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6. France in the Eighteenth Century
- University of Nebraska Press
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BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 109 / / The Transatlantic Slave Trade / James A. Rawley 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [109], (1) Lines: 0 to 21 ——— * 15.76pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [109], (1) 6. france in the eighteenth century In the seventeenth century, as we have seen, France had successfully contested with the Dutch and the Spanish for empire and slave trade, establishing herself in the Caribbean and temporarily grasping the asiento. In the course of the eighteenth century France vied with England for colonies and slaves in a great struggle for national ascendancy and global wealth. During the prolonged Franco-British rivalry France lost out in India and North America and suffered reverses in West Africa, leaving the French West Indies the pulse of her empire. She rose to third rank as an importer of slaves, surpassed only by Britain and Portugal. Flexibly applying mercantilistic principles , she achieved a high level of industrial production at home and a near equality with England in foreign and colonial trade. The great rivals in a sense came to divide the world market, France supplying Europe and the Near East, and England Asia and America, and the two sharing Europe. Dependent for commercial success more heavily than the English upon Caribbean possessions, France throughout the eighteenth century insatiably requisitioned labor fromAfrica,never managing to meet planter demand for slaves. Between 1701 and 1810 the French transatlantic slave trade supplied only 62 percent of the French West India market. One in four enslaved Africans shipped to the French islands arrived via the inter-colonial slave trade—from the British, Dutch, and Danish West Indies. France’s failure to become self-sufficient in the slave trade is entwined in her failure to achieve supremacy in empire and economic development. In this chapter we shall examine the dimensions of her eighteenth-century slave trade, France in Africa, the mercantile organization of the French slave trade with special attention to the port of Nantes, the intense development of the French West Indies and the apogee of the trade, revolution at home and in St. Domingue, and the trade’s vicissitudes at the close of the period of legal trade. BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 110 / / The Transatlantic Slave Trade / James A. Rawley 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [110], (2) Lines: 21 to 29 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [110], (2) “Une histoire qui reste à écrire,” pronounced Jean Mettas, the most knowledgeable scholar about the French slave trade. Mettas, who died in 1975 soon after he declared that the history of the French slave trade was yet to be written, described the shortcomings of existing histories and pointed to the rich archival sources that future historians could exploit. Among the sources Mettas examined in detail are admiralty records, which contain captains’ reports for about nine hundred voyages, crew registers from Le Havre and La Rochelle, and various kinds of port documents for Bordeaux, Honfleur, Lorient, Nantes, St. Malo, and Vannes. Mettas kept research notes on more than 3,000 French slaving ventures in the eighteenth century, materials that in different degrees give information about ships, crews, itineraries, numbers of slaves purchased in Africa and delivered in America,and mortality. Serge Daget collected and published Mettas’s research notes in two volumes in 1978 and 1984, and these voyage data were then incorporated into the transatlantic slave trade cd-rom database in the 1990s.1 The work of Mettas and Robert Stein in the 1970s indicates that older histories of the French slave trade have been misleading in at least two particulars. One is that it has been the fashion for historians to play up the major port of Nantes to the neglect of other French ports in the eighteenth century. The other is the general contemporary tendency to understate the numbers of slaves carried by the French: “La tendance à diminuer les chiffres semble aujourd’hui générale,” as Mettas put it. This tendency is attributable in part to the practice of extrapolating the volume of the entire French trade as a...