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.
Leiden University, Netherlands - ORCID: 0000-0002-4448-3396
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
Metadata License
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
Metadata License
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