ness in private hands. As for the West India Company, it seems to have broken down by 1674, when its charter was revoked. Colbert determined to abandon henceforward, for the purpose of colonization, the agency of Companies, and to substitute direct administration by a minister of the Crown.
For the East Indies, however, Colbert maintained the organization of a chartered Company, although under the close superintendence of the Crown. Yet the legitimate commercial undertakings of this Company had been hampered at the outset by combining them with an expedition for the colonization of Madagascar, which failed disastrously. The first attempts of the French to gain a footing on the Indian coast were also defeated by the Dutch, so that in six years after its foundation this Company was entangled in very serious embarrassment. Nevertheless, if the most liberal support and encouragement from Louis XIV and his great minister could have secured success to the Company – and if a sharp turn of general policy, adverse to Colbert and his commercial views, had not speedily supervened – it is possible that the French might have made good their position in India before the close of the seventeenth century. Their initial difficulty was that the ground had been preoccupied by Holland, against whom Louis XIV declared war in 1674, partly, it is said, on account of the violent opposition of the Dutch to French interference with their Indian trade. But a few years later, when Louvois had plunged his master into interminable continental wars,
