French Indies Company in the context of "Louis XV"

The Battle of Plassey was a decisive victory of the British East India Company, under the leadership of Robert Clive, over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies on 23 June 1757. The victory was made possible by the defection of Mir Jafar, Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah's commander in chief, as well as much of the Bengal Subah's armies being earlier committed against an Afghan invasion led by Ahmad Shah Durrani against the Mughal Empire. The battle helped the British East India Company take complete control of Bengal in 1773. Over the next hundred years, they continued to expand their control over vast territories in the rest of the Indian subcontinent and Burma.

The battle took place at Palashi (Anglicised version: Plassey) on the banks of the Hooghly River, about 150 kilometres (93 mi) north of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and south of Murshidabad in West Bengal, then capital of Bengal State. The belligerents were the British East India Company, and the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal. He succeeded Alivardi Khan (his maternal grandfather). Siraj-ud-Daulah had become the Nawab of Bengal the year before, and he had ordered the English to stop the extension of their fortification. Robert Clive bribed Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of the Nawab's army, and also promised to make him Nawab of Bengal. Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey in 1757 and captured Calcutta.

Murshidabad (Bengali pronunciation: [murʃidabad]), is a town in the Indian state of West Bengal. This town is the headquarters of Lalbag subdivision of Murshidabad district. It is located on the eastern bank of the Bhagirathi River. During the 18th century, Murshidabad was a prosperous and cosmopolitan town. Murshidabad was the capital of the Bengal Subah for seventy years. This town was the home of wealthy banking and merchant families from different parts of the Indian subcontinent and wider Eurasia. European companies, including the British East India Company, the French East India Company, the Dutch East India Company and the Danish East India Company, conducted business and operated factories around the city. The town was also a centre of art and culture.

The city's decline began with the defeat of the last independent Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The Nawab was demoted to the status of a zamindar known as the Nawab of Murshidabad. The British shifted the treasury, courts and revenue office to Calcutta. In the 19th century, the population was estimated to be 46,000. Murshidabad became a district headquarters of the Bengal Presidency. It was declared as a municipality in 1869.

Louis XIV's East India Company (French: Compagnie des Indes orientales) was a joint-stock company founded in the Kingdom of France in August 1664 to engage in trade in India and other Asian lands, complementing the French West India Company (French: Compagnie des Indes occidentales) created three months before. It was one of several successive enterprises with similar names, a sequence started with Henry IV's first French East Indies Company in 1604 and continued with Cardinal Richelieu's Compagnie d'Orient in 1642. Planned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to compete with the English East India Company and Dutch East India Company, it was chartered by King Louis XIV for the purpose of trading in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Louis XIV's company became insolvent and was reorganized in 1685, and was again bankrupt in 1706. In 1719, what remained of it was acquired by John Law's Company, which in 1723 became the French Indies Company active during much of the 18th century.

Isle de France (Modern French: Île de France, pronounced [il də fʁɑ̃s] ) was a French colony in the Indian Ocean from 1715 to 1810, comprising the island now known as Mauritius and its dependent territories. It was governed by the French East India Company and formed part of the French colonial empire. Under the French, the island witnessed major changes. The increasing importance of agriculture led to the "import" of slaves and the undertaking of vast infrastructural works that transformed the capital Port Louis into a major port, warehousing, and commercial centre.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Isle de France became a base from which the French navy, including squadrons under Rear Admiral Linois or Commodore Jacques Hamelin, and corsairs such as Robert Surcouf, organised raids on British merchant ships. The raids (see Battle of Pulo Aura and Mauritius campaign of 1809–1811) continued until 1810 when the British sent a strong expedition to capture the island. The first British attempt, in August 1810, to attack Grand Port resulted in a French victory, one celebrated on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. A subsequent and much larger attack launched in December of the same year from Rodrigues, which had been captured a year earlier, was successful. The British landed in large numbers in the north of the island and rapidly overpowered the French, who capitulated (see Invasion of Isle de France). In the Treaty of Paris (1814), the French ceded Isle de France together with its territories including Agaléga, the Cargados Carajos Shoals, the Chagos Archipelago, Rodrigues, Seychelles, and Tromelin Island to the United Kingdom. The island then reverted to its former name, 'Mauritius'.

The Carnatic wars (Hindi: कर्नाटक युद्ध) were a series of military conflicts in the middle of the 18th century in India's coastal Carnatic region, a dependency of Hyderabad State, India. The first Carnatic wars were fought between 1740 and 1748.

The conflicts involved numerous nominally independent rulers and their vassals, struggles for succession and territory, and furthermore included a diplomatic and military struggle between the French East India Company and the British East India Company. They were mainly fought within the territories of Mughal India with the assistance of various fragmented polities loyal to the "Great Moghul".

A sepoy (/ˈsiːpɔɪ/) was the designation given to an Indian infantryman armed with a musket in the armies of the Mughal Empire and the British East India Company.

In the 18th century, the French East India Company and its European counterparts employed locally recruited soldiers within India, mainly consisting of infantry designated as "sepoys". The largest sepoy force, trained along European lines, served the British East India Company.

John Law's Company, founded in 1717 by Scottish economist and financier John Law, was a joint-stock company that occupies a unique place in French and European monetary history, as it was for a brief moment granted the entire revenue-raising capacity of the French state. It also absorbed all previous French chartered colonial companies and was popularly known as the Compagnie du Mississippi (Mississippi Company), even though under Law's leadership its overseas operations remained secondary to its domestic financial activity.

In February 1720, the company acquired John Law's Bank, which had been France's first central bank. The experiment was short-lived, and after a stock market collapse of the company's shares in the second half of 1720 (the Mississippi Bubble), the company was placed under government receivership in April 1721. It emerged from that process in 1723 as the French Indies Company, focused on what had been the overseas operations of Law's Company.

Khoja Wajid (also spelled Wazid, Wazeed; d. 1759) was a wealthy Armenian merchant who played a prominent role in the economic and political life of Bengal in the 1740s and 1750s.

He was the son of Khoja Mahmet Fazel, another notable Armenian merchant. Based in the port town of Hughli, he used his business prowess and influence at the court of the Nawab of Bengal to consolidate his commercial empire, gaining control over the economy of Bihar and establishing highly profitable monopolies over the trade of saltpeter and salt. He also controlled most of the opium trade. After consolidating his control over Bengal's inland trade, he expanded his operations to maritime commerce and acquired a trading fleet which, according to Sushil Chaudhury, "dominated the Asian maritime trade of Hughli." He had extensive business connections with the French, Dutch and English trading companies in India. In the early 1740s, Wajid became the official representative of the Armenian merchants of Bengal at the court of the faujdar of Hughli, later gaining a place at the court of the nawab in Murshidabad. By the early 1750s, he had become a political figure of great influence and a close ally of Nawab Alivardi Khan and his successor Siraj ud-Daulah. When Siraj came into conflict with the English, Wajid was sent as the nawab's emissary to negotiate with the English prior to the Siege of Calcutta. Wajid's commercial interests suffered after the English sacked Hughli, ostensibly in retaliation for Siraj's capture of Calcutta. Seeking to restore his fortunes, Wajid advised the nawab to ally with the French against the British, but fell out of favor at court when this plan failed. He was one of the last to join the conspiracy against Siraj ud-Daulah in May 1757.