Abstract
In September 1789 the Deputies for Industry and Trade of the French National Assembly published a short pamphlet whose main concern was the dietary habits of the 400,000 slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue.1 The Deputies were particularly interested in the relationship between bread made from French wheat flour and vivres du pays (local foodstuffs), referring to manioc, yams, squash, and the other crops cultivated on the island. A central aspect of this relationship was the differentiation between the diets of white planters and their slaves, who in fact consumed, the Deputies claimed, very little bread made of wheat flour:
Bread… only appears on the tables of Whites where it is always accompanied by a great quantity of the local foodstuffs that Creoles often prefer to European bread. It appears only rarely at the festive gatherings of the Nègres. … It is so little required that a plantation of 200 Nègres scarcely consumes more than 4 barrels of flour a year.2
The Deputies’ interest in the food practices of the slaves of Saint-Domingue should not surprise us. Food provision was one of the ongoing crises of colonial development, and the continued production of French wealth from Caribbean sugar plantations depended on constant attentiveness to its management.
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Notes
400,000 is the estimated slave population that appears in the pamphlet; more contemporary estimates of the slave population of Saint-Domingue in 1789 range from 452,000 (Antoine Gisler, L’Esclavage Des Antilles Françaises XVIIe–XIXe Siècle, Contribution Au Problème de L’esclavage [Paris: Editions universitaires fribourg suisse, 1965], 34) to 465,429
(Charles Frostin, Les Révoltes Blanches À Saint-Domingue Aux XVIIe Et XVIIIe Siècles [Paris: L’École, 1975], 28).
Cynthia Bouton, ‘Les Mouvements de Subsistance Et Le Problème de L’économie Morale Sous l’Ancien Régime Et La Révolution Française’, Annales Historique de La Révolution Française 319 (2000): 71–100;
Judith Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 115–33
and Owen Hufton, ‘Social Conflict and the Grain Supply in Eighteenth Century France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14, no. 2 (1983): 303–31. For the background to the strife of the 1780s, see Miller, Mastering the Market, 27–113,
and Steven Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976).
Dale Miquelon, ‘Canada’s Place in the French Imperial Economy: An Eighteenth-Century Overview’, French Historical Studies 15, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 434.
Louis-Philippe May, Histoire Économique de la Martinique (1635–1763) (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1972), 75–84;
Clarence Gould, ‘Trade between the Windward Islands and the Continental Colonies of the French Empire, 1683–1763’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25, no. 4 (March 1939): 473;
Richard Pares, ‘Merchants and Planters’, Economic History Review, supplement 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 2000, 1974), 259–60
and Sheridan, ‘The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 4 (October 1976): 615–41.
Locally cultivated provisions (manioc, yams, sweet potatoes, peas, etc.) continued to play a central role in the diet of slaves in particular. For the historical development of slave gardens in the French Caribbean, see Vincent Huyghues-Belrose, Le Jardin Créole À La Martinique: Une Parcelle Du Jardin Planétaire (Fort-de-France: Parc naturel régional de la Martinique, 2010).
In 1713, the population of New France was 16,500 (15,000 Canadians and 1,500 Acadians) while that of the French Antilles was 75,000 (15,000 white colonists and 60,000 slaves). By 1763, the population of French Canada was 85,000, while that of the Antilles was 351,000 (35,000 white colonists and 316,000 slaves). Paul Butel, L’Économie française au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: SEDES, 1993), 114–5.
For population statistics, see also James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), appendices I-II, 423–31.
For the French Atlantic, see inter alia Paul Butel, Les Négociants Bordelais, l’Europe Et Les Îles Au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1974)
and Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les Négoces Maritimes Français, XVI–XXe Siècle (Paris: Belin, 1997).
See also Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
For the early generations of French settlement in the Caribbean, see Philip Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Pierre H. Boulle, ‘French Mercantilism, Commercial Companies and Colonial Profitability’, in Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Regime (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1981), 97–117.
Jacob Soll’s recent claim that Colbert showed little interest in colonial matters because of the lack of paperwork they generated in his archive (Jacob Sollis, The Information Master: Jean- Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009], 113–9) is an unconvincing account of the role of overseas trade in Colbert’s overall economic and commercial activity.
See inter alia L. Cordier, Les Compagnies À Charte Et La Politique Coloniale Sous Le Ministère de Colbert (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1906);
E. Benoit du Rey, Recherches Sur La Politique Coloniale de Colbert (Paris: A. Pedone, 1902)
and Stewart Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1912).
See also Pierre Clément (ed.), Lettres, Instructions, Mémoires de Colbert (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1861), tome 3, 2e partie, 387–649, for a selection of Colbert’s letters and instructions on colonial affairs written between 1662 and 1682.
