French Slave Trade Research Articles

From islands to territorial empire: The French colonial administration at Gorée and the environmental causes of continental expansion after the Seven Years War

This article explores the relationship between islands and the continental shore through the lens of the French colonial administration at Gorée after the Seven Years War. In this period, the French Ministry of the Marine deliberately sought to check French territorial expansion across the globe in order to favor France’s lucrative plantation complex in the Caribbean. As part of this official policy, Gorée was deemed critical for the protection of the French slave trade, but not seen as a point of departure for colonial empire on the African continent. Unreliable provisioning from the metropole, labor shortages, and environmental conditions at Gorée, however, pushed local French administrators to rely on the African mainland for resources, nourishing expansionist ambitions in the process. Focusing on the environmental, geo-political, and commercial dimensions of island-continental interaction at Gorée and the Senegambia’s coast, this article brings into view unaddressed tensions among official French imperial policy, colonial provisioning, and territorial expansion.

Construire une base de données sur la traite des esclaves dans l’océan Indien

Si depuis plusieurs décennies, les historiens de la traite des esclaves dans l’Atlantique peuvent bénéficier des données disponibles sur la base de données en ligne : Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, rien de tel n’existe encore pour ce commerce dans l’océan Indien. La publication du premier ouvrage général sur ce commerce (rédigé par Richard B. Allen) remonte seulement à quelques années. Nous manquons encore cruellement de données, et ce manque d’information empêche une meilleure connaissance de cette traite. C’est l’un des objectifs de cet article, qui s’inscrit dans le projet Exploring the Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA), que de contribuer à combler ces lacunes. La traite des esclaves dans l’océan Indien présente des caractéristiques bien différentes de la traite transatlantique. Elle se démarque par la diversité des cargaisons : les esclaves ne constituaient qu’une partie de celle-ci, car Madagascar fournissait également une quantité importante de vivres (riz et bœufs, notamment). Elle se distingue en outre par la complexité des réseaux commerciaux multidirectionnels dans la zone. Ainsi, les lieux d’embarquement et de débarquement étaient les points de transit des esclaves quittant l’Afrique orientale pour être conduits aux Mascareignes en passant par Madagascar. La présence de marchands africains et asiatiques était ici très importante. Les sources d’information sur ces sujets sont difficiles à identifier car elles sont éparpillées dans différentes institutions archivistiques, et les données sont pénibles à extraire. Ceci posé, et vu la diversité des régions, il s’avère très compliqué, pour créer une base de données, de dégager des variables pertinentes susceptibles de recouvrir la multitude des cas. C’est dans cette perspective que nous présentons l’exemple de Madagascar, sans doute l’un des commerces d’esclaves de l’océan Indien qui se rapproche le plus de la traite pratiquée dans l’espace atlantique. Une analyse détaillée de cette traite, des sources, des données et de la façon de les traiter, permet d’établir les difficultés et les possibilités qu’il y a dans la création d’une base de données en ligne sur ce commerce dans l’océan Indien. Cet article propose une première réflexion destinée à établir une méthodologie en vue de la création de cette base de données.

French Slave Trade on Madagascar: A Quantitative Approach

Abstract This article provides a better understanding of the volume of the French slave trade on Madagascar. Indeed, while research on the European slave trade in the Atlantic has benefitted much from statistical data, the slave trade in the Indian Ocean still lags behind, despite new scholarship. Based on detailed archival research, this article systematically analyzes different aspects of this commerce, including the organization of the trade, the age-sex ratio of the enslaved, and their mortality during the middle passage. Taking the number of French expeditions as a basis, we are able to determine the number of slaves traded with greater accuracy than was previously possible. Through this calculation, this article will shed new light on the patterns of slave trade in the Indian Ocean.

