Between Commerce and Conquest: Franco-Anglo-Indian Relations in the Middle of the 18th century

In the course of the 18th century, European trading companies radically changed the character of the administration of their territories in India. The central decade of that century, in fact, saw a change from the pioneering phase of the English and the French colonial experiences in India (16th-17th centuries), marked by a prevailing interest for exotic goods and commodities, to a new more political phase aimed at territorial expansion, in order to control the most important strategical or economical areas (and this new phase, in a global context, would reach its apex only in the second half of the 19th century).