Robert Batie, ‘Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples on the English and French Antilles, 1624–54’, Journal of Caribbean History 8, no. 9 (1976): 1–41;
Christian Schnakenbourg, ‘Note Sur Les Origines de L’industrie Sucrière En Guadeloupe Au XVIIe Siècle (1640–1670)’, Revue Française D’histoire d’Outre-Mer 55, no. 200 (1968): 267–311 and May, Histoire Économique de la Martinique, 87–90.
Pierre Bonnassieux, Les Grande compagnies de commerce: étude pour servir à l’histoire de la colonisation (Paris: Plon, 1892), 369–77.
Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17–20;
António de Almeida Mendes, ‘Les Réseaux de La Traite Ibérique Dans l’Atlantiques Nord (1440–1640)’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 4 (2008) (63e année): 739–68 and Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy, 287–309.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 37–40; Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 190;
Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (eds), Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden: Brill, 2003);
Paul Butel, ‘France, the Antilles and Europe, 1700–1900’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153–73
Charles Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, vol. II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 27–36 for a closer description of Colbert’s efforts at excluding foreign traders; Pritchard, 194; Mims, 225–6; Bonnassieux, 373.
Ordonnance du Roi, qui défend le Commerce Étranger aux Isles (4 juin 1670), reprinted in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix Et Constitutions, tome 1, 195–6; Arrêt Du Conseil D’État Touchant Les Passeports Pour Négocier Aux Indes Occidentales (30 décembre 1670), reprinted in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix Et Constitutions, tome 1, 206–7; Ordonnance Du Roi qui défend le transport des Bœufs, Lards, Toiles et autres Marchandises… dans les Isles (4 novembre 1671), reprinted in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix Et Constitutions, tome 1, 253–4. See also Schnakenbourg, 301–2; G. Saint-Yves, ‘Les Antilles françaises et la correspondance de L’intendant Patoulet’, Journal de la Société des Américanistes 4, no. 1 (1902): 59.
The standard accounts of French mercantilism that espouse this view are the volumes by Charles Cole already cited; Eli Fr. Heckscher, Mercantilism, rev. edn by E. F. Soderlund, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955) and Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). For a brief discussion of this historiography, see Thomas J. Schaeper, ‘Colonial Trade Policies Late in the Reign of Louis XIV’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 67 (1980): 203.
Jonathan Howes Webster, ‘The Concerns of Bordeaux’s Merchants and the Formation of Royal Commercial Policy for the West Indies’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 2 (1974): 12–20; Jonathan Howes Webster, ‘The Merchants of Bordeaux in Trade to the French West Indies, 1664–1717’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1972), esp 376–436; Boulle, 105–9, 115–7.
Allana G. Reid, ‘Intercolonial Trade during the French Regime’, Canadian Historical Review 32, no. 3 (September 1951): 242 and Gould, 473–5.
The principal works on this trade are Jacques Mathieu, Le Commerce entre New France et les Antilles au XVIIIe Siècle (Montréal: Fides, 1981) and ‘La Balance Commerciale Nouvelle-France-Antilles Au XVIIIe Siècle’, Revue D’Histoire De L’Amérique Française 25, no. 4 (March 1972): 465–97; Gould, 473–90;
Dorothy Burne Goebel, ‘The “New England Trade” and the French West Indies, 1763–1774: A Study in Trade Policies’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 20, no. 3 (July 1963): 331–72 and Reid, 236–51. On intercolonial trade between 1670 and 1730, see Pritchard, 197–201.
On the trade in wheat flour between New France and the Antilles, see Louise Dechêne, Le Partage des subsistances au Canada sous le régime français (Montréal: Boréal, 1994).
Thomas Schaeper, The French Council of Commerce 1700–1715: A Study of Mercantilism after Colbert (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), esp 61–2, 125, 241–2;
David Kammerling Smith, ‘Structuring Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Innovation of the French Council of Commerce’, Journal of Modern History 74 (September 2002): 490–537.
Jacques Petitjean-Roget, Le Gaoulé: la révolte de la Martinique en 1717 [Société d’histoire de la Martinique, 1966], 167–93, treats in detail the trade and provisioning crisis of this war.
Dale Miquelon, ‘Envisioning the French Empire: Utrecht, 1711–1713’, French Historical Studies 24, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 653–77.
Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France À La fin de L’Ancien Régime: L’Évolution du régime de l’Exclusif de 1763 à 1789 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1972), I: 88–9.
Jean-Pierre Poussou, ‘L’Âge atlantique de l’Économie française (vers 1680–1780)’, Information Historique 59, no. 1 (1997): 28. A detailed calculation of the value of colonial food trades to the metropolitan economy remains to be done. See Guillaume Daudin for the broad role played by all external trade within the domestic economy (Commerce et prosperité: la France au XVIIIe Siècle [Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2005], 351–431, esp 390–1);
on hinterland development, Richard Drayton, ‘The Globalisation of France: Provincial Cities and French Expansion, 1500–1800’, History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (December 2008): 424–30.
