Liza Oliver is Assistant Professor of Art History and South Asia Studies at Wellesley College, USA.  She researches and publishes on visual cultures of trade and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, along with the politics of cultural heritage. Her book, Forging French India: Art, Diplomacy and Imperialism in the Early Modern Era, is forthcoming in 2018 with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.

This lecture will explore visual cultures that developed from the French East India Company's involvement with Coromandel textile industries in the 18th century. It will overview the role of Coromandel textiles in such far reaching enterprises as European botanical study, French luxury markets, and the Atlantic slave trade. It will also detail the life of the French Company's chief Tamil agent and broker, whose visual and textual archive reveals the intermediary space compradors such as him occupied in European enclaves of 18th-century South India.