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“Ce Noir qui aurait pu être mon frère”: Race and Fraternité in Marie NDiaye’s Fiction

Marie NDiaye’s novels engage with race and identity in profound, if elusive, ways. In this article, I contend that NDiaye uses allegory to suggest what cannot be stated directly. In a Benjaminian fashion, she uses literary and artistic fragments to both draw connections and expose fissures between the Départements d’Outre-Mer (D.O.M.) and the metropole, between the era of the French slave trade and the present, and between black and white French citizens. I show that the politics of NDiaye’s works come into sharper relief when considered within the particular political moment of their publication. On May 23, 1998, forty thousand people descended on the streets of Paris in the name of memory to demand that France recognize the slave trade as a crime against humanity. Their call was answered on May 10, 2001 when the “Loi Taubira” passed the Senate.1 Between the march and the passing of the Loi Taubira, NDiaye published two works haunted by the slave trade: her 1999 novella, La Naufragée, and her 2001 novel, Rosie Carpe. La Naufragée and Rosie Carpe engage with the memory of the slave trade and the devoir de mémoire through an essential question of fraternité. They are books that ask, “Who counts as my brother, my equal, my fellow man?”

Before They Were Haitians: Examining Evidence for Kongolese Influence on the Haitian Revolution

In Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, historian Laurent Dubois describes how most of the slaves brought to Saint Domingue during the late eighteenth century were former soldiers brought from central Africa, and that the French unwittingly supplied the colony with slaves whose regional origin made their rebellion in 1791 possible. The goal of this article is to explore if the evidence supports this claim of Central African origin, and does so while distinguishing that the region from which African slaves were purchased and the region from which they originated were not necessarily one and the same. By analyzing French documents concerning African slave ports, colony reports, plantation data, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD), and the historiography surrounding the French slave trade, this article seeks to determine whether or not the slaves who rose up in 1791 were indeed Central African, either by birth or descent.

THE VICISSITUDES OF MALI’S EMPIRE

This article begins with a discussion of Mali’s great dynasties comprising three main empires: Mali’s Empires, Ghana’s Empires and Songhai Empires. The second part examines how these empires which occupied the Savannah region influenced it with the gold trade, Islamic scholarship and manuscripts. These manuscripts exist in Malian main institutions such as Ali Ahamad Institute in Gao and University of Timbuktu today. The article then examines the empires’ rise and the impact of its fall on the French colonial penetration of Mali in the 1850s. Both developments have an interesting historical setting which this article examine. First, the historical development of Mali’s dynasties; and second, the historical development of French slave trade and colonial agenda in Mali where the foreign regime conspired and forced Malian dynasties to fall. Indeed this factor was considered as reasons for their fall. Different tribes of Mali which existed at the time were in fact the base for the origins of Mali’s empires. In this ancient era, they mainly concentrated on different business interactions and religious activities for national interests and Islam throughout the Savannah, which was much influenced by their trade and transactions for Mali’s economic integration including Islamization of the region.

Slave-Trade Memory Politics in Nantes and Bordeaux: Urban Fabric Between Screen and Critical Landscape

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bordeaux and Nantes were important ports for the French slave trade and colonial traffic. Since the mid-1990s, official memory initiatives and struggles between memory activists have taken place along the Loire and Garonne rivers in postcolonial France. These have led to the creation of a new topography with fresh images contradicting established myths and dominant urban representations. This article combines urban social geography with phenomenological and semiological approaches to address the confrontation of the urban fabric and local authorities with slave-trade narratives and memory practices in Nantes and Bordeaux. This comparison allows us to move past simplifications, underlining the relative autonomy of local powers within the French Republic. This approach also demonstrates the power of places and urban history, not only as stage and performance, but as structuring powers.

Histoire, mémoire et politique: Débats actuels sur la traite d'esclaves et le colonialism

History, Memory, and Politics: Recent Debates about the Slave Trade and Colonialism French colonial past is often the apple of discord between French historians. This article tries to analyze three reasons for these quarrels: a significant and pioneering historical literature has been forgotten; French education at school has been deficient and silent on the French slave trade and slavery; and many historians refuse to realize that it is a political question that is related to the «national identity », an interrogation including also the public use of history and the – easily committed – confusion between history and memory.

