Adam & Company Limited

At the beginning of the nineteenth century a Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Pipon, founded an import-export business in Mauritius. In 1817 Joachim Henri Adam (1793-1856) arrived in Mauritius from Rouen to take up work on a sugar estate; in 1825 he married Jean-Baptiste's daughter and joined the Pipon business thereafter. Henri Adam played a prominent part in the island campaign for an indemnity to owners of slaves emancipated under the Abolition Act of 1832. The firm, which for more than a century was one of the island's three most important firms of merchants and commission agents, traded successively under the names of F Barbe and Adam (1829-1837); Henry Adam and Co (1837-1848); Pipon Bell and Co (1848-1863); Pipon Adam and Co (1863-1897); Adam and Co (1897-1945); and Adam and Co Ltd (1945-1969). The Adam family was important in local administration. Charles Felix Henri (fl 1830-1900) was a member of the Council of Government in the 1880s. His brother Louis Gustave (d 1894) established himself in Paris to watch over the European side of the business. In 1969 the business was sold to the Blyth, Greene, Jourdain and Company Group; a condition of the sale was that the Adam name should be kept. Both the Pipon and Adam families were involved in the production as well as in the marketing of sugar, the main export industry of Mauritius. Through a network of correspondents and agents the firm sold sugar, mostly on consignment, to Britain, France, India, Australia, Malaya, Dutch East Indies, Indo-China and South Africa: it imported rice and jute (gunny sacks) from Calcutta; chemical fertilizers and machinery from Europe and guano from Peru; mules from Montevideo, and a great diversity of consumer goods. An important part of the company's operations from the late 1830s onwards was connected with the transport and allocation of Indian immigrant workers under contract to the sugar plantations. It was also active in the chartering market, acting as agent both for chartered vessels and for regular liners, notably the Clan Line. There was also an insurance business, the Mauritius Marine Insurance Company, which looked after the affairs of a number of overseas insurance companies as agent and claims assessor, besides representing the Bureau Veritas classification society in Mauritius.