Scholarly Works, History
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Browsing Scholarly Works, History by Author "Agmon, Danna"
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- A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French IndiaAgmon, Danna (Cornell University Press, 2017)Early in the eighteenth century, in the French colony of Pondichéry, India, a man’s life was thrust into turmoil. A Tamil commercial broker named Nayiniyappa, the colony’s most powerful local man, was arrested, swiftly convicted of tyranny and sedition, and died in prison while serving out his sentence. But following his death a global mobilization effort on his behalf ensued, and the French King exonerated Nayiniyappa posthumously. The struggle over this man’s guilt or innocence drew into debate merchants of the French trading company, the Compagnie des Indes, Catholic missionaries of various orders, high ranking officials in Paris and Versailles, and local families in Pondichéry. As they fought over Nayiniyappa’s fate, they also articulated radically different visions of the French colonial project in India. This microhistory of the affair and the fault lines it reveals shows that conflicts between and within the projects of trade and religion were a defining feature of the little-known French empire in South Asia.
- The Currency of Kinship: Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French IndiaAgmon, Danna (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2014)In the French colony of Pondichéry, French and local actors alike drew on the shared idiom of kinship to strategically advance their political and commercial agendas. Recent scholarship has shown that the structures of family underlay early modern European state building and imperial expansion. This essay deploys this insight in the colonial context, to examine how indigenous families in the Tamil region entered into the European colonial project. For native commercial brokers, involvement with European newcomers could actually strengthen local family ties. Simultaneously, French employees of the Compagnie des Indes were eager to insert themselves into Tamil networks and did so by deploying public and inscribed performances of kinship.
- Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French IndiaAgmon, Danna (Cambridge University Press, 2021-10-01)This article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps - physical, historiographical, and epistemological - to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history - questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty - with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie's early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.