How the Republic contributed to the French colonial empire: ‘People like you and me invested’
In the 18th century, the French colonial empire teemed with protectionist laws. Nevertheless, businessmen from the Republic played an important role in the French economy, and thus in the colonial system. PhD student Tessa de Boer explored how this came about.
Many European countries pursued a protectionist course in the eighteenth century, and France was no exception. ‘They wanted their own ships and their own merchants to have first rights,’ de Boer explains. 'Officially, only they were allowed to trade in the colonies, but the sources we have show that there were foreigners everywhere, including in the Republic. I wanted to find out how that was possible.'
Through her research, she distinguished three ways in which people from the Republic contributed to French colonial trade: they resold the products France took from the colonies, traded in the colonial territories themselves or financed French traders and colonial governments. ‘Only the second form was prohibited,’ says De Boer.
Capturing the imagination
This led to scenes that capture the imagination. ‘If your ship was in distress, you were allowed to dock in a French colony,’ says De Boer. 'So some captains got their crew to drill a hole as soon as they came close to an island. Then they had to wait and see if the governor would indeed give permission for them to enter the port.’
De Boer's own interest, however, lies more in the legal contributions to the colonial empire. 'The other two forms of investment were not prohibited at all. Indeed, they were actually encouraged, because the financial and commercial markets were complementary. Whereas the Republic, for example, had a lot of investment capital available, France, on the contrary, had too little money.' The same went for the products that France acquired from the colonies. De Boer: ‘For example, the colonies had a lot of raw sugar, and the Republic had a lot of refineries. That amounts to tens of millions of pounds of sugar a year.'
All branches of society
The legal forms of investment were thus much larger and more continuous than the proceeds from smuggling. Moreover, they permeated all branches of society. ‘In Paris there is an archive of government bonds,’ says De Boer. ‘I only went through a very small part of that, but still I found almost six hundred Dutch people, all of whom invested in the French state debt and thus financed the colonial empire.’
The composition of this group was diverse. De Boer: ‘It certainly wasn’t just merchants and bankers, but people like you and me, who had some savings left over, bought a bond as an investment and maybe used it to keep a foreign colony above water. ‘That’s a very different form of colonialism than what most people think of when they talk about the colonial past.'
‘We do know’
Partly because of this perception, for a long time little attention has been paid to this form of financial colonialism. De Boer: ‘Sometimes I see in the literature that we don't know who invested in the French national debt. Then I think: But we do know. It’s all in the archives in Paris, which often complement Dutch archives. We've just never quite sorted it out and brought it together across national borders.'