Bordeaux and the Atlantic trade

What was Bordeaux like around 1715?

Bordeaux stands on the River Garonne, which bends through the city in a crescent. That curve gave the harbour its old nickname, the Port of the Moon, and a crescent still appears on the city’s coat of arms. Ships came up from the sea through the long Gironde estuary to tie up along the quays.

In 1715 Bordeaux was an old merchant city that had traded wine with England and the Low Countries since the Middle Ages. Its merchants founded a Chamber of Commerce in 1705 to speak for their trade. A town plan of 1733 shows that the city was still mostly packed inside its medieval walls. The grand stone waterfront that visitors admire today came later: the royal square now called the Place de la Bourse was begun in the 1730s, and Tourny, the intendant (the king’s chief official in the province), rebuilt the quays and avenues between 1743 and 1757.

Why was Bordeaux famous for wine?

Wine was Bordeaux’s oldest and biggest business. Barrels were loaded onto seagoing ships for England, the Netherlands and the German ports of the North Sea. Around 1700 most foreign ships calling at Bordeaux were Dutch.

The long War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) closed many of these northern markets and hurt the wine trade. After the war, in 1716, France signed a trade treaty with the Hanseatic towns such as Hamburg. Even at the end of the 1720s, wine made up more than half of Bordeaux’s exports by value. The city also shipped brandy, flour and salt. Over the rest of the century the wine trade kept growing, but trade with the colonies grew much faster.

Bordeaux wine crossed the Atlantic too: the city also sent wine and brandy to French Canada.

How did Bordeaux trade with the French islands?

France ran its colonies under a system later called the Exclusif, meaning “the exclusive”. Colonies such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola and today’s Haiti, were meant to trade only with France and only in French ships. Royal letters patent (written orders from the king) of April 1717 named thirteen French ports allowed to trade with the colonies, and Bordeaux and Nantes were among them. A ship had to come home to the port it had sailed from. Goods sent out to the islands paid no duty, and goods brought back paid a small tax of 3 per cent.

Most of Bordeaux’s island trade was what the French called trade en droiture, meaning “straight there and back”. A ship sailed directly to the Caribbean with wine, flour and goods made in the region, and came home with sugar, indigo dye and, later in the century, coffee. Ports such as Cap-Français on Saint-Domingue were regular destinations.

Much of the sugar and indigo did not stay in France. Bordeaux merchants refined some of the raw sugar and sold much of the rest on to the Netherlands, Germany and other parts of northern Europe. They also lent money to planters, and many Bordeaux families came to own plantations themselves. The city’s museum says that most of the sugar plantations on Saint-Domingue were run by planters from Bordeaux or the surrounding region.

Did Bordeaux take part in the slave trade?

Yes. Bordeaux’s direct trade depended on slavery, because the sugar and indigo it brought home were grown by enslaved Africans on the island plantations, where the work was very hard and many people died.

Bordeaux also sent its own slave ships to Africa. These voyages carried trade goods to the African coast, bought captives from African merchants and rulers, and sold the survivors in the Caribbean, above all on Saint-Domingue. The historian Éric Saugera counted 508 slaving expeditions from Bordeaux between 1672 and 1837, carrying roughly 120,000 to 150,000 Africans. Other counts run from under 400 to about 500 voyages. Bordeaux is usually ranked second in France, far behind Nantes, though La Rochelle and Le Havre sent similar numbers.

In the game’s years Bordeaux’s own slave trade was still small. The city museum dates its main period from about 1729, and most of the voyages came in the second half of the century. Bordeaux was involved in other ways even before that: in 1714 royal tax officials let Bordeaux wine travel to the Channel ports of Le Havre and Honfleur to be loaded onto ships bound for Africa. In 1741 the king opened the African trade to every port that traded with the islands.

Did enslaved and Black people live in Bordeaux?

Yes. Planters returning from the islands brought enslaved people with them, mostly as household servants. By the 1730s several hundred enslaved people born in the colonies were living in Bordeaux, and some of them ran away. Later records count many more: one historian estimates that about 2,500 people of colour passed through the port between 1763 and 1792, most of them young men working as servants. Few of their own words were written down.

The city’s learned society, the Bordeaux Academy, was founded in 1712. In 1741 it set a prize question asking what caused the dark skin of Africans. Sixteen essays sent in for the prize sat in the city archives until historians Henry Louis Gates and Andrew Curran published them in 2022. They show educated Europeans debating ideas about race in a city whose wealth rested on slavery.

How does Bordeaux remember this history today?

For a long time Bordeaux spoke mainly about its wine and its handsome buildings. In 2009 the Musée d’Aquitaine opened new galleries on the city’s Atlantic trade, the slave trade and slavery on Saint-Domingue. Some critics say the museum still plays down the city’s role, for example by giving the slave trade as a small share of the port’s traffic rather than counting the people carried.

In 2020 Bordeaux put up explanatory panels on several streets named after slave traders and plantation owners. A statue of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the revolution that ended slavery on Saint-Domingue and created Haiti, was given to the city by Haiti in 2005. Another statue honours Modeste Testas, a woman born in East Africa around 1765 who was enslaved by two Bordeaux merchant brothers and later freed.