Empire du Mogol

Circa 1786-87

Original hand-coloured copper engraving on paper

Print size: 12.5 x 21.75 in (31.5 x 55.5 cm)
Sheet size: 15.25 x 22.75 in (38.5 x 57.5 cm)
Folded: 15.25 x 11.75 in (38.5 x 30 cm)

Empire du Mogol – Jean-Baptiste Louis Clouet’s Enlightenment Map of Mughal India and the Bay of Bengal

This large and finely engraved late-eighteenth-century map by Jean-Baptiste Louis Clouet presents a comprehensive political and geographic vision of Mughal India and its wider Asian context, extending from Persia and Tartary through Hindustan and Bengal to Burma, Siam, and the Malay Peninsula. Issued in Paris for Clouet’s Géographie moderne (circa 1786–87), the sheet reflects the Enlightenment ambition to synthesise territorial, ethnographic, and administrative knowledge into an authoritative didactic format.

Distinguished by its extensive marginal explanatory text, the map functions not only as a cartographic document but as a geographic treatise. The left-hand commentary surveys Mughal India’s climate, fertility, and principal products—cotton, fruit, gold, and diamonds—alongside European observations on caste, imperial wealth, military organisation, the administration of justice, and the origins of the Mughal dynasty. Particularly notable is its division of the Mughal state into nineteen governments, including Kashmir, Ajmer, Patna, Bengal, Cuttack, Orissa, Gujarat, Sindh, Multan, Kabul, Lahore, Delhi, Agra, Jaunpur, Malwa, and Malabar, embodying the late eighteenth-century drive to render India legible through administrative geography.

The right-hand passage shifts focus southward and maritime, describing the Coromandel Coast and the kingdoms of Madura, Mysore, Tanjore, the Carnatic, and Golconda, while explicitly acknowledging the expanding European colonial presence—French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Danish. Trade centres such as Pondicherry, Madras, Tranquebar, and Pulicat are situated within a network of coastal commerce, and the famed diamond mines of Golconda are singled out as emblematic of India’s mineral wealth and imperial allure.

Executed in crisp copperplate engraving and heightened with contemporary hand-colour, the map delineates political boundaries with clarity while emphasising the strategic importance of the Ganges–Brahmaputra system and the Bay of Bengal as axes of exchange, rivalry, and maritime connectivity. Stylistically restrained yet intellectually ambitious, Clouet’s Empire du Mogol exemplifies late Enlightenment French cartography, privileging informational density and state-orientated geographic knowledge over ornamental excess. Its scale, scope, and scholarly marginalia render it a highly desirable example of French political mapping of South and Southeast Asia on the eve of the Napoleonic era.

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