New Evidence of the French Slave-Trade in the Bight of Benin

New Evidence of the French Slave-Trade in the Bight of Benin

The French Slave Trade: An Overview

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.

French anti-slavery under the Restoration : the Société de la morale chrétienne

The Société de la morale chrétienne, a Christian philanthropie society which flourished during the last décade of the Restoration, is primarily known as a group which neglected the issue of slave emancipation while helping to launch the nineteenth century movement against the French slave trade. A detailed examination of its works, however, shows that the Morale chrétienne was also the first organization of the 1800s to promote libération for France's colonial slaves. Indeed, the Société de la morale chrétienne was the predecessor of the Société française pour l'abolition de l'esclavage, a body to which it transferred its leadership, tactics, and program.

Capitalism After Slavery? The French Slave Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic, 1500–1900

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Sex Ratio and Ethnicity: a Reply to Paul E. Lovejoy

I feel I should make clear that the ethnicity data in my article were intended only to shed light on the question of sex ratio. They do not provide an accurate reflection of the ethnic make-up of the eighteenth-century French slave trade, nor even of the trade to Saint Domingue. For this reason, I would hesitate to compare them, as Professor Lovejoy does, to Patrick Manning's projections based on decennial samples of plantation papers. The relatively high proportion of Hausa, Nupe and Voltaic slaves that Lovejoy remarks on was caused by the preponderance of post-1780 sources in my sample.

Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: data from French shipping and plantation records

This article examines the age and sex composition of the Atlantic slave trade in the belief it was of considerable significance in shaping black society in both Africa and the Americas. Focusing on the French slave trade, two main samples are analysed. One is composed of 177,000 slaves transported in French ships during the years 1714–92, which is taken from theRépertoire des expéditions négrièresof Jean Mettas and Serge Daget. The other, derived from nearly 400 estate inventories, consists of more than 13,300 Africans who lived on Saint Domingue plantations in the period 1721–97. The results are compared with existing knowledge of the demo-graphic composition of the Atlantic slave trade to show the range of variation that existed through time between different importing and exporting regions, and to shed light on the forces of supply and demand that determined the proportions of men, women and children who were sold as slaves across the ocean. Significant and consistent contrasts are found between different ethnic groups in Africa and different slaveholding societies in the New World, many of them thus far unnoticed in the scholarly literature.

Pour une histoire de la traite française sous le Consulat et l'Empire

Contrary to the historiographical tradition, the French metropolitan slave trade continued throughout the impérial and consular era : the concomitance of the Amiens treaty and the restoration of the slave trade in 1802 allowed to revive a traffic previously interrupted since 1793. Up until 1805, sixty-five armaments — a third of which were from Bordeaux — were, or could have been destinated to slave-trading on the occidental and oriental coasts of Africa, and then to Spanich, Dutch and French colonies of America. The rupture of the peace in 1805 did not definitively wipe out the French slave trade : several ships — which remain to be determinated — became « spanishized » or « americanized » in order to avoid the hold of the Royal Navy. Henceforth, with those formed in the colonies — Guiana, Senegal and Mauritius — , the French slave-trading expeditions of the Napoleonic era can constitute a repertory. This can be situated between that of Jean Mettas of the 18th century and that of Serge Daget for the XIXth illegal century.

Review. The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century. An Old Regime Business. Stein, Robert Louis

Review. The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century. An Old Regime Business. Stein, Robert Louis

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Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century. An Old Regime Business. By ROBERT LOUIS STEIN. London: University of Wisconsin Press. 1979. xvii + 250 pp. £12.00. J. LOUGH J. LOUGH DURHAM Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1, January 1983, Pages 87–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XXXVII.1.87 Published: 01 January 1983

Discussion: Mortality in the French Slave Trade

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The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business.

The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business.