The French Slave Trade: An Overview

Abstract

I N comparative studies of race and slavery, France's colonies often appear in an intermediate position between Iberian and Anglo-Saxon extremes. The institutions of the French colonies exhibited in attenuated form the Catholic absolutism of the Iberians, whereas the colonies' social structures closely resembled that of the North European colonies. Scholars who discuss colonial slave laws, the frequency with which slaves were freed, or racial integration often situate French slave society somewhere between northern and southern European polar types. In the history of the Atlantic slave trade, too, we find the French occupying an in-between position. Whether the subject is the length of time the French actively participated in the slave trade (as importers or as traders), their share of its total volume, or the pace of their withdrawal, the mortality suffered by the captives they carried or the balance between males and females among those they transported, French activity tended to have that same intermediate character. In the history of the slave trade, the Iberians are often grouped at one end of the spectrum and the Northern Europeans at the other, but, invariably, the French appear somewhere near the middle. This article begins by addressing the contribution of the Du Bois Institute's dataset to existing knowledge of the French slave trade. It then examines the general contours of the trade, notably its temporal and spatial distribution, its mortality rates, and the age and sex composition of the people transported. The second half of the article focuses on France's Caribbean colonies, which were the principal destination of 90 percent of French slave ships. It identifies a pattern of variations among different colonies and regions in the ethnic, age, and sex composition of their African migrants. This pattern is attributed to factors that include planter preferences determined by crop type, differing chronologies of colonial expansion, and the commercial aspects of markets that were valued by merchants. Finally, the cultural implications of this pattern for different areas are briefly considered.