religious belief, and political power collided.