A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies [HC] - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0917860691 ISBN 13: 9780917860690

Publisher: Historic New Orleans Collection, 2016

Synopsis

Company Man

About this title

About the Author

Erin M. Greenwald is curator and historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection. She is curator and project director of the NEH-funded traveling exhibition Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808-1865. Her most recent publication is Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World (LSU Press, 2016), which builds upon the edited volume A Company Man: The Remarkable French Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies (HNOC, 2013). Greenwald holds a PhD in History from Ohio State University.

Review

A wonderful, careful, informed, and loving job of editing. The translation is well written and sensitive to nuances. I learned a lot, especially the determined merriment in the face of horrors which remains characteristic of New Orleans.--Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century.

We are lucky that The Historic New Orleans Collection has invested the money, time, and expertise to bring Caillot's memoir to a wide audience. The book is beautifully and expertly produced. . .And then there is Caillot himself, whose youth, spirit, and hormones make him an astute if unlikely guide to this complicated world to which he paid such great and painstaking attention. --James Taylor Carson, Journal of Southern History

One of the most important finds on colonial Louisiana in many decades...Expertly translated and annotated with wonderful illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again.--Alan Gallay, author of The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717.

What a remarkable find, this mislaid memoir by a skirt-chasing clerk in John Law's Company of the Indies. Marc-Antoine Caillot's mishaps on land and water as he travels from Paris to New Orleans by way of Saint Domingue seesaw between harrowing and hilarious. It s a fine translation, too, whose annotation and introduction alone are worth the price of the book. A Company Man will delight general readers and specialists for years to come. --Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans

A remarkable achievement...In this journal historians of colonial Louisiana receive a gift of surprises and opportunities that will influence many interpretations to come...The introduction and notes add immeasurably to the value of this rare document, situating this clerk's career--and the manuscript itself--firmly within the context of French colonial experience and history.--Daniel H. Usner Jr., author of Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783.

Caillot's narrative is more than a refreshing and provocative departure from the well-known formal memoirs of his contemporaries. It is a richly informative window onto colonial consciousness and behavior that draws readers in and plunges them into the raucous and terrifying eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Greenwald's thoughtful and informed introduction and notes are a revelation. . . a welcome and informative portrait for scholars and general readers alike. --Emily Clark, author of Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834

About this edition

• Publisher: Historic New Orleans Collection
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0917860691
• ISBN 13: 9780917860690
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Greenwald Erin M.