Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

From Westphalia to the Caribbean
men sion of German trade in Bordeaux and its links with the French
plantation economy are probably best personified in the merchants
Friedrich Romberg and Johann Jakob Bethmann.
Born in 1729 in a small village close to the iron-manufacturing city
of Iserlohn, Friedrich Romberg learned his logistical skills as head
and founder of a Brussels-based long-distance haulage enterprise
linking Flanders with Italy. Another important aspect of his business
was provisioning the French navy ports of Brest and Cherbourg with
naval supplies such as ropes, masts, hemp, and tar. During the
American War, which was a boom period for the neutral flag of the
Austrian Netherlands, he also became an important shipowner. With -
in a few years he had established the shipping company Fréderic
Romberg fils & Ricour in Ostend, a maritime insurance company in
Bruges, the slave-trading company Romberg & Cie in Ghent dealing
mainly with Cuba, and a calico factory in Brussels. In 1783 he also set
up the Bordeaux slave-trading company Romberg, Bapst & Cie.
Minor shareholding partners in this firm were Georg Christoph Bapst,
who came from a family of financiers originating in the Palatinate,
and the Brussels banking brothers Walckiers. All these business ventures
were supplemented by shares in the textile and ironware production
of the Iserlohn area. In 1784 Romberg was knighted by
Emperor Joseph II. 84
Within a few years, Romberg, Bapst & Cie became the major
slave-trading and plantation company in Bordeaux, its expeditions
extending as far as Mozambique. During this feverish boom period
in the plantation economy rising slave prices had made many plant -
ers debtors of the slave traders. The latter increasingly took over
indebted plantations, or at least their management, in order to satisfy
their claims with the produce of these estates. Romberg, Bapst &
Cie acted in the same way. On the outbreak of the revolution, the com -
pany owned or managed some twenty plantations on Saint-Dom -
ingue, producing predominantly cotton and indigo. It permanently
had five or six ships in service, representing a capital of around
400,000 livres tournois. The pay for the 200 seamen employed on them
represented running costs of 100,000 livres per annum (excluding
84 Françoise Thésée, Négociants bordelais et colons de Saint-Domingue. Liaisons
d’habitation: La maison Henry Romberg, Babst & Cie 1783–1793 (Paris, 1972),
23–6; Weber, Deutsche Kaufleute, 195–8.
89