Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MARGRIT SCHULTE BEERBÜHL and KLAUS WEBER
Wine-Growing and Slave-Trading: Germans in Bordeaux
In the process of European expansion, France had been a late-comer
by comparison with the Iberian countries, the Netherlands, and
Britain. It made its first acquisitions in the Caribbean only from the
1650s onwards. But these acquisitions, internationally acknowledged
in the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), proved to be most lucrative. The
islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and especially Saint-Domin -
gue (the western part of the Spanish possession of His paniola), be -
came the world’s major producers of raw sugar. Because of its ex -
tremely fertile soils, Saint-Domingue produced up to three quarters
of the sugar consumed in the western world in the late eighteenth
century. The island was also ‘quickly becoming the world’s largest
producer of coffee, which had only been introduced [there] in 1723’.
The exports of this island alone were ‘greater than the combined
exports of the Spanish and British Antilles’. 76 While most of the sugar
from British islands was consumed by British domestic markets,
France could afford to re-export vast quantities to countries in central
and eeastern Europe, which lacked their own sources of production.
While France was catching up in the process of European expansion,
the French shipping industry also joined the rank-and-file of the
slave-trading nations, and French Atlantic seaports increasingly
adapted to the plantation and slave-trading economy. Nantes be -
came the major domestic port for the French slave trade, and Bor -
deaux was by far the largest port for receiving and re-exporting colonial
goods from the French Caribbean. For a long time, merchants
from Bordeaux had developed efficient distribution networks for
their wine trade and were therefore in an advantageous position to
supplement their stock with products coming in from overseas. In
1717, the port city on the Gironde had handled 20 per cent of the
entire French colonial trade, while by the second half of the eight -
eenth century it was 40 per cent. During the 1780s, more than half of
all French re-exports of colonial produce were sent from Bordeaux,
which also became France’s second most important slaving port. The
76 Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, and Jacques Tobie,
Histoire de la France coloniale, i. Des origines à 1914 (Paris, 1991), 241–3; Herbert
S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Oxford, 1986),
56–8, at 57.
84