Book Chapter

Manufacturing Markets: Managing the Industrial Risks of Franco-Asian Commerce, 1683–1702

  • Lewis Wade

This paper revisits the relationship between entrepreneurialism and risk by analysing the French crown’s efforts to promote the trade of Languedocian cloth in India from 1686 to 1702. The crown limited the CIO’s ability to import Asian textiles, regarding these as deleterious to metropolitan industry, while simultaneously requiring the CIO to make consistent, large orders with the Languedocian factories of Saptes and Villenouvette. This reflected an understanding of the factories’ entrepreneurs as agents of the public good who needed to be protected from market uncertainties. Yet while the CIO itself suffered from this dynamic, the scale of its orders facilitated the factories’ development into mature enterprises that undergirded French success in Ottoman trade in the eighteenth century.

  • Keywords:
  • entrepreneurialism,
  • industry,
  • cloth,
  • French East India Company,
  • India\,
+ Show More

Lewis Wade

Leiden University, Netherlands - ORCID: 0000-0002-4448-3396

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Pages: 191-206
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Manufacturing Markets: Managing the Industrial Risks of Franco-Asian Commerce, 1683–1702

Authors

Lewis Wade

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2.14

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Gestione del rischio, insolvenza e bancarotta nel mondo premoderno (secc. XIII-XVIII) / Risk management, insolvency, and bankruptcy in the pre-modern world (13th-18th centuries)

Editors

Angela Orlandi

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

568

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0962-5

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0963-2

eISBN (xml)

979-12-215-0964-9

Series Title

Datini Studies in Economic History

Series ISSN

2975-1241

Series E-ISSN

2975-1195

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