2 Fanon Pondichery

The Compagnie des Indes received its charter in 1719 under John Law's sweeping reorganization of French colonial commerce — the same financial restructuring that collapsed catastrophically in 1720 as the Mississippi Bubble. Coins struck that year exist in a peculiar administrative limbo: minted under a company whose metropolitan financial basis was disintegrating even as the dies were being cut in Pondicherry.

The fanon was a local unit of account rooted in South Indian trade custom, not French monetary tradition. Striking it in high-grade silver was a deliberate concession to the Coromandel Coast merchants who would accept nothing less.