“For the Africans who lived through the experience of deportation to the Americas, confronting the unknown with neither preparation nor challenge was no doubt petrifying.[…] But that is nothing yet. What is terrifying partakes of the abyss […]", Edouard Glissant, “The Open Boat” in Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 2010 (Originally published in French by Gallimard, 1990).
How Nantes became a part of the slave trade
During the second half of the XVII century, Nantes went through a remarkable period of growth in terms of both construction and business. A growing fleet meant its shipbuilding industry developed internationally. Its port was home to a vast number of overseas businesses and activities, from fishing to colonial expeditions. The latter grew steadily in number from 1660 onwards, creating back and forth direct trading corridors with French colonies. However, these expeditions also sowed the seeds of a slave trade network.
Nantes: France’s first slave-trading port
At the start of the XVIII century, Nantes became the kingdom of France’s leading merchant shipping port and was responsible for 75% of French slavers’ expeditions between 1707 and 1711. Mathurin Joubert, Jean Terrien, and above all René Montaudouin (1673-1731) were Nantes’ principal ship owners involved in the first large-scale campaigns. In 1713 fourteen ships left the banks of the Loire, headed for the African coast. In 1718 there were nineteen ships. In 1721, twenty-four. Their number seemed to be growing exponentially, and certainly Nantes had two major advantages. Firstly, between 1720 and 1733, thanks to the city's mayor at the time, it had a monopoly on sales from the East India Company. This had immediate consequences. The city became Western Europe’s main outlet for Indian and Asian goods of high economic value, making it wealthier than it had ever been. The second advantage also related to the cargo returning from the Orient: fabrics brought back from the East and cowrie shells or 'money cowries' collected in the Maldives would arrive in city’s estuary in huge quantities. And in fact, these two commodities were the principal goods exchanged in Africa for captives.
The accumulation of wealth of some ship owners and traders was staggering, even if direct profits, estimated at 6%, seem fairly modest at first glance. This percentage reveals the unpredictable nature of these types of expedition, which could either bring great wealth or total ruin to those financially involved. It was on the back of these profits that Nantes' port developed faster than ever before. They also directly benefited the business elite of the petty bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. On top of this, just as East India Company sales had done at the start of the XVIII century, they attracted a vast community of foreign traders who actively participated in the development of the slave trade, as well as the redistribution of colonial goods throughout the whole of Europe, thanks to well-established family networks.
Generally speaking, the Atlantic slave trade is represented without ambiguity in images of the men and women involved in its organisation, just as it pervades their daily surroundings. Their personal belongings, the decoration in their homes, the artefacts they were interested in, also reflect this context. Slavery itself was not called into question until the end of the 1770s, and even then only by a very minor subsection of European intellectuals. For the vast majority, it remained the symbol of social success par excellence which people were proud to put on display. The Wailsh, Grou, Michel, Bouteiller, Trochon, Bertrand and Montaudouin families, who were the greatest beneficiaries over several generations, lived surrounded by objects which were not only reminders of the slave trade, but which celebrated it.
The Atlantic slave trade’s economy not only relied on trade taking place in far-away places, it also involved activities at a local level. Certain industries provided goods that were exchanged on the African coast, and others were specialised in transforming the goods that came back. The direct and indirect agents of the slave trade were many, both upstream and downstream of the campaigns, extending well beyond just the slave traders and ship owners themselves.
The terrible human cost of the Atlantic slave trade
Brutal in the extreme, the Atlantic slave trade affected between thirteen and seventeen million men women and children over a period starting from the second half of the XVI century to the end of the XIX century. The French trading campaigns alone were responsible for the deportation of one million three hundred thousand Africans. Nantes became France’s first slavers’ port in the XVIII century. 43% of France’s slaver expeditions began their journeys from the city’s port. Despite the trade being banned in 1815, this hugely profitable industry, which led to unprecedented levels of growth for the city, continued until 1831.
This particularly long, painful and complex period of history has left physical traces and deep scars which are still visible today. In Nantes, the names of places and residential areas, as well as architectural details, still betray to those with their eyes open the colonial development of a city, a territory, a continent even, based on a trade so very different from any other: that of captives torn from their native lands and brought over to European colonies as slaves.
Countless archive documents provide information on the organisation, step by step, of the slave trade and the slavers’ system. It is clear however, that most collections acquired in France before 1945 on this subject were for one purpose only: to celebrate France’s colonial history. Nantes was no exception to this rule, since in the first half of the XX century entrepreneurs, manufacturers and businessmen helped collate these collections. Comfortable in their certainty that the XVIII century was the source of an extraordinary period of growth for port and city-based businesses, councillors acquired and curated these collections with a nostalgia reminiscent of a golden age…
Today, objectivity prevents us from considering the heritage and artefacts preserved at the Nantes history museum as fully representative of the lives of the people forced into slavery. Nor do they relay the extremity of the status applied to those subjected to it. Some items have provided us with the memories of men and women who were victims of the trade, the brutality of working on the plantations, but these remain tenuous, almost invisible… The vast majority of artefacts and documents tell a story above all else of the dominance of one group of people over another. It’s therefore important to keep them at a distance, since they intrinsically relay a colonial point of view, both racist and dominant, which is neither objective nor harmless, even when seemingly descriptive and relatively mundane.
Translation: Tilly O'Neill
