ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Economics of the Antipodes. French Navy Explorers on Trade and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century.
Author: Orain Arnaud
For the past ten years, D. Armitage’s pioneering work has engaged intellectual history in an “international turn” that has profoundly changed the history of Empires. One aspect of this change is related to the prehistory of reflection on globalization; i.e. the emergence of consciousness, then of an analysis, though fleeting, of the phenomenon of rapprochement among peoples, goods and ideas across continents. Several periods during the past five centuries may be convened for this purpose; but it seems that “[t]he period between the end of the Seven Year’s War and the defeat of Napoleon would be a heyday both for imperial historiography and for a renewed attention to the sea power in history.” Until then, historians had been interested in this period through the colonial Encyclopedia of Enlightenment, the Histoire des deux Indes, published by Abbé Raynal. Rather than re-examine this great philosophical meta-narrative, this article aims to shift the issue. The idea is to see how, in the 1750s, the colonial debate inherited from previous centuries was reconfigured by economists (the Gournay circle on the one side, the Physiocrats on the other) into two competing versions that were no longer quite focused on the diptych “Colony for Trade”/“Colony for Empire”. The next step is to focus on the performativity of this narrative on exploration accounts over the 1765-1789 period. This article attempts to determine the influence on navigators of the competing colonial models developed by economists. Finally, the point is to test the implementation of one of these models in the French Mascarene Islands colonies by a discerning traveler who attempted to subvert several exploration missions to the benefit of his own colonial ideal.
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