Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MARGRIT SCHULTE BEERBÜHL and KLAUS WEBER
German entrepreneurs not only employed slaves on their plantations;
a number of them also became slave traders. At least six of their
trading houses in Bordeaux, among them Dravemann (from Bre -
men), van Döhren (from Hamburg), and Overmann & Meyer (from
Hamburg), sent their own ships to African coasts, flying the French
flag. In total, German companies directed about thirty Bordeauxbased
slaving expeditions, which account for about 7 per cent of the
411 slavers that left from the Gironde between 1700 and 1793. 82
German capital was certainly involved in expeditions directed by
French shipowners, but far more significant was a less obvious economic
link with the slave trade. The total volume of German-made
manufactures used as barter goods to buy slaves on the coasts of
Africa, including by merchants of other nationalities, is unknown,
but it must have been significant. Sources rarely offer information on
the origin of such goods, but where such information is available, the
poportion of German manufactures is surprisingly high. One of these
rare examples is provided by the slave ship Amiral, which left
Bordeaux for the Guinea coast in 1744. As with most slavers, the bulk
of its cargo consisted of textiles. Of the total of 5,095 bales of cotton
and linen it had on board, 1,440 came from Nantes, only 675 from
Rouen, and 260 from Amsterdam, but as many as 2,720 from Ham -
burg. The German economist Johann Georg Büsch (1728–1800) highlighted
the importance of German linen on African markets, providing
the example of a slaver leaving the French port of Lorient in 1720
with its cargo made up entirely of textiles imported from Ham burg. 83
These isolated observations confirm Herbert Klein’s more general
state ment concerning German linen increasingly competing with
Indian cottons on African markets (quoted above). The African di -
la Guerre de Sept ans à la Guerre d’Indépendance’, Bulletin du Centre d’Histoire
des Espaces Atlantiques, NS 3 (1987), 21–83; Paul Butel, ‘Des négociants allemands
de Bordeaux aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: les Schröder & Schyler et les
Cruse’, in Alain Ruiz (ed.), Présence de l’Allemagne à Bordeaux du siècle de
Montaigne à la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Bordeaux, 1997), 57–64.
82 Weber, Deutsche Kaufleute, 198.
83 Saugera, Bordeaux port négrier, 246, 352. Eric Saugera notes that the load
carried by the Amiral was a typical cargo destined for West African markets.
Johann G. Büsch, Versuch einer Geschichte der Hamburgischen Handlung nebst
zwei kleineren Schriften verwandten Inhalts (Hamburg, 1797), 88–9. Büsch took
this information from a report by the French voyager Desmarchais.
88