Slave Trade, Commercial Organization and Industrial Growth in Eighteenth-Century Nantes

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Abstract
The slave trade was one of the important motors of economic concentration in the eighteenth century. One thesis would even have it that, in England, this commerce was closely tied to the Industrial Revolution. Gaston Martin has suggested a similar pattern in the case of Nantes, the first slave-trading port of France, around which a true industrial revolution is supposed to have taken place, thanks to the armateurs' economic concentration. Hence, the case of Nantes may reveal something about French economie transformation and its limits in the eighteenth century. Such a concentration, based on a rational organization of commerce, took place within Nantes' slave-trading oligarchy between 1730 and 1755. There, unlike in other ports, the effect of this concentration was not dissipated through heavy non-commercial investments. Rather, accumulated capital was used to expand the trade's impact, especially through investments in local industries (mostly textiles), the character of which was remarkably modem (quantity replaced quality ; a modem financial structure was adopted ; labor problems and competition arose). However, the Seven Years' War interrupted the Atlantic trade. Nantes, over-specialized, suffered more than other ports. Traditional investments having regained their the postwar period saw the old slave-trading families replaced by more cautious and less specialized armateurs. Furthermore, the era being characterized by lower profits, less risk capital was available to industry. The port's industrial growth was stopped and modernization not pursued. Thus, the Seven Years' War is a turning point for Nantes' economy. The fragility and isolation of the latter may be fundamental causes of the city's failure to industrialize, but these weaknesses had been overcome earlier. Therefore, the French fleet's powerlessness to protect the merchant navy was an important factor in the French eighteenth-century failure to keep up with England in the industrial realm.

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