French East India Company Refounded

1664

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's indefatigable finance minister, chartered a new Compagnie des Indes Orientales with royal backing and a monopoly on French trade east of the Cape. Factories at Surat, Pondicherry, and Chandernagore would follow. France was entering the scramble for Asian commerce sixty years behind the Dutch, but with the Sun King's purse.