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.
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