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In 1691, an ambassador of the Wendat confederacy (Ontario, Canada) was received by Louis, but was unimpressed by the Sun King. The envoy’s identity is still debated but he was probably Kandiaronk, elected ‘speaker’ of the Wendat council, an eloquent and gifted Thuron soldier-politician who had expertly played the French against the rival Iroquois. Debating the merits of French versus Iroquois society with one of Louis’s officers, Louis-Armand, baron de Lahontan, Kandiaronk mocked ‘the faults and disorders they observed in our towns as caused by money’. The natives ‘laugh at the difference of ranks … they brand us slaves … alleging we degrade ourselves subjecting ourselves to one man … They say the name of savages which we call them would fit ourselves better.’ The Native American was touching on the essence of western freedom: much of it was – and is – theoretical since most people were actually bound by their place in society. In Kandiaronk’s society, people often defied their lords and left to join another tribe. He wondered why anyone would allow those with money to establish authority over them and regarded the Jesus story (‘the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit’) as preposterous – though he pragmatically converted later. ‘To imagine one can live in a country of money,’ he said, ‘and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.’ In 1703, when Lahontan published his conversation with Kandiaronk, entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who has Travelled, it inspired a new generation to question European authority and the origins of civilization.

In the Caribbean, Louis competed in sugar and slaves with the Spanish and English: he took over Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe where, along with Louisiana, the sugar plantations were worked by 2,000 new slaves supplied annually by his Compagnie de Guinée et du Sénégale (in which the French king was a shareholder) from Africa.^* By the time of Louis’s death there were 77,000 slaves in French America. But he also followed the English and Dutch eastwards, pursuing the conversion and annexation of Ayutthaya – Thailand^* – and backing his Compagnie des Indes Orientales that claimed Isle de France (Mauritius) and Île Bourbon (Reunion), where new sugar plantations were now worked by slaves transported from east Africa. In 1674, Louis’s envoys approached Emperor Alamgir for Indian concessions to compete against the English, just as his Hindu nemesis – Shivaji – created his own kingdom.

In June 1674, at his mountain fortress Raigad, the great Shivaji was crowned chhatrapati of Maratha Swaraj, a hugely symbolic act that sent shockwaves across India – the creation of a new language of Hindu sovereignty that made no mention of the Muslim Mughals. This outraged Alamgir, who denounced the ‘mountain rat’.^* But he failed to defeat the chhatrapati. In 1680, when Shivaji died of dysentery, his eldest wife committed sati on his funeral pyre and his son Sambhaji emerged as chhatrapati. Sambhaji knew the Mughals well, helping Alamgir’s son Akbar in a rebellion that ended with the prince’s death. Alamgir planned a terrible death for the Hindu who had meddled with his family.

In 1684, Alamgir himself tried to take the Maratha capital, Raigad Fort, but failed as Sambhaji ranged up the west coast, attacking Alamgir’s Portuguese allies in Goa. But finally he overreached: in February 1689, Alamgir captured Sambhaji himself. His revenge was terrible: at Bahadurgad, Sambhaji was brought before Alamgir and forced to run the gauntlet through Mughal soldiers, before being ordered to embrace Islam. When he refused, his tongue was sliced and he was asked again. ‘Not even if the emperor pimped me his daughter!’ he wrote. Alamgir was outraged. Sambhaji was tortured for two weeks with metal claws that gouged out his eyes, cut out his tongue, pulled out his nails, then flayed him alive and then quartered him with the claws in mouth and fundament, the body parts fed to dogs. Raigad fell to Alamgir, who relentlessly pursued Rajaram, the new chhatrapati – but he could not quite destroy the dynasty.

Alamgir granted the French a factory in Surat, followed by Pondicherry on the east coast; the latter became the French headquarters (and remained French until 1954). But Louis was most fascinated with the new Qing emperor of China, to whom in 1687 he sent two delegations of Jesuit scholars. In 1669, at the height of Louis’s successes, the Kangxi Emperor started his personal rule: the two had much in common.