You have reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 and gave your farewell lecture on 6 June last. High time to have an interview with you! After Itinerario was founded by George Winius and you in 1976, you yourself did many of the interviews. Interviews were and still are rather uncommon in scholarly journals. Why did you start them?

It was a mixture of egoism and curiosity. We meant the journal to be a research journal, so apart from publishing articles we had two things in mind: to speak with prominent people active in the field and also to do special reports on archives and research institutions. George and I loved to ask colleagues about their backgrounds, their personal interests and their approaches to teaching and research. The interviews worked out well, but it turned out to be very difficult to find people who were willing to write about their experiences in foreign archives.

It is well-known that in 1763 the French presence in India was reduced by the treaty of Paris to five trading posts, or comptoirs, whose names—Pondichéry, Yanaon, Karikal, Mahé and Chandernagor—were erstwhile learned by heart by the French schoolchildren. French India lasted until 1954 and sparked a wide scientific interest in France at least until the beginning of the 1970s. Since that time, along with the history of French colonial policy during the early modern period as a whole, the study of French India has largely gone out of fashion. The last decades of the Ancien Regime have especially been concerned by this disaffection. The best current French specialists of these parts of the world, like Philippe Haudrère, have focused on the activities of the Compagnie françaises des Indes, which was suspended in 1769, or, like Jacques Weber, devoted themselves to the history of the French presence in India during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Even if the period of Dupleix is more studied, the history of French India during the eighteenth century does not seem to tempt many researchers nowadays.

The period between 1780 and 1840, which is often called the age of revolutions in the West, witnessed significant change in the Lusitanian space in India, due to radical alterations in the politico-economic activities and socio-ecclesiastical institutions. On the one hand, the commercial ventures that the Portuguese had officially maintained as their major economic activity for more than two centuries were relegated to the background or handed over to the Saraswat Brahmins of Goa and some private entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the Portuguese state in India began to focus more on agriculture as a means of sustaining itself against the backdrop of intensified threats from the British encroaching on their peripheral commerce. The agrarian policy of the Portuguese Prime Minister Marques de Pombal to acquire new cultivable territories and expand agriculture had already brought several neighbouring areas of Goa, under the Portuguese control during the period between 1763 and 1783, which were named New Conquests. This was followed by the establishment of a Department of Agriculture in 1776 to supervise cultivation and to introduce new crops, such as pepper, cotton and areca-nuts in Goa and in the newly conquered territories. At the same time that the king of Portugal fled from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and began to rule the metropolis and its colonies from Brazil, following severe threats from Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese possessions in India—particularly in Goa—were moving towards increasing ruralisation. The Department of Agriculture even clamoured for the closure of the municipal councils of Goa, and also for the liquidation of the gaonkar system (communal ownership of land) that would facilitate distribution of land to enterprising individuals to increase production and to make Goa self-sustaining.

With the eighteenth century drawing to a close, Anglo-French hostilities were rapidly escalating in Europe. Besides competing for power on the continent, both the British and the French were concerned with expanding their influence in the East, where the once mighty trading empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had been in steady decline for some decades. By the end of 1794, conflicts on the continent were turning firmly in France's favour and in January 1795 French troops invaded the Netherlands, forcing the ruling Prince of Orange to seek refuge in England. Members of the Dutch Patriot movement—the democratically-minded opponents of the Dutch monarchy and the old order in general—were sympathetic towards French revolutionary ideals and welcomed the French presence in their country. Meanwhile, the occupation of the Netherlands was of great concern to the British government, who suspected that the French would waste no time in also taking control of strategically-located Dutch colonies.

“The stigma of piracy,” writes Sugata Bose, “has provoked heated historical and political debate without always shedding much new light on its meaning and substance.” As a stigma, it has not only misrepresented the morality and motives of so-called pirates, but has also succeeded in ascribing an air of criminality to their activities, in an absence of any law that would actually have made it so. Moreover, recounting the spectacles of piracy in world history once nourished a faltering vision of imperial triumph, in which the maritime violence of empires, particularly the British Empire, was seen to be a wonderful thing. Since then, naval history has run aground, while other historians have begun to confront some of the questions head on: what is a “pirate,” and what made its violence illegitimate relative to the power of sovereign states? Most important to the present article is questioning how piracy developed into a central pillar of maritime-imperial expansion. Was it, as Bose suggests, part of a wider “extraterritorial and universalist anticolonialism” within the Indian Ocean arena, or was it merely an oppositional fantasy that legitimised sea power against a ubiquitous and ill-defined foe?