The story of my postdoctoral research started a decade ago as an undergraduate, writes Lewis Wade.
Under the supervision of Helen Pfeifer at Cambridge, I wrote a dissertation on commercial exchanges between England and the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century – an experience I still look back on with great fondness. This convinced me I wanted to continue studying history, so I planned to do a Master’s and/or PhD that would shift the focus of my analysis to early modern Franco-Ottoman commerce. In particular, I wanted to study the production and trade of fine woollen cloth from the Languedoc, which became one of France’s great economic success stories in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Fate intervened to take me on a slight detour. I applied to Maria Fusaro’s ERC-funded project on risk management in early modern Eurasia (AveTransRisk) and ultimately wrote my doctoral thesis at Exeter on the French marine insurance industry under Louis XIV. This was only a detour, however, as fate soon stepped in again to pull me back towards my original interests. On 6 March 2019, I was sat in the Archives nationales in Paris looking through a letter book pertaining to maritime commerce. I soon realised this was just one of several letter books belonging to Jean-Baptiste de Lagny, director general of commerce. As a leading figure in the formulation and implementation of French commercial policy in the 1680s and 1690s, Lagny was central to the development of the Parisian marine insurance market in those decades. In short, I had struck gold, and I wrote rather breathlessly about this to friends in Britain (hence the random use of guillemets!), saying “I’m not overstating much when I say this [set of letter books] will probably « make » my PhD”.
In fact, this would prove to be an understatement, not an overstatement. As I looked more closely through the letter books in the months that followed, I noticed that marine insurance was only one of many topics on which Lagny was writing. What caught my eye in particular was that he was writing to the directors of the East India Company (Compagnies des Indes Orientales) about the sale of the Languedoc’s fine woollen cloth in India and Siam (modern-day Thailand). Lagny’s letters suggested that this was not simply a Franco-Ottoman story, as the historiography has suggested to date, but in fact a Franco-Asian story.
These letter books were therefore not only invaluable to my doctoral thesis: they soon became the launching pad for my ongoing postdoctoral work. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s famous minister of finance, offered significant support to the Languedocian cloth industry, but this notwithstanding, the industry was in dire straits upon his death in 1683. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the picture was very different indeed: the industry was in fine health, and Languedocian cloth would soon supplant its English and Dutch competition to establish France’s place as Europe’s leading commercial player in the Ottoman Empire. The question at the core of my postdoctoral work is a seemingly simple one: what happened between 1683 and 1700 to explain such a remarkable change in the industry’s fortunes?
As I started wading into the holdings of the Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives de la Chambre de Commerce et Industrie Marseille Provence, however, it became increasingly clear that this was not a simple question at all. The fortunes of the Languedocian industry were imbricated within a complex set of commercial frameworks and dynamics. In particular, understanding the industry’s ongoing woes throughout the 1680s is impossible without first analysing what was happening with French merchants in the Levant. As it turns out, the 1680s was a truly turbulent decade for France’s consulates in the Ottoman Empire. First established in the medieval Mediterranean, consulates provided an essential service that eased the frictions of cross-cultural trade: consuls advocated on behalf of the merchants under their protection in instances of dispute with foreign officials, while consular registries validated commercial transactions, creating paper trails accepted in legal systems across the Mediterranean. In brief, as the historiography has keenly recognised, consulates were the beating heart of French commerce in the Ottoman Empire.
Yet when that heart stopped beating in rhythm, the consulates had the capacity to wreak havoc. All the archival material I have gathered makes clear (often in amusingly vivid detail) that France’s mercantile communities were distracted throughout the 1680s by a set of intense, interconnecting conflicts over how the consulates should be run. This helps to explain why Languedocian cloth was being sent to India and Siam: the East India Company was being enlisted by the French crown to help make up for the instability of French trade in the Levant in the 1680s. Yet the consular crisis in this decade has not yet been explored within the literature, so after a lot of thought, I eventually concluded that I had no choice but to write about it myself. What started off as one book project became two complementary book projects.
While I initially feared opening up my research in this way, I can now say with confidence that this was the right decision. I am now able to do justice to the remarkable material at my disposal and think more deeply about the connections between France, the Ottoman Empire, India and Siam in the latter decades of Louis XIV’s reign. Furthermore, dividing my research into two book projects is allowing me to carve out a coherent yet ambitious research trajectory as an early career researcher.
My postdoctoral research has been defined by serendipity: going in, I could never have anticipated where my research would take me. I was very fortunate to have Cátia Antunes as a mentor at Leiden to support me while I thought about how best to proceed with my research and to reassure me that my decision to pursue two book projects was the right one. If you are a PhD student or postdoctoral researcher in a similar predicament – faced with spectacular sources that pull you in an unexpected direction – I would urge you to engage with your support network to find the best possible path forward for your research. It may seem daunting to adapt your original proposal in response to new material and unexpected findings, but serendipity is at the core of what makes historical research so exciting. While the French faced many perils when sailing through the waters of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, we as historians must trust ourselves that we will not sink when we plunge ourselves into unknown waters: we will, eventually, swim.
Lewis Wade is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University and an incoming Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. The research for this piece was conducted with funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101060096: GlobalMed: The Mediterranean as a Laboratory of Globalisation: The Franco-Ottoman Cloth Trade, 1683–c.1715, alongside an Economic History Society Postan fellowship held at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
