Three Frenchmen in Bengal: The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757

In 1757, three Frenchmen held the keys to a fading empire in Bengal. Samuel Charles Hill reconstructs the final, frantic years of French commercial ambition in eastern India through the lives of Renault in Chandernagore, Law in Cossimbazar, and Courtin in Dacca. These men watched helplessly as English rivals muscled into territories they had long dominated, their trading houses caught between a crumbling Mughal order and the rising power of the Nawab Siraj-ud-daula. The year of Plassey that would reshape all of India unfolds here from the French perspective: we see the desperate diplomacy, the military posturing, the whispered betrayals that would leave their settlements in ruins. Hill draws extensively on archival correspondence to reconstruct not just events but the inner world of men watching their world end. This is colonial history from the losing side, which makes it invaluable: a reminder that the British conquest of India was never inevitable, and that another future once seemed possible.