Palissandria: Difference between revisions

→‎Beginnings of Palissandria: correction: "French Guinea" to "French Guiana"
(→‎Beginnings of Palissandria: correction: "French Guinea" to "French Guiana")
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Starting in the late 1750's in the aftermath of French defeat in the Great Silesian War, Italian merchants started to become integral as middle men & financiers of French colonial ambitions in and around the Americas as taxes were raised on the colonies, French merchants & the third estate in general. This allowed Italian merchants a niche to provide direct investment in colonial ventures. In the 1760's Tuscan & Ligurian merchants were granted contracts by the cash-strapped French government to take over resource extraction, mostly abandoned planation land-grants & native contracts in Guiana. These contracts with the French government were wildly profitable for the Tuscan & Ligurian merchants who kept input costs low by heavily utilizing the labor of African slaves & native envoys. Several successful tobacco plantations & rosewood gathering enterprises were set up in this period.
 
After decades of financial hardships in 1788, the French government announced that the national treasury was empty. This along with the volatile political climate of France at the time caused the collection of Tuscan, Ligurian & Corsican merchants with contracts in the region to start to coalesce into a consortium. In between 1788 and 1793 seeing that the French position in the colony was very weak a collection this consortium started to discuss the future of their interest in the colony and decided that French rule was both unstable & un-needed. In 1793 after Philip VII's Flight to New France during the French revolution this consortium approached Philip VII and offered to purchase the rights to colonize what was at the time French Guiana. After Auguste Spiga declared the establishment of the 1st French Republic in May 1794, Philip Vll started to consider the offer of the Italian merchants and finally sold the rights to colonize Guiana in September of that year. During the Augustine wars French forces captured the newly founded city of Nuova Lucca in 1799 but the abandoned their position only a few months later to protect Saint-Domingue. In 1805 the consortium of Italian merchants approached the King of Tuscany with an offer to be benefactor of the colony to give their claims further legitimacy. In 1814 the Treaty of Vienna was signed and Britain backed up Tuscan claims on former French GuineaGuiana (now re-named Palissandria) in an effort to further weaken the French position in South America & the Caribbean.
 
In the aftermath of the Tuscan claim on the colony solidified, the former consortium of Italian merchants was re-organized into the '''Tuscan West Indies company''<nowiki/>' which ran the colony near-autonomously from the Tuscan government.
 
=== Tuscan Palissandria ===
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