Istwa Nou

France ranked third among the national slave trading groups, and the reason its traffic grew so large in the eighteenth century was one colony. Saint-Domingue produced more sugar and coffee than anywhere else on earth and consumed enslaved people faster than they could reproduce, so the ports of France sent ships to Africa in numbers that tracked the colony's appetite. The crown underwrote the business. State subsidies were paid to slave traders until the Revolution stopped them, which means the French treasury covered part of the cost of every voyage. French ships overwhelmingly supplied French possessions, where the British and Portuguese trades sold widely to foreigners. Colonists in the French Caribbean organised almost no expeditions of their own, and the maritime side stayed with Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux and Le Havre. When the enslaved of the northern plain rose in August 1791, they rose against a supply system that the government in Paris had been financing for a century.