France
Thanks to several key French port cities — Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre — the French became one of the largest slave traders, delivering huge numbers of Africans to Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the late eighteenth century. Records show that of the 1,381,000 Africans loaded onto French ships during the transatlantic trade, 1,165,000 survived the Middle Passage to meet harsh conditions mostly in French Caribbean colonies. About 217,000 went to Martinique while 73,000 went to Guadeloupe but the majority — 773,000 — went to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) which became the New World’s most profitable colony in the eighteenth century.
CM98, an Antillean anti-slavery group, said France “needed a large and resistant workforce to produce sugar cane, coffee, cotton, tobacco, indigo … all the colonial products that enriched Europe for a long time.”
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“With the money collected, the slave traders buy the products of the Caribbean plantations (sugar, indigo, cocoa, coffee, precious stones) to bring them back to France,” said French historian Jean-Marie Desport. At the end of the day, the “kingdom of France became, in the eighteenth century, the world’s largest exporter of sugar, coffee and cotton,” according to Desport, adding that “thanks to the work of slaves, France has become part of the world’s economic hub, becoming, until today, a leading commercial power.”