For Bordeaux, see Francisque-Michel, Histoire du commerce et de la navigation À Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Feret and Fils, 1870), tome 2, 285–90 and for Bordeaux’s colonial wine trade,
see Christian Huetz de Lemps, Geographie du commerce de Bordeaux À La fin du Règne de Louis XIV (Paris: La Haye, 1975), 121–3.
Pritchard, 203–8; Tarrade, I: 95–101. For a wider discussion of smuggling, see Wim Klooster, ‘Inter-imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800’, in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia Denault (eds), Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 141–80.
Christopher Moore, ‘The Other Louisbourg: Trade and Merchant Enterprise in Ile Royale, 1713–1758’, in Eric Krause, Carol Corbin and William O’Shea (eds) Aspects of Louisbourg: Essays on the History of an Eighteenth-Century French Community in North America (Sydney, Nova Scotia: Louisbourg Institute, 1995), 228–49
and John McNeill, Louisbourg and Havana: Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), esp 180–202.
Bertie Mandelblatt, ‘A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt Beef in the French Atlantic’, History Workshop Journal 63 (Spring 2007): 18–47.
For a recent examination of the French negotiations of the Treaty of Paris, see Helen Dewar, ‘Canada or Guadeloupe? French and British Perceptions of Empire, 1760–1763’, Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (December 2010): 637–60.
On Tarrade, I: 14–6 and E. Daubigny, Choiseul et la France d’outre-mer après le traité de Paris: Étude sur la politique coloniale au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1892), 19–27.
See also Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (trans.) (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1748]), bk 21, chap. 21, 390–3, for his statements on the functions of colonies.
André Labrouquère, Les idées coloniales des Physiocrates: documents inédits (Paris: Presses universitaires de la France, 1927).
A site of repeated French colonial expeditions before this period, la Guyane experienced several more after the Seven Years’ War: David Lowenthal, ‘Colonial Experiments in French Guiana, 1760–1700’, Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (1952): 22–43;
see also Marion F. Godfroy-Tayart de Borms, ‘La guerre de Sept ans et ses conséquences atlantiques: Kourou ou L’Apparition D’un nouveau système colonial’, French Historical Studies 32, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 167–91.
Jacques François Artur, Histoire des colonies Françoises de la Guianne: transcription Établie, présentée et annotée par Marie Polderman (IBIS Rouge Éditions, 2002), 716.
Marcel Dorigny, ‘The Question of Slavery in the Physiocratic Texts: A Rereading of an Old Debate’, in Manuela Albertone and AntoninoDe Francesco (eds), Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 147–62.
Jean-François Brière, Lapêche française en Amérique du Nord au XVIIIe Siècle (Montréal: Fides, 1990), 4, 59–60, 257 and for a summary of the deep-rooted structural problem with provisioning slaves in the French Caribbean with French dried cod from Newfoundland, Brière, 257–8.
Malnourishment, including protein deficiency, was a central cause of the high mortality rates of slaves, and was recognised as such during the eighteenth century: see Jean-Barthélemy Dazille, Observations sur les maladies des nègres: leurs causes, leurs traitements et les moyens de les Prévenir (Paris: Didot le jeune, 1776), 262–6; for a discussion of the diets of French Caribbean slaves, see Gabriel Debien, ‘La nourriture des esclaves sur les plantations des Antilles françaises aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles’, Caribbean Studies 4, no. 2 (1964): 3–27.
Martin Durand-Molard, Code de la Martinique, nouvelle Édition (Saint-Pierre, Martinique: 1807–1814), II: 565–7; C. A. Banbuck, Histoire politique, Économique et sociale de la Martinique sous L’Ancien Régime, 1635–1789 (Paris, 1935), 273.
Tarrade, vol. II, 527–30; for French-American trade during the War of Independence, see Paul Cheney, ‘A False Dawn for Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism? Franco-American Trade during the American War of Independence’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63 (July 2006): 459–84;
on the question of debt see Allan Potofsky, ‘The Political Economy of the French-American Debt Debate: The Ideological Uses of Atlantic Commerce, 1787 to 1800’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63, no. 3 (July 2006): 489–516.
The debates over the role of overseas trade in the economic growth of Europe are vast and reach back notably to Eric Williams. See, inter alia, Guillaume Daudin, ‘Do Frontiers Give or Do Frontiers Take? The Case of Intercontinental Trade in France at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, in P. C. Emmer, O. Pétré-Grenouilleau and J. V. Roitman (eds), A Deux Ex Machina Revisted: Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2006), 200–24.
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Mandelblatt, B. (2013). How Feeding Slaves Shaped the French Atlantic: Mercantilism and the Crisis of Food Provisioning in the Franco-Caribbean during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In: Reinert, S.A., Røge, P. (eds) The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315557_10
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