Place · royal court & publishing city · France
Paris
Also known as Paris, Les Fables de Pilpay
Where the two French accounts of Mughal India were written and sold. Tavernier's Six Voyages appeared in 1676 and Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire in 1670–71, and between them they gave Europe most of what it thought it knew about India for the next century.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 48.857, 2.352
Worth knowing
Tavernier sold Louis XIV the blue diamond that became the Hope and was ennobled on the strength of it. Bernier's essays on Mughal land tenure were read by Montesquieu and, two centuries later, by Marx, and are the origin of the European idea of oriental despotism — an argument about India made in a Paris drawing room.
Connections (2)
- Trade routeKollur / Golconda diamond fields
Paris and the Kollur gravels are the two ends of one trade: Tavernier bought at the mine and the Golconda market and sold at the French court, and the stones that crossed that distance include the Hope and the Great Mogul. The route ran Isfahan, Surat, Golconda and back, and he did it six times over nearly forty years.
- TransmissionRed Fort, Delhi
Bernier read Gassendi and Descartes aloud to Danishmand Khan in Persian at Delhi, and wrote his essays on Mughal land tenure for a Paris readership. The traffic ran both ways in one household: European natural philosophy into Persian conversation, and a description of Mughal government into European political theory, where Montesquieu and Marx both took it up.
On these journeys
- Jean-Baptiste Tavernier — six voyages for stones (1630–68)
- François Bernier — physician at the Mughal court (1658–68)
Sources
Wikipedia, “Paris”. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (Paris, 1676); François Bernier, Histoire de la dernière révolution des États du Grand Mogol (Paris, 1670–71).
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