Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by the French Empire or the British Empire.
History In the Caribbean, England colonised the islands of St. Kitts and Barbados in 1623 and 1627 respectively, and later, Jamaica in 1655. In these islands and England's other Caribbean colonies, white colonists would gradually introduce a system of slave-based labor to underpin a new economy based on cash crop production.
French Institution of Slavery
In the mid-16th century, slaves were trafficked from Africa to the Caribbean by Europeans. Originally, white European indentured servants worked alongside enslaved Africans in the Americas. François Bernier, who is considered to have presented the first modern concept of race, published his work “A New Division of the Earth according to the Different Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It” in 1684, over 100 years after slaves were brought to the "New World" (the Americas), including Haiti.
As of 1778, French slave trade transported approximately 13,000 Africans as slaves to the French West Indies as well as Saint-Domingue each year. Slavery had been active in French colonies since the early 16th century; it was first abolished by the French government in 1794, whereupon it was replaced by forced labour before being reinstated by Napoleon in 1802. The French slave trade ran along a triangular route, wherein ships would travel from France to colonized African countries, and then to the Caribbean colonies. The triangular setup was intentional, as France aimed to bring the African laborers to the New World, where their labor was of higher value because of the natural and cheap resources cultivated from the land, and then bring the product back to France. In French, the commerce triangulaire referred to this Atlantic economy based on the trafficking of slaves from Africa.
In France, the slaving interest was based in Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Le Havre during the years 1763 to 1792. The men involved defended their business against the abolition movement of 1789. They were merchants who specialized in funding and directing cargoes of stolen Black captives to the Caribbean colonies, which had high death rates. Caribbean plantations relied on a continuous supply of newly trafficked slaves. Slaveholding plantation owners were strongly opposed to the application of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to Black people. While they ridiculed the slaves as "dirty" and "savage", they often took a Black mistress (an enslaved woman forced into sexual services). The French government paid a bounty on each captive sold to the colonies, which made the business profitable and patriotic.
Slave trade Slaves, wealth and goods were moved in an insular, unidirectional fashion to the exclusive benefit of Europe. In fact, the French had a policy called “the Exclusif” (exclusive in English), requiring French colonies to only sell exports to France and purchase imported goods from France. This promoted the concept of “centripetal trade” in which all profit and capital spread amongst the American colonies eventually circulated back into the hands of European powers. The trafficking of slaves was just one fraction of the mercantilist economy. In addition, Europeans brought “pacotille” or “cheaply made European goods” to trade with Africans. This often took the form of colonial products such as sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee, or indigo. Thus African leaders, who themselves were in control of selling African captives with Europeans, did not retain the wealth they acquired in the trafficking of slaves. Rather they were the targeted customers of poorly-made pacotille. Their profits from the trafficking in slaves then circled back to manufacturers in Europe, just as the Exclusif had intended.
The French trans-Atlantic trafficking of slaves has qualities of both an economy of trade and traite. Many historians consider the trafficking in slaves to be “an economy of trade according to “rational” sets of prices, and not as a pure extraction of theft of Africans from Africa by Europeans.” Indeed, the victims of chattel slavery became commodities, given a “rational” price tag. At the time the Dictionnaire universel was written the cost of a slave in a French colony was £19. While this is a somewhat arbitrary number, from an economic standpoint, this is an example of trade in the sense that goods of “similar” value were exchanged. However, the Europeans purchasing slaves directly from Africa bought them for about half the price of slaves in the "New World" with the thought that slaves in Africa did not have environmental factors or technology to be as efficient as slaves in the colonies. Examples of slave prices in Africa include 172 cowries, 1/25 of a horse, and 9000 pounds of sugar. The relativity of the price of a slave contributed to the centripetal force of triangular trade. It drew profits for merchants who bought the same slaves in Africa from Africans for a low cost and then upticked the price for Europeans in the American colonies. While the exchange itself might be considered trade, the power of Europeans to monopolize the trading and trafficking in slaves and control the market poses a strong confounder to the situation, pointing the trans-Atlantic trafficking of slaves from Africa to also be an economy of traite.
General overview
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