COROMANDEL DIARY
Lakshmi Subramaniam
India in the 17th Century: Social, Economic & Political Memoirs of Francois Martin Vol. I, Part I. by Lotika Vardarajan Manohar Book Service, Delhi, 1982, 465 pp., 150
March-April 1982, volume 6, No 5

Travel accounts—day to day recordings of the factors of the European East India Companies during their stay in India—have constituted an invaluable source of in¬formation tor researchers working on India’s trade his¬tory in the 17th and 18th cen¬turies. The Memoirs of Francois Martin, an employee of the French East India Com¬pany, whose sojourn in India covered about thirty-seven years (1669-1705), is no ex¬ception to this rule. It is to the credit of Dr. Varadarajan that an extract of these memoirs has been made available to us in translation. The transla¬tion reads easy and the anno¬tations, biographical and sup¬plementary notes added to the work by the author makes it at once a significant primary source material to researchers. The introduction to the work is lucid, setting out in brief the principal issues that JV1 artin thought worthwhile to record in his diary.

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